eldavido

67 ms·

481.
by eldavido 9y ago
I'm not saying anyone is collecting bills from their neighbors. I think people are reading my comment a lot more literally than I intended. What I'm saying is that, we have large-scale utilities like power and water companies that
482.
by eldavido 9y ago
Come on dude, be nice. All I'm saying is that, whenever people complain about Comcast, it's inevitably about some problem with either their network, or customer service. Comcast is a huge, scaled organization that deals with &quot
483.
by eldavido 9y ago
I think people misunderstand Comcast. They're arguably more in the business of retailing/financial services than anything having to do with TCP/IP or DOCSIS. Americans as a whole are horrible at managing money. They don'
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by eldavido 9y ago
I pay $400/month for an office for four. Probably another 100-200/month for random services like Internet access via an ISP, general commercial liability insurance I'm required to carry by my landlord, and other random stuff
485.
by eldavido 9y ago
I've wasted a lot of time learning that "owner" vs. "employee" is the wrong distinction. It's a hold-over from the industrial-era mindset of union/employee vs. management. In today's economy, many emp
486.
by eldavido 9y ago
It's worth asking why we make the distinction between "activists" and big fund managers in the first place. Shouldn't all fund managers be doing what's best for their shareholders? You should check out John Bogle&#x
487.
by eldavido 9y ago
For anyone reading this in the US: don't take this at face value. This (my opinion) is coming from someone who's indifferent between renting vs. owning, so is trying to make the decision purely on financial factors. Reasons why th
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by eldavido 9y ago
This is a textbook case of something every first-year statistics student studies: voluntary response bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_bias If I remember, things like these tend to draw out extremes, but the
489.
by eldavido 9y ago
This is a great discussion. Thank you. Agree 100% on the whole creative destruction/racism/etc. point, it's impractical and leads the conversation nowhere. On a slightly more charitable note than my last post, I'd be int
490.
by eldavido 9y ago
I find this comment frustrating because the "macro-politics and big concepts" end up mattering a lot. This is politics. It's about what's right, what's fair, and notions of equality/fairness. You can't tal
491.
by eldavido 9y ago
Well, sort of, given equal/lesser preparation. What goes missing from your analysis is how much of the round is won before it even starts. A team coming prepared with well-organized files, "answer-to" blocks, recently-cut pol
492.
by eldavido 9y ago
Are you familiar with the format in general? It's a left-to-right style of note-taking where points/ideas are written in a vertical column, with responses written to the right of the original idea. As a former four-year policy deb
493.
by eldavido 9y ago
Yep. My experience exactly. Former policy/CX guy here, there's no better way to learn speaking, how to make an argument, how to listen well, how to argue responsively, clash, note-taking, how to do research, etc. If you can do it
494.
by eldavido 9y ago
Thanks for your response. The medium-long term is where I'm fuzziest. Maybe that's why life is so interesting.
495.
How to plan for/manage/reason about volatility in tech careers
2 points by eldavido 9y ago|2 comments
496.
by eldavido 9y ago
12 is quite a lot. I'm closer to 10 when I'm really pushing it. Work 7-7 or 8-8 with 1hr lunch/errands and 1hr exercise/day. Maybe a bit on the weekends but it's hard if you want to see friends or have any kind of s
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by eldavido 9y ago
As an older millennial (33), I couldn't agree more. We're living in boom times, and one layoff or closure will make people rethink their behavior. I don't care how expensive a place is, you're just an idiot, plain and si
498.
by eldavido 9y ago
This is a foolish question, but that's the point. There is simply no objective way to analyze this. It all comes down to which group the people signing the checks value. I often say "pay is a social construct" and this is wha
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by eldavido 9y ago
Not sure about "fragmented" but perhaps not VC-appropriate. This stuff will all go away once (a) the non top-tier investors realize their entire portfolios are underwater and (b) interest rates rise a bit. Stepping back, it is pre
500.
by eldavido 9y ago
You want to know what they mean? "I haven't studied CS and don't understand that all compilers are just translation layers from one language to another"
501.
by eldavido 9y ago
Sure, but it's a lot different from being a CEO, shareholder, member of the board, or high-level corporate officer. "Founder" is something you can bestow retroactively, not so much with "CEO". And I'm seeing al
502.
by eldavido 9y ago
Cofounder is sort of nebulous, it doesn't carry any official legal authority and isn't an "officer" of the corporation in most senses, though it has a lot of cachet in SV. I view it as a relatively cheap bargaining chip
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by eldavido 9y ago
I wish people would stop talking about valuation this way, emphasizing the bullshit headline valuation. The reality is that (speculating), they probably issued a new class of stock, at $x/share, and that class of stock has all kinds of
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by eldavido 9y ago
I think there's a collective realization happening in the Bay Area that the landlords are the real winners and everyone else is just playing their game. Employees hate seeing 3k/month fly out the door in rent just as much as CEOs
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by eldavido 9y ago
Yes and no. I agree the effects on number of jobs will be smaller than people are predicting. It won't be mass unemployment. On the other hand, people need to realize how sensitive the job market really is. Typical unemployment in the
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by eldavido 9y ago
Not really. I think he's starting to converge on "skin in the game" as a unifying thread for much of the other work. I could be wrong, but having read FBR and TBS, I don't recall seeing it put this simply ("skin in
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by eldavido 9y ago
More broadly, Netflix has had 3 distinct business models in its lifetime: disk rental, streaming other peoples' content, and now, streaming its own first-party content.
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by eldavido 9y ago
I'm reminded of an article in Foreign Affairs arguing that our our data privacy laws need to be based on use rather than collection, e.g. even if you know someone goes to the bar every week, it's illegal to predicate a credit or i
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by eldavido 9y ago
Where is the "PT SA 45K" coming from? Somewhere in the interior US or overseas? That would be difficult to do in California.
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by eldavido 9y ago
The biggest cost many young companies face is people, both salaries, and management/coordination overhead. Assuming you need to pay someone at least 10k/month fully-loaded (and this is hard in SF) to manage all of this, I wouldn&#

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