lpolovets

12 ms·

61.
by lpolovets 4y ago
The influence of US News on colleges is wild. One absurd tidbit that I've heard: the rankings weigh freshman stats much more than transfer student stats, so a lot of competitive schools that won't let you in as a freshman if you w
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by lpolovets 4y ago
Not sure why you're accusing me of lying, I just said that there are companies working on this. I think the key thing here is that while eliminating 100% of animal testing is an ambitious -- and perhaps ultimately unreachable -- goal,
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by lpolovets 4y ago
A relevant aside: there are some companies and startups that aim to replace a good chunk of animal testing with in silico testing. Here's one that my fund is an investor in called VeriSIM: https://www.google.com/amp&#x2
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Lawmakers push for universal chargers for smartphones, mobile devices(usatoday.com)
2 points by lpolovets 4y ago|0 comments
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by lpolovets 4y ago
(I'm a seed stage VC.) In general, seed stage is less affected by the recent downturn than later stages. Which makes sense, since the time to exit for a seed stage company can be the better part of a decade, so today's macro clima
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by lpolovets 4y ago
(Context: I'm a VC, but while I graduated just after the dotcom bubble and worked as an engineer through the '08 recession, I was not a VC until ~10 years ago.) Directionally I agree with the post. Relative to a few months ago, th
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by lpolovets 4y ago
> Simple Outperformed Smart. As a self-admitted elitist, it pains me to say this, but it’s true: the startups we audited that are now doing the best usually had an almost brazenly ‘Keep It Simple’ approach to engineering. My hunch is tha
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by lpolovets 4y ago
I disagree strongly that moving outside of the financial system is primarily used for money laundering. Bitcoin is great for censorship resistance, and for offering an alternative to oppressive monetary policies. Here's a good article
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by lpolovets 5y ago
It's still a pretty founder-friendly market. If you get an offer from a16z, or anyone else: 1) it doesn't hurt to negotiate. Worst case they stand firm. 2) if you get a $1m offer from a16z, chances are you will be able to get comp
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by lpolovets 5y ago
Isn't this a risk with apps in general, not just VC backed ones? I skimmed the blog post and it sounds like they had a hard time monetizing the product. That could happen with a bootstrapped project too: someone builds something cool i
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by lpolovets 5y ago
Math: Art of Problem Solving (read in jr high) Computer Science: CLR Algorithms book and Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual (read both in college)
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by lpolovets 5y ago
Re: Eisenhower quote -- this is what I meant in the original comment too. It's less about the details of the plan and more about understanding how someone is thinking about the plan. > I'd think it would instead be a great exer
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by lpolovets 5y ago
You're right, I should've said EV has to be 10x higher, not probability of success. That said, in my experience it's much more common to de-risk a business by an order of magnitude than to 10x the market size.
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by lpolovets 5y ago
I'm a seed stage VC. Reposting my thoughts on this from twitter: YC invests at $2m valuations, so Paul's take is very logical. This won't apply to startups raising seed rounds at 10x higher valuations. At a 10x valuation, you
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by lpolovets 5y ago
If I'm reading Figure 5 right in the original paper*, it looks like the biggest cardiac impact is on people who were hospitalized or went to the ICU for covid, and the effect on people who were not hospitalized is present but relativel
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by lpolovets 5y ago
Pretty interesting move. Great for founders raising seed rounds after YC. Great for YC. Not sure if it's as great for founders who want to raise a little at a pre-seed price (e.g. $1m at $10m post) because now there's $375k extra
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by lpolovets 5y ago
Based on the link in my comment, 600 deaths from covid in the 17 and under bracket since 2019. ~70m people in that age group, so that's 1 in 200k per year for 2 years, roughly? The vaccine risk (1 in 50k) is based on the .0022% figure
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by lpolovets 5y ago
> that figure is already three orders of magnitude lower than the 1.6% (772,000) I think the interesting ethical/moral/etc debate is what to do for people who are at lower or negligible risk of dying from COVID in the first pla
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by lpolovets 5y ago
The title "Enough" made me think of this great poem/story from Kurt Vonnegut: True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelt
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by lpolovets 5y ago
I've heard that the post office doesn't receive taxpayer funds directly, but tbh even after googling around I don't understand how that works. For example https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020
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by lpolovets 5y ago
They have a monopoly over letters and your mailbox. See: https://www.cato.org/tax-budget-bulletin/privatizing-us-post... .
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by lpolovets 5y ago
> No one is forcing you to go to USPS. First, the government does force you to use USPS for some things. The USPS has a monopoly on the delivery of certain types of mail. Second, we all pay for USPS as taxpayers regardless of whether we
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by lpolovets 5y ago
Maybe a dumb question, but why is the government getting into banking? Is this desirable? IMHO most consumer facing services they roll out are pretty poor. And for what it's worth, seems like Walmart and other companies already offer a
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by lpolovets 5y ago
I'm not a financial advisor, but I think housing is a very reasonable investment given: 1) you need a place to live no matter what 2) historically the real estate market does well over long time horizons 3) if you make $540k and your m
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by lpolovets 5y ago
Top 1% income is about $540k/year according to https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/07/01/how-much-you... In my experience, an income of $X lets you get a mortgage for a house worth ~$6X.
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by lpolovets 5y ago
I think many of SF's ultra rich are also very aware of the issues and are moving out in droves. FWIW a lot of my VC friends who have been in VC long enough to have $$$ have moved to other states (or at least other cities in California)
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by lpolovets 5y ago
In many ways, storytelling IS a key part of a founder's job. You're often pitching your company to someone: a prospective customer or employee, an investor, a journalist, a vendor, etc. The better you are at this, the better your
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by lpolovets 5y ago
Thanks!
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by lpolovets 5y ago
How much light pollution will this actually create? I've read that SpaceX wants to launch 40k satellites that are 200 miles above earth. Each satellite is the size of a table. Could one see a table-sized satellite 200 miles away? Also
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by lpolovets 5y ago
> People don’t deserve to be ground to a pulp while your simulation plays out. IMHO you're making a judgment about what other people want, but those people's actions suggest otherwise. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on its

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