ryandamm

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211.
by ryandamm 9y ago
I'm not sure the pause in unicorn IPOs is directly related to a slowdown in seed funding -- perhaps indirectly by minting fewer angel investors. A lot of the popular press -- even the popular tech press -- conflates startup funding.
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by ryandamm 9y ago
I think posting the "We don't give a f--k" video is a pretty direct attack. And even if that specific incident hadn't happened: a climate of gendered or sexually explicit comments is hostile. I'm sorry if you work s
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by ryandamm 9y ago
"Lead" implies taking the largest position in the round, often but not always around 50% of it. VCs typically have a strict profile for the size of check they write -- though I think this is more prevalent at the seed stage, where
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by ryandamm 9y ago
This sounds a little too cynical, and possibly autobiographical. I have counterexamples. So, who's right?
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by ryandamm 9y ago
The article this is responding to is extremely misleading and is pure clickbait. Safes are great. They're easy to understand, and any semi quantitative founders should be able to build dilution spreadsheets without the help of a lawyer
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by ryandamm 9y ago
The title misrepresents the universality of the author's perspective. More plainly: this is HN clickbait. Ignore, please, read on at your peril.
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by ryandamm 9y ago
I pitched Niko (he passed for now, too early) -- and this interview does capture his style pretty well. My cofounder and I found him very smart, but also personable and genuinely interested in what the startup is doing. He asked good questi
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Unfortunately for the US, proposed revisions to immigration policy may be sending more of that brain drain back. Also, in general, more public funding for education does pay for itself in the long run, though I'm not sure how that&#x27
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by ryandamm 9y ago
That's not a separate point from "lack of a killer app" -- most motion sickness is a result of bad content, that violates rules of good perceptual design.
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by ryandamm 9y ago
The nice thing about California is employers' concerns about the market, competition, and trade secrecy cannot take priority over an individual's right to work (with narrow exceptions for owners selling a business). To the exten
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Are you sure about (1)? I believe you can steal trade secrets even if you don't take them in an embodied form. It is true that you can't prevent someone from practicing their profession under the terms of California employment law
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by ryandamm 9y ago
This is really similar to the concept of 'first sale' in copyright law, which similarly prevents the copyright holder from using copyright to restrict what a buyer does with the object. Glad to see it extended to patent law as wel
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Sure, I'll elaborate, but it may not be terribly illuminating. As for why it's "hilarious" (okay, overstatemetn) -- it's not really a critique of how comments work -- more just that this is sort of an off-topic subj
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Everything exponential is ultimately unsustainable. The value of these analyses is they try to plumb the limits of the model; there was a substantial sea change in how China's economy operates ~2008-9, with a shift towards massive debt
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by ryandamm 9y ago
But this is actually why the euro isn't an optimal currency area. Germany's low levels of debt:GDP are a result of explicit suppression of the household sector -- a deal struck by Merkels government with labor unions to restrain w
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by ryandamm 9y ago
To the extent people are trying to trade on this model, they look for liquid marketplaces that are exposed to China's economy. Australian metals and mining stocks, for instance, or currency fluctuations in closely-pegged economies (for
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by ryandamm 9y ago
To piggyback on your point, Pettis lays out explicitly how China should shift to consumer-driven GDP growth... then also points out how politically difficult it will be (because it likely entails assigning losses to the wealthy and politica
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by ryandamm 9y ago
The average disguises a few things. One, I assume that's in absolute terms and not, say, purchasing power parity (which accounts for lower consumer prices in China). Two, the 'average' in China includes huge numbers of the ru
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Great, detailed response -- I learned a lot from this, so thank you. Also, I think it's hilarious/curious that the actual economist's response is buried in a thread. Internet message boards (yes, even HN's) are not kin
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by ryandamm 9y ago
No, the reason he suggests the government move assets into private hands is because his main thesis for how China can get out of the jam is to improve household consumption vis-a-vis growth in household wealth. Not covered in the article I
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by ryandamm 9y ago
No, I was making a general point about what's productive investment and what isn't. In the US, we're doing a bad job of making our deficits count. That will be bad in the medium and long term. In the short term, any spending
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by ryandamm 9y ago
We also have immigration into the US. I read somewhere that growth in the population vis-a-vis immigration (and the higher birth rate of recent immigrants) propped up US growth, and explains both why the US didn't suffer as badly as Eu
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by ryandamm 9y ago
This is an excellent link, thanks for that! Pettis goes over similar identities, but this is much pithier, and all in one place. (Probably: Pettis assumes his readership already knows these things; I'm definitely not as savvy as his
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Pettis quantifies it (elsewhere in his articles). He's gone on record that there's going to be an explicit or implicit write down, and China's average GDP growth is going to be well below 5% (averaging more like 2-3%) by 2020
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by ryandamm 9y ago
He elaborates on technology improvement in other articles, but it boils down to: technological improvements have a range of returns, but even the most optimistic of historical returns to technological progress can't paper over the debt
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by ryandamm 9y ago
I think the best model to understand this is Michael Pettis's balance sheet analysis. He covers it extensively, but here's his latest digest of the model: http://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/662
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Sustainability is a function of total annual deficit relative to growth in ability to service the debt. Deficits that lead to productivity-enhancing investments will pay for themselves: education, infrastructure, etc. Deficits that result f
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by ryandamm 9y ago
A little late, but Pettis obliged with his latest post. It's more directly answering your question, I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14408165
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by ryandamm 9y ago
Worthwhile subhead: "In a recent much-remarked-upon and very short op-ed, George P. Shultz and Martin Feldstein argue that the only way, or at least the best way, to cut the U.S. trade deficit is for Washington to cut the U.S. fiscal d
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Does the US deficit dictate capital flows, or vice versa?(carnegieendowment.org)
1 points by ryandamm 9y ago|1 comments

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