startingup

13 ms·

61.
by startingup 18y ago
It would be nice to know some real stats, like subscribers, revenue etc. not just vaporous speculation about valuation.
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by startingup 18y ago
Has anyone switched from a C to S corp (yes, you read that right)? How painful was it? Here is the situation: an existing small, moderately profitable company has decided to stay out of VC circuit, stay private, run it as a life-style busin
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by startingup 18y ago
This observation runs quite deep. This two-tier economy is the price Japan paid for its export obsession and its long post-war tradition of mercantalist trade policies (export good, import bad ...) Here is approximately how it happened: Jap
64.
by startingup 18y ago
This is a topic near and dear to me. I believe cognitive abilities are falling, but not for the reasons this article talks about. I believe vaccination may have a strong role to play, and the number of vaccine shots kids get (let's say by t
65.
by startingup 18y ago
I am partial to BSD as a basis for hosting a browser, which is all I want my OS to do. My ideal would be BSD + Chrome mated to be one small, light kick-ass web top. I gave up on Linux a long while ago on the client side. It is chasing Windo
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by startingup 18y ago
pg, you are applying technology industry lessons to finance here. The phrase "financial innovation" has a long history of being very destructive to people's well-being. At the root of it, financial innovations turn out to be sophisticated w
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by startingup 18y ago
As with a lot of such things, it is only true if a lot of people don't believe it is true. The very reason Flickr etc succeeded in 2003-4 was because dotcom became such a dirty word by then. I have to admit even I was very skeptical at th
68.
by startingup 18y ago
vtnext, in all the excitement of his Nobel, his actual economic views (as opposed to his politics, which I completely don't care about one way or another) about events in the real world have been forgotten. In fall of 2004, as Greenspan sta
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by startingup 18y ago
In all matters dealing with a foreign culture, remember the Heisenberg principle - by your very act of being in a situation, you are subtly altering it. Americans in technology have a lot more experience with foreigners arriving in America
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by startingup 18y ago
What is your specific objection (if any) to the Sequoia presentation? I assume you have no issues with the data, but its interpretation. Would love to know what you think!
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by startingup 18y ago
There is a different strand of criticism of Krugman (and the neo-Keynesians in general) that is quite apart from his politics. At some level, this is a criticism of the modern economic profession itself, and its worship of mathematical mode
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by startingup 18y ago
You are making baseless assumptions. I was born in a very poor country, to parents neither of whom could afford to finish high school. My worldview was shaped by a world where debt was just not an option (think loan sharks & 300%+ annu
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by startingup 18y ago
None of the figures (debt to GDP, savings rate etc) I cited are controversial. Lots of people have been talking about those figures for many, many years, that's why I left out citations. Just to cite a recent example, the Sequoia presentati
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by startingup 18y ago
Totally agreed! Thanks for that succinct explanation of the real world connection to all this financial destruction. A whole lot of capital and labor needs to be repurposed, and it is going to hurt, even without the political system making
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by startingup 18y ago
Bottom line, the financial system is broken, but I'm not sure the fundamental underlying "projects" are themselves broken. In your diagram, you need to complete the loop, to more accurately reflect reality: [capital] <--> [financi
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by startingup 18y ago
You are putting words in my mouth I didn't say. I am in the same position as you: zero debt (no mortgage or car payment even), almost all cash or precious metals and renting my home. So this panic doesn't mean anything personally in terms o
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by startingup 18y ago
Total US debt (public, private & consumer) is 320% of GDP. Government alone is about 70% of GDP. Consumer debt is pushing 90-100% of GDP, historic high. Rest is private sector. The 320% is a never-before-in-history number, even bigger
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by startingup 18y ago
Yes, I actually did purchase a meaningful (i.e as a fraction of my net worth) amount of gold, and have been buying for years. And for the rest of my net worth, I went all cash (dollar & yen) or short term treasuries some years ago - oth
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The world *has* changed: Why we should be afraid
34 points by startingup 18y ago|84 comments
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by startingup 18y ago
I have to disagree: the world has changed. It is not merely a financial crisis. It is a fundamental economic crisis. The last two weeks brought the crisis to full focus, but we have been building up to it for several years. Here are a few t
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by startingup 18y ago
Knol is really just a Google rehash of Squidoo. It is subject to the same problems as Squidoo: relentless spam. It is really Google's attempt to protect its content based ad revenue by trying to lower Wikipedia's domination of search result
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by startingup 18y ago
Let me list the ways that Chrome starts to encroach on the OS territory. 1. It has a fast Javascript VM, that converts Javascript into native code, cutting through lots of layers. 2. Each Javascript app (i.e a tab) runs in its own process,
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The Economist: Deflating IT(economist.com)
43 points by startingup 18y ago|12 comments
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by startingup 18y ago
I may be wrong, but my understanding of the technology was that Scribd iPaper is a wrapper over Flashpaper. I remember reading that somewhere, but can't be sure ...
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by startingup 18y ago
Yes, there is a bit of reinvention, but I would prefer JS to take over from Flash. Flash just doesn't integrate as nicely with the standard the web paradigms ... jQuery just rocks.
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by startingup 18y ago
If I hire a financial planner and he gave me bad advice, he could be liable (depending on the laws of the state, exclusions on the contract and so on). So bad analogy there.
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by startingup 18y ago
Let's also consider an employer's perspective here. OK, you are a Y Combinator start-up, and you have hired your 18th employee (there are at least 10 that have 20+ employees, I think). If that employee were doing something like this on the
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by startingup 18y ago
C++ (which a colleague taught me)
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by startingup 18y ago
I suppose that was when I got interested in starting a business. I realized software is one area where you don't need much capital. So I decided to fall in love with software ;) To be honest, I hugely enjoyed it, though it was a kind of mar
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by startingup 18y ago
I touched my first computer at 19, but that was just one mandatory college class in programming, after which I never touched a computer for several years. I didn't become a programmer until I was 26 and even then, it was a chore I had to do

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