It's almost like PG and his posse is part of the reason for some of the toxic culture in SV. But God help you if you say that...
My open resentment for them aside, I do wonder why he feels qualified to comment on the economics of income inequality. Just cause you were tangentially involved with something does not give you room to run roughshod over well established economic research.
This would be like Alan Greenspan telling you about which technology companies are solid bets. Or an electrician telling the architect that the building is actually designed how the electrician sees it, not the architect. Like wtf?
I would love an official YC response because I know many in the financial and economics community who see SV and PG specifically as kind of a joke would love a debate, rather than PGs masturbatory, illogical, pseudoscientific rants.
I would like a response from the "many in the financial and economics community who see SV and PG as kind of a joke" as to why they invest in and exploit the tech sector (they know what NASDAQ is, I hope) and yet treat it as a joke? Do they think they are successful jocks versus socially maladapted geeks and nerds? Seriously, computers have taken over finance and expert systems will soon do a better job than humans managing economic systems as large as countries - how do the jocks react when they are told that they will be mere clerks to machines?
Not that I agree much with PG or the HN posse these days but I'm curious to know about their reaction to the inevitability of the jocks being the first casualties of business management automation
Complete straw man? Which YC companies are listed on the NASDAQ? Exploit might be the appropriate word, but most of the SV VCs come from tech backgrounds these days, not finance.
Why? All of YC's companies are worth $30 billion, and it's the resounding success? How many deals that big does Wall Street do each week? How big are the biggest hedge funds in terms of AUM? What about average hedge fund size?
I don't think they're "successful jocks" at all, although I'm glad you have no experience there - I know you think all the best PHD's are going to SV but maybe rethink that.
If you can convince an owner to sell his company, and another company's management to buy it, all with a machine, well, then you've pretty much created superintelligent AI and it's not just Wall Street that would need to be worried at that points, it's literally everybody. You think a machine can convince a crusty CEO of a company to give up his empire building, spend more time with his kids, and hey, maybe accept a slightly lower multiple too? Or rather, a machine that calls Goldman Sachs at just the right time to offer them an emergency credit line on terms that haven't been offered before - only after convincing them that these terms are actually favorable to them and that your standing will be able to help hold them up? Perhaps they, too, can make the decision about storing oil for a storage trade - maybe they can vet the vessels, the captains, the port agents, the inspectors, the storage tanks, the insurance companies, the financing banks, and the counterparties, and maybe then they can build good working relationships with all of them in order to get them to fix all their mistakes when they inevitably happen? Will a computer go to a bank executive and actually persuade him that these activities should be profitable and safe, when it's not always such a sure thing they will be? Will a computer know not to blend gasoline to a certain spec because hey, there's a chance I might actually want to blend it with something else because this guy has a position and I think I can talk him into adding to it? What I'm getting at is, it's obvious you don't understand how Wall St works.
Nobody was talking about jocks. I'm talking about the people running hedge funds, private equity funds, investment banks, and trading houses. If you totally fail to see how most of these are social activities to their very core, with numbers there as support, then of course you think it can all be automated.
What you aren't factoring in is Wall Street is probably on the cutting edge of automating work - DE Shaw, where Jeff Bezos worked prior to Amazon, was implementing many of the same statistical methods that are just getting big now, all the way back in the 90's.
So I complained about PG specifically posting pseudoscience, and you come back saying "well how will jocks feel when they're automated." I just don't see this going far.
This is going to be wildly unpopular but 7.6 billion would be a number worth mentioning. (Although I also feel VW should be banned from the US, no negotiations.)
What kind of message do you send by only fining them a tiny portion of what they were only able to make by breaking your laws? I'm 24 and I know my peers already justify their potentially unethical business decisions by citing Uber. Really all I've taken away from this is to not really worry about state laws.
I don't think that applies here. This is about Uber failing to provide reports about handicapped access to CPUC. At best they would have saved an engineer's salary for a couple days by not filing, but as the article states, Uber did eventually make the report (just not on time). So I'm pretty sure Uber made $0 from this and lost $7.6 million. Even $7.6 million for a late report seems vindictive to me.
Just like they eventually fell into compliance with certain cities, right? Where do you draw the line? Uber has a record of flagrantly, openly, defiantly breaking US laws - this fine came after they were stonewalling CPUC. If I were an institutional investor, at this point and looking towards the future, I would be furious for risking future business viability by continuing to openly flaunt your unwillingness to follow regulations. I would also probably sell my stake. There are plenty of other companies with room to grow that aren't running US Federal (and state!) government risk.
Let's think of the other companies that tried fucking with CPUC and evaluating their ethics as well. We can start with Enron. Travis is a smart guy but probably not as smart as those guys and even they got fucked. Even with their attachment to the hip to the federal government. Even with their company that was effectively many times bigger and more influential than a ride sharing app.
1. True, and they probably should be fined for the late report, but as a public entity you can't go fining people exorbitant fees due to unrelated actions. For example, if I made some public bigoted remarks and then a police officer caught me littering they can't just go fining me 20x the normal fee because of what I said. CPUC should evaluate the fee solely on the basis of the infraction that caused the fine in the first place.
2. While I don't disagree with you, this is irrelevant to this discussion. Perhaps it belongs it its own comment thread?
3. This seems similarly irrelevant to this comment thread. A better comparison would be how much Enron got fined for a similar offense against the CPUC.
1. I would agree but this doesn't reflect the reality and underlying political reasons for regulation and enforcement. I would imagine the large fine (lol jk, a $7mm fine is a joke) was to send a message that stonewalling a public regulator is not acceptable. Maybe "unrelated," but as this is a discussion, I do find it ironic that the tech community hates Comcast and wants the infrastructure to be treated like utilities, and then is okay with their own golden child (uber) running all over a public utility... When they were trying to enforce antidoscrimination measures. The reason Uber can do this is the same reason Comcast can hold everything hostage (yes I know that's very simplified, I'm on my phone). The fine is very trivial compared to the damage discrimination has done to this country - it must be known that that is totally unacceptable.
2. Fair
3. I disagree. I think looking at the ethics of companies who have historically picked fights with CPUC is quite telling, and cited an example.
But that sort of approach is effectively permission for an equally-well-funded unethical company that wants to disrupt an industry full of ethical business practices.
That's one of the biggest reasons that laws have publicly disclosed punishments associated with breaking them: they dissuade other people from breaking the law. If the penalty is low, and not because the people of California said that Uber should not be penalized (which presumably they can easily do), that communicates to everyone else who might want to break similar laws that the penalty will be equally low for them.
> They are only breaking laws protecting unethical business practices of the taxi cab companies.
That, and also laws protecting ethical business practices of the taxi cab companies, which are often unprofitable but desirable for the city population. And also laws protecting employees. And tax codes.
It's true that Uber managed to stir the pot, and definitely helped in fixing the stagnation of taxi services sooner. But that doesn't excuse their flippant attitude towards law and society, or corrupt example they give to the future startup founders.
What the fuck! They are breaking laws related to protecting people from discrimination! And all you can focus on is, hey, there's other people doing bad things too! Why can't you get mad at them? Seriously wtf.
It's not win-win, all the value (in required quality level of the service across the board) that regulation ensured goes down the drain. Competing on price will mean that corners will now be cut everywhere.
What would be the infrastructure this time? Instacart drivers at the ready...? The whole ecosystem that's been pushed seems to be being pushed precisely because there's no infrastructure involved, leading to the asymmetric cost structures so championed by PG/YC.
The whole devops toolchain really came of age in this bubble. The same stuff you used to build yet another instagram clone can be used for a medical analytics startup. It's how things have always been in tech. Yesterday's toys become tomorrow's tools.
I'd say it's even better than that. At my last company we used our own hardware, but we still benefited from Docker, Consul, Chef, graphana, etc. There's a lot there that is cloud-agnostic.
For example, service discovery is still service discovery. You still have, say, a hundred machines running the listeners API. Are you going to keep a manual tally of that? Or better to just start consul client from the ansible/chef provisioner, and let "dns" handle the load balancing. You can implement "connection draining" by downing the health check url before going offline on a node. Just one example, but yea, there's a lot of ease and maturity in the new services way of doing things now.
I like how he tries to quote a "Nobel prize winning economist" as an appeal to authority, but then (without naming him) insults Picketty's work, which will probably win a Nobel. PG is a smart guy but he really should stick to his areas of expertise, him and Marc Andreessen both frequently make basic finance and econ theory mistakes. PG's claim that he is in a position to speak with authority on inequality is like an electrician claiming he is in a position to speak with as much authority as the architect concerning the overall progress of the building.
If getting $150k before doing pretty much anything else was standard, it would be significantly easier to create sub-billion dollar companies. I've looked at multiple companies that wouldn't have needed further funding at all beyond about $75k unless they wanted to accelerate growth further, and would have made all of their participants extremely wealthy.
Yup. That's where I am right now. My current project could turn into a successful, and eventually relatively hands-off, business if I had about $50K more in the bank than I do right now. So I'm working on it on the side while I put that together, but it's slow.
And in +10 years, activist investors come in and lament how much more valuable the shipping business and the e-commerce business really are when separated, as the legacy network doesn't necessarily fit the needs of the newer one :)
This happens a lot with commodity shipping at least.
Ah, you hit it on the head. My neighborhood is full of these types, and that's the catch - you can keep your family together, but, just like happened to me standing at the ATM yesterday, the kids ride by on their hoverboards and you hear one of them telling the other how their dad had to go in to work (again) today - just like he always has to on Christmas.
I know most people here mean marijuana legalization when they say drug legalization, but there is absolutely no way meth, cocaine, or heroine will be legalized within the next 15-20 years, which is fairly long-term from a business perspective, by which I mean that they are not worried about their status as a going concern even if marijuana is legalized in the US. Their violence also is a complement to their ability to hold control of the routes / networks to actually move these products in any significant volume. It ensures they get paid whether they control production or not.
Furthermore, one industry in which violence will prove to be an asset but hasn't yet had an opportunity (like the guy below me claims) is profit recovery from legal dispensaries inside the US. Dispensaries and their owners have huge targets on their backs.
Mariguana is most of the weight and the volume of cartel operations but Mexican intelligence analysts say it produces only a quarter of the revenue.
That leaves the majority of cartel revenue still viable as long as amphetamines are restricted. Opiates are a rising profit center as DEA policy blocks branded opioid distribution equally to addicts and chronic pain sufferers.
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Parent describes legal marijuana businesses as targets for cartel violence because they do business in cash. Foreign cartels can't compete against local US gangs if that emerges as a racket. Also, it may become possible for mariguana businesses to use banks if cash starts driving crime. States may have to charter or run state banks eventually if federal officials continue to block the federal banks.
In any case there are no black markets as persistently profitable as the cartels' current drug business.
Fair points, but I didn't say it was because of their cash dealings. I was suggesting it more because of how the cartels operate. Also, claims that local gangs would be able to compete against cartel-aligned gangs (which is already making a huge assumption that they aren't one and the same) strongly disagrees with spikes in violence in Chicago, arguably (obviously) the largest hub for Sinaloa volumes, as well as Baltimore.
My suggestion was merely that I would be balls paranoid about security if I was tied to a dispensary in the US, no matter how legal, not because of cash, but because once one person uses that strategy (violence) they all will, such as how cocaine dealing became significantly more violent permanently once there was a wave of violence in the late 70's / early 80's.
How is profit recovery from dispensaries different from any other business with respect to racketeering? As far as I know racketeering is not a major threat to US businesses in general, what makes legal dispensaries different? Are you implying that the feds won't prosecute rackets against dispensaries, and state agencies are inadequate?
My open resentment for them aside, I do wonder why he feels qualified to comment on the economics of income inequality. Just cause you were tangentially involved with something does not give you room to run roughshod over well established economic research.
This would be like Alan Greenspan telling you about which technology companies are solid bets. Or an electrician telling the architect that the building is actually designed how the electrician sees it, not the architect. Like wtf?
I would love an official YC response because I know many in the financial and economics community who see SV and PG specifically as kind of a joke would love a debate, rather than PGs masturbatory, illogical, pseudoscientific rants.