1290cc

Doesnt Altman own 20% of Ive's "startup"?

Corporate hackathons are like stadium concerts, not quite as good as dive bar gigs.

Literally what the CEO of Snowflake did, by posting a long corporate speak linkedin post everywhere on the web.

There is an opportunity cost to starting a new business. Depending on market and your experience it can take several years before you get anywhere close to earning the same level of income as a mid to senior level FAANG employee. There is also the time commitment to dealing with everything outside of being an IC (taxes, healthcare, finance, marketing, disputes, legal).

To anyone exploring starting a new business I would keep the day job and suffer until you get to a point where the business is on a good clip and you can dedicate all your time to it. Otherwise spending 20 years at FAANG and enjoying your life is really not a bad way to live, in fact its a dream to 99% of the planets population.

Just look for companies that are profitable (read their financial statements) and have long average employee tenure (use linkedin premium, check company insights). I'm returning to a boring/old tech company because the benefits were better than any startup I worked at, I was making $400k-500k/yr, I had free time after hours and enjoyed my weekends.

I use web hooks now and they work really well for asynchronous situations. Spinning up a base app in node to do this is super simple and much easier to maintain than doing it in a kafka message bus.

Nice to see so many developers owning up to the "resume building" and being pragmatic about solving human/business problems versus technology for the sake of it.

Age 13-29, I mostly had oodles of free time to listen, explore music and a network of friends sharing their discoveries. Age 30-40, I got really busy and had more people involved in my professional and private life so it became harder to fit in music exploration (something I really enjoy). And less friends sharing their music.

I think streaming has a lot to do with this as my parents had a monthly record club they organized. A bunch of friends with their kids got together at someones home, made dinner, drank and listened to new music in the background.

SBF was a bright kid that was further enabled by his parents and the environment he grew up in. Imagine taking peoples life savings and being on speed while arbitraging exchanges? Thats some real hubris to not reflect that you might make a mistake at some point. The intellectual arrogance further indicts his parents who likely cheered him on.

This only makes sense when upholsterers dont cost more than buying an entirely new sofa. My family used to reupholster furniture every 5 years and it was cheap because my mother had an interior design firm and got very good rates.

I tried the same here in the US with some high end Scandinavian furniture ($5k), the quote was up to 1x what I originally paid. In the end it made sense to just buy new again.

The cost of labor of where you reside has a significant effect on whether you purchase another 'junk' piece of furniture.

Love the idea and lived in London to experience this. Amazing way to work but long term living is expensive as everyone wants to live like this, the photos shared in the article in London and Amsterdam are some of the most expensive places to reside. I believe what many feel is this is just another development exclusively for the $500k+/yr family and ultimately will lead to more traffic congestion for the surrounding areas and less affordability for surrounding towns.

As others have commented why not redevelop existing cities, rather than creating more urban sprawl? If bureaucracy/corruption in local government is a problem then fund politicians and get voters out to change this. Why arent feds involved in redevelopment? SF/Oakland/Berkeley are nowhere near the dense living of europe but they are going in the right direction. The problem these cities have is they simply arent run very well and have weak leadership that flop along with whatever the current thing is.

bingo.

so many companies raised on sky high evaluations in the '21-'22 vintage, that its going to be a tough ask to keep going now the market has reset and valuations returned to the mean.

You're completely right to feel this way.

Reading about your struggles made me reflect on my twenties in tech and what a day to day looked like. Most mornings would start on a tube commuting into central london, getting to see how people dress, was anyone attractive on my route? what music should I listen to on the way? Then getting into the office, I worked with with engineer that was a developer at roscosmos and escaped the soviet union. We would walk the streets of london and discuss what problems we were going to solve that day and have a morning espresso while doing it. The city was always buzzing with traders and office workers. Work was tough but I had a lunch outside to look forward to with my team. If it was thursday or friday most of us would head to a pub for a late boozy lunch or end up at bricklane for a curry and the night just went on and on.

Amazing time and when I compare that to the last few years of remote work it cant even come close to the interactions and experiences I gained during that time. My day to day has been wakeup, grab a coffee, walk into my office and start responding to emails. I then try to squeeze in time to walk my dog and then get back to continue more meetings and zoom calls. Once the day ends I'm pretty exhausted and try to get outside to ride my bike or go to the gym. I physically interact with less than 2 people a day. My wife and the barista at the local coffee shop.

I completely empathize with how you're feeling!

Thank you for sharing, I've had similar frustrations since the iPhone 11. The only constant I've been able to compare against is that my keyboard typing has not declined in accuracy.

Personally, I'm starting to applaud Zuckerberg for the risk he's taking with this project.

Despite all the hate Meta is getting, we can't forget this is exactly what we all want in the tech world. Established companies making bold, borderline crazy investments into R&D for new markets - remember how yesterdays leader became irrelevant? Usually you would see this taking place outside of the corporation via funding for smaller startups but in this case got the CEOs direct involvement and focus which is intriguing.

This is the correct answer, Elon will not be as generous when cutting numbers.

I'll never forget letting go of staff in France and Italy. The employees were overjoyed we were letting them go and got into fights over who would be taking the packages. I learned that they received 1 year of salary upfront tax free with a bunch of additional benefits to help with job training and placement.

An average middle manager friend has had this happen 3 times, each time after a US acquisition. He now has a chateau in the south of france and is very happy with himself.

I see this all the time in home decoration and design. We tried to decorate our home and we had an idea what we wanted but it was almost impossible to escape the "Big Furniture" bubble as almost everything we wanted almost always lead back to the same 5 or 6 mediocre major retailers. Visited any of those big sites? Well then Pinterest is going to flood your searches with content that leads back to them.

We enlisted a designer and she sent us over 30 incredible online stores that we had specifically been looking for that none of our previous searching lead us to. Most were small independent places and had incredible quality/value and originality.

It was exactly like taking the red pill.

Time to travel the well trodden path of leaving to start your own company that beats the pants off $LARGE_CORPORATION. I am certain your customers feel exactly the same way and are seeking alternatives.

Youtube/Social Media has removed the filters and gatekeeping that happened in the legacy media. Of course there is a lot of noise. But what are the odds of a young MKBHD, DrDisrespect, Linus, etc, etc getting their own show in legacy media? Zero to none because we would've never heard about them.

Its glorious to see people who are truly brilliant at what they do getting a shot at the audience and owning everything they do. Its not just Twitch Streamers and 20 something influencers. There is a deep world of niche experts opening up all sorts of interesting topics to everyone and the best get to stand front and center.

My recent fav is Benn Jordan who breaks down a lot of the challenges of being an independent musician in a world of streaming. He recently did an incredible piece on how a NY Times reporter used his credentials to scam hundreds of musicians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk872ERRVxA

Trifacta is pretty cool way to do data engineering. Very efficient approach to assessing what is going on in a massive amount of data and then get suggestions on ways to transform it. Once you're done export to python code or just run from their app as a pipeline that is pushed down into spark or within a data warehouse.

Unlimited PTO has always been about attracting talent (it looks great on paper) and ensuring you manage HR costs. If you have unlimited PTO there is no need to track it and no need to payout employees when they leave.

This is what most of the apartments on the bay area peninsula are like.

My wife and I realized very quickly that because we didnt fit into the corporate hierarchy of ivy league grad, VP at FANG corporation that we were not worth the time.

Explored more of the bay area and found lovely people in other areas. Every now and then we get a peninsula type here but they move pretty quickly as they cant handle the unbridled good mornings and nobody starting a conversation with their resume credentials.

Of course he wants to increase corp taxes, this will make life incredibly difficult for his competition or new upstarts to challenge Amazon. He has already planned for this and how it will kill his competition.

Amazon can afford to find the loopholes but hes right that most of his competitors can't.

This is a company that helps realtors more than home buyers/sellers. The realtor business is a patchwork of messy solutions and mom/pop shops. Compass has brought many realtors into the modern age with managed business processes and a way to leverage all the tech behind managing home sales.

My realtor switched from his own excel sheets to their way of doing things and loves it.

Imagine being a billionaire and then avoiding taxes. No matter how you look at it you are always going to remain in the tres commas club and afford a fleet of yachts, mansions, rare Nike Jordans and throw parties for instagram models in Tulum.

Yet you still do it.

Austin is the perfect place for companies that are expanding administration, finance, operations, legal, marketing etc. Talented individuals with specialist skills now have the freedom to be anywhere. All of this is a good thing.

I completely sympathize with the personal assistant, accountant or support agent (normal commodity jobs) that has a family and is forced to live on the SF peninsula and commute on the 101 each day back to their crummy home that is extortionately priced because they have to compete with the salaries of CEO's and VPs who live a few miles away.

Really happy for these guys, they are they kinds of leaders we want at the helm of an organisation.

I find it really disturbing that so many VC's and CEO's highlight how important it is to actually do the work of your business in order to understand your service, customer and product better. Why is this a revelation? I would think that this is business 101. It seems to me that all of the best companies have leaders that know their products inside out and are personally invested in said product (Jobs, Musk, Chesky, Mckinnon, Collisons).

I'm still shocked to hear of tech CEO's of massive companies who have never used or installed the products they sell.

It may be a bit frustrating to read but it helped me to understand the true value of the work I was doing and what others are being compensated.

I remember my first job age 20 working for a startup that developed an early version of Twitter but designed for neighbors (this was around 2001).

I had to write drivers for a GSM module, write a server to process incoming/outgoing SMS messages, write an API into an SMS-C, build a website for users to interact and administer on. Do it all in java/linux as we had zero investment to buy anything. For all of this I was paid minimum wage (<$250/month) and had zero equity.

It was only through forums like this that I discovered how horrifically exploited I was. This was a long time ago and the founder had no business sense but was smart technically. Business shutdown after 2 years and I went onto bigger and better things. One thing I will say is that silicon valley pays better than anywhere else I've lived in the world (Asia, Africa, Europe).

This reveals a lot about how technical people approach problems. Many times you're simply applying whole sum logic to a human and not considering that humans are soft and squishy.

What happens when those 100 humans perfect for the task get sick? Maybe have children? What about life altering events or accidents? Divorce? Theft? Emotion? Government oversight or over reach? There are a million things that can whittle or impede that 100 people. Much like the film Gattaca who felt they had the perfect vision for who was perfect, life tends to disagree. In the 50's we all thought India was a backwater of poverty yet its yielding some of the worlds best problem solvers.

These are all things that make it better for as many people as possible to focus on a problem and eventually we reach a better solution. It also fosters creative destruction as there're always new cultural takes on an issue that evolves over time. Was the vacuum cleaner solved when Electrolux was the dominate force? Or is it solved by Dysan? This is part of the fabric of life which makes debate so interesting.

Redshift is an onpremise piece of software that was converted into a cloud platform (acquired by AWS). Snowflake was built from day 1 as a cloud platform with awesome big data frameworks as its internal architecture. Its very hard for Redshift to rearchitect itself in the way Snowflake was designed from the start because they need to continue supporting existing instances and create an entirely new product.

Makes sense they're going for the IPO at the start of the work from home era. Asana has been around awhile and my team always used it for remote team communication and project management. We never saw the need for apps like Slack or Basecamp because working with the tool is very similar to the Getting Things Done system (or Toodledo).