AndreLock

I've long been skeptical of the potential of prediction markets. A huge source of their recent growth, sports-related contracts, seems to rest on precarious legal grounds since none of the major players are registered sports betting outfits. There's a lot of activity around political betting, but these are concentrated around presidential and midterm election seasons. Is there really enough betting volume to justify an $8B valuation? What % of that volume will they be able to capture as fees? Over the past few years, the retail brokerage market has trended towards eliminating trading fees in favor of payment for order flow. Could the same happen to prediction markets?

Using valuation as a measuring stick is a bit silly given how much valuations can be inflated based on a pre-revenue idea and the pedigree of the company founder(s). When Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI and walked into a room of investors saying, "I'm starting my own AI company", they arguably both created one-person, billion dollar companies right then and there.

This came from the NLRB's McLaren Macomb case.

The first batch of reviews for Vinfast's US vehicles were awful. I can't imagine this going well for them, though the stock will very volatile due to the low float.

I agree regarding leaving VC as an associate. Many of these positions are not partner-track. Also, in a world in which term sheets were being signed in 48 hours, it isn't clear what skills they've been building (no financial analysis, little-to-no due diligence, no deal sourcing).

Interesting to see what the impact will be on crowdsourcing annotation companies like Scale AI, especially after reading this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2023/04/11/how-alexa...

Scale AI has long struck me as one of the worst examples of the excesses of the recent startup boom:

- An extraordinary amount of hype and handwaving over what is essentially a business process outsourcing operation

- Exploitation of gig economy workers in developing economies

- Significant data privacy concerns (this article describes how Scale AI data annotation workers openly shared amongst themselves private photos of Roomba customers taken without user consent: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...)

- A horrible work culture that has seen Scale AI's founder imploring employees to work very hard and then unceremoniously laying off 20% of its workforce (https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/10/scale-ai-cuts-20-of-its-wo...)

- Founders being allowed to take large sums of money off the table before a business has successfully exited or achieved any profit

I think it's the latter. If anything, this will negatively impact Mercury and Brex in the long run as companies will favor safety above all else.

I was a competitive chess player in my youth and am currently ~2300 on Lichess. Here are key aspects of any training regimen:

* Tactics - I did thousands of tactics puzzles using a program called CT-ART while under a time limit. I would have to complete 25 puzzles within 5 minutes while making 0 mistakes. If I made a mistake I would have to start from the beginning.

* Core positional concepts - Understanding pawn structure (double pawns, isolated pawns, passed pawns, pawn majorities, etc.), control of central squares, open files, king safety, and so on.

* Endgames - Many players neglect endgames. Master the basics: common rook-and-pawn and pawn-only endgames, how to checkmate with 2 bishops and bishop + knight, etc. Read Silman's Complete Endgame Course, Basic Chess Endings, and Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual (for advanced players) to improve your endgame play.

* Openings - Many people have mentioned learning openings, but it is generally a mistake for beginners and intermediate players to focus on this aspect of their game. It is not especially useful for a ~1000-rated OTB player to learn 15+ moves of theory in the King's Indian Defense only to end up in a position where there are slightly better according to theory but have no understanding of their position. It is better to center your opening repertoire around easy-to-learn openings and focus on improving other aspects of your game until you are strong enough to handle positions outside of opening theory.

The college student behind the account also tracks the private jets of other prominent individuals, including Bill Gates, Trump, Bezos, and a slew of Russian oligarchs. It should be noted that at the time I'm publishing this comment, other private jet tracking accounts (e.g. @CelebJets) remain active, suggesting that this policy of protecting privacy is being selectively applied.

"Having easy access to his whereabouts at all times" is hyperbole. Only his jet is being tracked, not his physical location at all times.

I stand corrected on this point. Bloomberg is reporting that SBF's Robinhood stake was apparently held through Alameda and may have been used as collateral for loans.

This is absolutely wild and unprecedented. Imagine being a victim of Madoff's ponzi and - after already being traumatized by the unveiling of the fraud - discovering that the rest of the money had been stolen.

Madoff's ponzi was larger, but the recovery rate was 88%. It looks like customers who didn't withdraw in time will end up with 0%.

SBF personally owns a 7.6% stake in Robinhood worth ~$700m at the current price.

The Sacramento Kings' old arena was called the Power Balance Arena in 2011-12. Power Balance went bankrupt in 2011, and the arena naming rights went to Sleep Train the following year.

Selling game/item codes is a grey area on eBay. eBay restricts the selling of digital goods to approved sellers, but it is theoretically possible to circumvent this by physically mailing codes to buyers. The problem is that this side hustle seems to frequently result in chargeback/return fraud, wherein buyers purchase codes and then claim they don't work.

I've sold ~$50k worth of items on eBay over the years and have had a mixed record dealing with eBay's customer's service. Unfortunately, eBay tends to side with buyers, leaving sellers prone to various fraudulent schemes by buyers. However, they sometimes will protect sellers. For example, I sold a Panasonic Toughpad that a buyer spuriously claimed wouldn't connect to cellular networks (I tested the tablet beforehand and everything was working properly.) The buyer attempted to extort me by saying he would leave a positive review if I gave him a partial refund and implying he would leave a negative review if I didn't (this is a big no-no on eBay). Given that I had written evidence of this behavior, customer support sided with me and closed the case and removed the negative review the buyer left. Not every situation will have a fortunate outcome like this though.