akharris

These are great.

I particularly like Waymo because of aggressively most of the media/talking heads wrote them off as "never going to beat Tesla" because google.

In the end, they took a fundamentally different approach at all levels of the product and won.

My list wasn't meant to exhaustive. Honestly not much of a list, just a few examples. SpaceX and Nvidia are both examples of deep technical moats, as are some of the others mentioned by commenters.

I agree with you that many moats are regulatory, but disagree that most moats are. Networks are powerful moats, customer lockin can work well, brand is a strong moat (at least for a time), speed and culture can function as moats.

Fwiw, I don't think any moat is ultimately perfect. Moats themselves are not meant to permanently stop an attacker - they are delaying tactics at best. Companies that stay ahead continuously re-invent and rebuild their differentiation and defenses.

Fair enough. I definitely should have added nvidia to the list.

Thank you.

What I love about that quote is that he knew that, some day, the cure rate would go even higher.

Thank you. I've only ever had bad luck creating Wikipedia entries, though it's been a while.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. He was.

Thank you.

My sister is an incredible write and he was a perfect subject.

Thank you.

I don't fully understand how he did it. I know he took a lot from the line in the Talmud that said "whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

My mom says that his baseline was incredibly high and that he was incredibly resilient. He also had a big rebellious streak, an analytical mind, and endless compassion.

Thanks for saying that.

Here's a bit more about him from the obituary my sister wrote: https://www.northjersey.com/obituaries/pnys1147090

My dad started his work as a Pediatric Hematologist Oncologist in the late 60s. He had a firm belief that cure rates could and would climb as a result of research and better clinical care. He spent his life pursuing both.

When people would ask him how he managed to stay so positive - he was one of the happiest people I’ve ever known - he’d reference the trends highlighted in this article.

That didn’t change how hard it was when he lost a patient, but I know he always had his eyes and his mind on the future.

This is an incredible example of science and medicine. Thanks OP for posting it.

I was six when Flood came out. My brother had a bootleg copy, which I later "borrowed" and carried around with me in my walkman (also "borrowed"). It was so...different than anything any of my friends listened to, and I loved it.

But maybe the greatest thing about Flood was seeing Particle Man and Istanbul on Tiny Toons. It was as if all my favorite weird things in the world (at least for a kid) were part of the same pocket universe.

I still find myself humming different songs from Flood on the regular, unprompted. Thanks for posting this.

Much as I’d love to debate you about this here, I don’t think either of us will convince the other - or anyone else - in this format.

Always happy to have a real conversation about difficult issues.

The overall tenor of this thread, and this comment in particular, is diving right into deep conspiracy theory territory.

There’s a huge difference between supporting an ally with common interests and being somehow controlled by them.

The idea that Israel - or AIPAC - is somehow in control of the US government is straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

On photography, in no real order, and probably overweight on street photography.

- Henri Cartier Bresson - Joseph Koudelka - Gordon Parks - Phil Penman - Alan Schiller - Annie Leibovitz - Micha bar Am - Bruce Gilden - Steve McCurry - Constantine Manos - Dorothea Lange

Well I do have you to thank for teaching me about combinatorial auctions :).

That said, you can think of the auction in two parts - the first gets the relevant people from the starting line to the actual bidding. The second part is where you actually make decisions. The latter part in this dynamic usually has few enough participants that a founder can run the variables in his/her head.

What would be interesting to see is whether or not more funds would get to the bidding stage with a robust combinatorial auction at the beginning of the whole thing.

The editing and music choice for the video are both incredible.

There's no perfect mix.

In an ideal world, you'd build an order book of every investor that wants in and how much they want. Once you had that book filled, you'd allocate by weighing long term value, price, etc.

Realistically you can't do this (ok sometimes you can). The situation is dynamic and you generally want to take the bird in hand vs. risking the longer process. BUT there's a limit to that, and if you sequence things well - say start the longer processes first - then you have more flexibility.

But remember, the biggest point is that the seed round is just 1 moment in time. If you can't fit someone in but you like them, build the relationship for next time.

Author here: Lost count of the various demo days coming up in the next few months. Happy to chime in on questions of how to deal with the run up to a demo day or the after effects.

There's a wonderful interview with the photographer for this piece, Tomas van Houtryve, on Leica's blog: https://leica-camera.blog/2022/05/09/rebuilding-notre-dame/.

Your second point is the dynamic that makes the least sense to me. In public markets, if a stock is cheaper relative to future earnings, that makes it a better buy. In our corner of the world, the opposite often holds true.

There should be a tipping point where greed beats ego, but have not yet figured out how to find it.

Fwiw - my general premise isn't that the "majority of VCs are not good investors." My point is that there's a serious disconnect in the markets right now, and that it is rooted more in fear than a lack of opportunity.

On the second point - you're right that the cash isn't literally sitting around, but VCs (generally) do not have to ask LPs for approval on a deal by deal basis. Capital calls can happen either as tranches or in response to a deal, and it is unusual for an LP to successfully refuse a capital call because of a specific deal.

I didn't end up assigning explicit scores to things. In general, I gave more weight to the long term in my head. At least, to the long term that would happen if my bet was right.

Congrats to Jon and Chandan on the milestone. Pretty rare to see a company go from seed to unicorn in a single round! Anything particular you learned during that jump?

Excited to see how you and the team continue to build.

I agree that there's quite a lot going on now, but you could have said the same of many other periods. The 80s saw PCs, but also new kinds of music, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and more. That's always going to be true (hopefully), and each of those shifts creates opportunities.

But I do think you're right that the trend is accelerating and will most likely continue to do so. It's that compounding trick, applied to history.

I like this!

I guess the founders would mostly argue that boilerplate is the price of admission for angels these days. But it would be great to see it work this way.

Do you mean in a down round or just a round at a low price?

In my experience, any down round requires massive changes to ownership across the cap table, previous rights or not. The only way to stop this is with even more onerous terms that one doesn't normally see in VC term sheets.

Fantastic post.

You say "haven't quite figured out" - does that imply there are things you wanted to convert but didn't see the path for, or that the question hasn't truly come up?

This is why I spent so much time working on the series a program before I left yc. many of these tactics/strategies can be taught or partially outsourced to the right advisor.