amb23

This isn't a great list--it's a lot of fluff, and self-help books masquerading as business content.

There are basically two skills you really need to hone in an MBA. The first are the hard skills/knowledge on finance, accounting, (basic) stats, and (basic) economics. The second is being able to assess and analyze business models, from both strategic and operational angles. The former can be learned in MOOCs, while the latter is best approached with case studies, ideally discussed as a group. I'd honestly suggest trying to start a business/entrepreneurs book club with ~12-20 people to try to replicate that experience over reading books on your own.

We're going to see a lot of smaller startups wind down by the end of the year: I know a few that have either wound down operations, or are in the process of an acqi-hire or asset sale to other firms. Anecdotally, I started hearing the numbers of startups in this position pick up significantly about a month ago (but I don't have a bird's eye view, I just pick up on industry news/gossip).

The rest are default alive, but growing slowly. The rapidly scaling startup model is gone for the time being: no one is trying to double headcount or take over a market segment. (Some AI startups are an exception, but that market is nascent/unpredictable.) Default alive startups can be fodder for acquisitions from larger, established firms as well, if VCs are willing to take a cut on prior valuations. It's not clear to me where those VCs are going to find their 10x power law exits without the kind of growth and scale that used to be the norm; default alive is not a good outcome for investors.

I think “software is eating the world” has evolved into “software is eating barriers to entry.” All these fintech startups are entering a market that software already penetrated years ago--but those first gen tools are clunky, or have so much so much bureaucracy that it’s not cost efficient to work with them. What's interesting about these dev-first fintechs (Stripe, now Lithic) is that they can grow the overall market demand by stripping all that away (and not just extract market share from the first gen software companies).

Wonder what this will mean for fintech exits in general. Will VC fintech funding start to cool if exits by legacy finance companies look to be subject to higher regulatory scrutiny than previously expected?

WSJ has an article on this too: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-ban-on-chinese-stocks-ro...

"The order, which takes effect Monday, bans Americans from trading the securities of dozens of Chinese companies... The order initially applied to 31 companies and has since grown to 35. Many are private firms with little connection to Wall Street, but a few have American depositary receipts listed on the NYSE. These include three large Chinese telecom carriers, as well as oil-and-gas driller Cnooc Ltd. , which was added to the blacklist in December."

In general you're better off working at a later stage startup if you want reasonable hours. I started working at a startup after it raised a Series A and then left a year after it raised its Series C; in that time I went from working 9:00am-7:30/8:00pm to 9:00am-5:30/6:00pm with the occasional late working day.

The labor of medical residents is something hospital systems exploit during normal times, but that exploitation has severely deepened during the pandemic. At the hospital my partner works at, respiratory therapists and nurses got a $10k bonus for working during COVID; the residents got nothing despite working insane hours in ICU, routinely working more than the legally mandated 90 hours per week. Just because doctors earn more later in their careers does not excuse the level of labor exploitation they are subject to during residency.

Stanford is not the only hospital system to restrict access to the vaccine from frontline residents. I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff before doctors, nurses, and other frontline employees. If vaccine allocation is getting messed up this early on within these closed systems, I can't help but think the next 2-3 phases will go awry as well--what checks are in place to ensure these vaccines get distributed to grocery store workers before people who are willing to pay more to get it early?

https://www.harnesswealth.com/articles/promissory-note-progr... What about a system like the one proposed here? This is the only tech startup I’ve heard of that uses an alternative equity system.

Agree with your point about 409(a) disclosures. As an ex-employee with outstanding options in two tech startups I find it crazy that nothing requires firms to annually disclose this information to options holders. And while I was working at these companies there was no mention of the #of shares outstanding and the % allocated to employees—even if you knew your personal percentage stake, you didn’t know how much was diluted with each subsequent round.

Salesforce is already a monopoly if you go by volume of revenue earned from CRM. No one other than small/niche SaaS businesses competes directly for CRM business, and any new CRM startups can't get venture funding because it's considered an untouchable space by VCs. Every other large player they compete with in the CRM space (Hubspot, Zendesk, Oracle) offers a CRM as a side product to their main line of business.

This transaction shouldn't be the catalyst for regulatory action; regulators should have already taken action.

I hate to be so blunt, but 50% of the population has IQ below 100.

This is by design. IQ scores are a normal distribution with a mean of 100...

The problem with prestige is that you, yourself, may not care about it, but those around it still do and still use it for social signaling. That affects the rationality of the decisions you make around your career in serious ways.

I think one of the problems around targeting prestige vs. targeting excellence is that we know what it takes to do something prestigious, but excellence is hard to define, and generally comes with much higher risk. Landing a fancy job at Facebook or Google means you tick the box on success without much risk. The criteria that defines success when you start a company, for instance, or work at a non-profit, is much less clear. That compounds the material risk of doing these ventures with a social risk of taking these jobs in the first place. So then what would would it take, in American society, to replace the prestige baiting with an emphasis on achieving actual excellence instead?

One of the lead doctors in the UK is saying life will start to look normal in Spring 2021 (albeit, I assume he was referring to the UK alone). There's good reason for cautious optimism & patience.

Science has done its job; now we need to push for coordination between infrastructure, government, and business to finish it.

A few quick takeaways on this-

1 - the DOJ is targeting a product/feature that Plaid hasn't even released: payment processing. That appears to be the reason other fintechs like Stripe/PayPal opposed the deal. Very odd to see this lawsuit filed on the potential for a future product vs. an existing product Plaid offers already. Not a lawyer but wonder what the precedence for this is.

2 - DOJ is targeting Visa as a monopoly in the online debit transaction space. They don't see them as a Visa-Mastercard duopoly. Interesting to compare the DOJ's decision to call Visa a monopoly & block the acquisition vs. a full on monopoly lawsuit for Google.

3 - Wonder what implications this will have on exits for other fintech firms, and startups generally. Definitely makes going public more attractive if the government is signaling that they're not opposed to putting up significant blocks to prevent acquisitions. Delaying an acquisition like this really will spook employees with stock options & VCs

What are the business risks to a company like Github when their source code has been released in the wild? Startups treat their code like IP, but I imagine it'd still be incredibly difficult for a competitor to try and build the same tool/features even if they have the code as a "cheat sheet" of sorts. Are there other risks (i.e. security vulnerabilities) it causes?

Acceleration stats aside, SUVs are, statistically, much more likely to kill more people--pedestrians and riders alike--than other types of cars. The increasing popularity of SUVs is one of the main reasons behind the rise in pedestrian deaths in the past decade. Given their bulk, they also cause slower traffic in general. Their popularity is a lose-lose for drivers (and everyone else trying to get around) at the end of the day.

I have mixed feelings about this car: on the one hand, it does give me hope that mainstream consumers who are attracted to trucks and SUVs will start to accept EVs as the standard, and the brand cache will accelerate EV adoption overall. It's also a pretty darn cool car; they did a great job with their initial marketing. On the other hand, it's going to suck to drive (or cycle, or walk) alongside people driving these vehicles. We're going to be complaining about selfish Hummer drivers when we see these on the roads again based purely on their behavior as drivers, EV or not.

Personally, I'm hoping we start to see a more diverse mix of electric vehicles on the market, including new kinds of micromobility. The Biro (https://biro.nl) is apparently a very cool car to own among wealthier Europeans. I've heard of a couple electric motorcycle brands that are trying to copy Tesla's playbook as a high end, prestige brand. More efficient delivery vehicles are desperately needed, too. But unfortunately, when other people drive SUVs, it makes it harder for you to drive these other vehicles safely and incentivizes you to drive an SUV, too.

The lineage of technological progress does not follow the same path as commercial development of a pre-existing technology applied to a pre-existing market. We need to be careful not to equate the two. As much as a D2C brand or SaaS startup may brilliantly bring a new market innovation to the fore, they rarely bring new technological innovations--and the potential to expand the pie rather than extract market value--with them. Technological progress is a halting, stop-and-start process, and the market isn't always welcoming to it even in cases when the economics of the innovation make sense. So, yes--if you're working on truly progressive technology, take this sense of purpose the author speaks of to heart. But tech as an industry shouldn't appropriate this purpose when it cannot follow through on it.

In order for internet communities to thrive, you need to install some sense of "psychological safety." I'm using this term in the same vein that Google uses when they say that psychological safety is the foundation needed to build highly effective, high-performing teams. (It has nothing to do with "safe spaces" and whatnot.)

On this thread, a female founder made the top comment with a personal experience relating to the article, only to get inundated by comments telling her she was wrong (from one commenter in particular). Similar reactions were found to the article itself. Yet someone's lived experience is just that; it's their perspective on their own, true personal experience. Calling perspective "untrue" right off the bat is like a form of internet gaslighting; it stifles open dialogue.

If we want have good conversations online--something that's incredibly hard to do, yes--we need to give space to the people who share their experiences. I'm disheartened because I look to Hacker News for open commentary on issues and problems in the tech industry, and it's sad to see that dialogue overrun with people who just want to tell others they're wrong. If it takes locking a thread to improve the overall conversation, and get back a sense of "psychological safety" needed for those good conversations--so be it.

I don't know how to flag this thread to the mods, but--hey mods, can we lock these comments? It's disheartening to see threads on women/minorities in tech on Hacker News get strong, negative reactions from the community like some of what's written here. I would hope the forum can hold itself to higher standards than what I'm reading here.

I blame it on quarantine, but for the past week or so I've really been longing to spend an afternoon in a library. They were one of the best parts of my childhood and teenage years: scanning a shelf and picking out something that catches your eye was a more efficient process, yielding more spontaneity and serendipity and quality, than the existing "recommended books" algorithms that exist on my library's online app. Finding books on similar topics was so much easier with the Dewey Decimal system. It's amazing to me that, decades into the information revolution, we still haven't been able to replicate the efficiencies of that manual sorting system online.

Mothers--the vast majority of mothers, not the aristocracic ones we model our current family structures off of--have always worked. They'd strap the baby on their back and go to the fields to plow or gather the harvest or cook or weave or chop firewood. Motherhood as as a full-time job is a modern invention; historically, it was a side gig.

I'd love to see a startup tackle this problem: think a benefits platform that allows companies to offer daycare as a benefit, or a Wonderschool-like daycare for working parents. Even an improved work from home policy for new parents would go a long way to plugging the talent "leak" that's prevalent right now.

Google said it was willing to ‘work with’ Turkey, but as a partner and not as a corporation working within a sovereign nation. It simply said it doesn’t like Turkey’s law, and so it will stop providing Android phones for an entire country. In other words, Google has a private sanctions regime against smaller countries.

The fact that Google even has the leverage to blackout an entire country like this--and that it's legally allowed to do so--is the best reason I've seen so far to break up Big Tech. They're playing with fire and undermining the U.S. diplomatic community by mixing public and private interests in a way that supersedes national policy. Both Android and Chrome need to be spun out--at this point they are basically public utilities.

US MBA programs need to start following the European model: Year-long to 16 month programs tailored to a slightly older demographic (late 20s to 30s) who actually need a degree to move a rung higher in their career. The shorter program length will decrease the costs for students (both in terms of tuition & opportunity costs) and--based on how much travel my friends currently pursing MBAs do during the academic year--is unlikely to hurt academic outcomes.

There are a few MBA ROI calculators online, and for my career I wouldn't see an ROI until ~20-25 years down the line. (For context, I'd probably gain a ~30k salary increase if I were to pursue an MBA.) And that's with consistent salary growth with no sabbaticals or career changes (and any subsequent loss in earning potential) I might want to pursue. I would love to use a year long program to gain some needed financial modeling, HR, and operational skills while taking the time to pursue a business idea, but the traditional programs are not structured to accommodate that. And besides, you don't actually need an MBA if you work in the tech industry until you're in a senior position--VP or C-suite--so there's no direct need for the degree itself until ~10-15 years in the future.

I haven’t found the ingredients to be too expensive for most of the menus honestly, but I also live by a really cheap fruit and veggie store. (A kilo of blackberries isn’t gonna break the budget when it’s $1.00 a carton.) The book’s recipes are sized for a family of four hence the huge portions; I’m single so I usually cut the recipes in half and save a lot for leftovers. I’d say there’s a lot of substitutes you can make in the book for rare/pricier items and it’s realistic for most middle class budgets. They also group menus by season, so you buy the ingredients for the week when the produce is at its cheapest. But yeah, they do have the occasional ingredient like ground lamb or garlic scapes that can make the menus annoying/expensive to put together exactly.

I would not recommend it for vegetarians as most of their menus have meat as a core dish unfortunately. The idea is translateable to a vegetarian diet; the menus are not.

Non-developer here but I might have some insight on general hiring practices: First of all, most companies, startups especially, are really bad at training. Like, really really bad. A majority don’t have any kind of formal training programs until they hit 100+ employees, and even then the training you get is usually created by HR and lacks any kind of technical depth. It’s hard enough to even wrap your head around the basics of how most tech companies are built as an early employee; trying to turn that complexity into a simple training program for new hires is hard and people rarely have the time or resources to do it well.

That being said, if a company is preparing for growth they need to plan and document for those trainings ahead of time, and they’re probably better off hiring fast and teaching quickly on the job. Not documenting how your company works is another kind of technical debt if you think about it, and a lot of startups scramble to make up for it when they find they need to hire quickly but those hires aren’t getting up to speed as quickly as they should be. So they overreact and think it’s the quality of the developers that’s the problem when it’s really their own lackluster training resources causing the issue. Also, the company I’m at just constantly maintains listings for front end and back end engineers and data science just to try and keep a constant pipeline coming, but the actual needs and experience levels they’re looking for at any one time on those teams do change. IMO you should never apply to a job post that’s been up for 1+ month; always target newly published listings and you’ll up the chances a recruiter reaches out. The rest is just HR noise.

If we're on the topic of how to cook rather than just what to cook: I just got A New Way to Dinner (a cookbook from Food52) earlier this summer and have been using it religiously pretty much every week since. It's a strategy guide on how to prep all your food on the weekend and have diverse meals throughout the week. You basically do 1-3 hours of cooking on the weekend to make the components for your dishes, and then a bit of assembly work during the week to combine different components and build your meals (i.e. A roast chicken on Monday can turn into a chicken salad with fennel on Wednesday and a chicken salad sandwich for lunch anytime during the week)

If I don't plan and cook my meals like this, then I end up either spending an hour plus to make a new dinner every weeknight, or getting lazy and frying up some eggs, or making a huge batch of whatever and reheating the same thing again and again. It's been such a timesaver during the week, I really wish more recipes & cookbooks were formatted like this.

I'm interested in this difference too, because anecdotally post-workout stretching does reduce soreness for me. One of the two studies referenced in the part about how stretching doesn't prevent DOMS actually did find that stretching decreased soreness, and post-workout stretching decreased it more than pre-workout stretching: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21735398. But, as the paper authors termed it, the effects were "clinically insignificant" (not the same as "statistically insignificant"). The results still strike me as odd from my personal experience, because it's so predictable that I'll be sore if I lift weights without a 5-10 min cool down afterwards. I'd want to see added research beyond these couple of studies before jumping to a conclusion.

MBA programs should adjust to the market by developing more concentrated 1-year degrees in specific disciplines: Finance, Operations, Marketing, Product, etc.

The first year of most MBAs are just core courses in various business disciplines: you'll learn accounting if you know you want to be a brand manager for a CPG company, or you'll learn org design if you're aiming for a job at a hedge fund. While I see the value in interdisciplinary education--and while I strongly endorse interdisciplinary core courses for undergrad--these courses simply aren't necessary for a professional degree and the extra year of school costs are prohibitively expensive.

I'd love to see more concentrated MBAs that really focus on specific disciplines. Basically, cut out the first year of an MBA and just focus on a core set of discipline-specific courses. Most MBA program already have these designed as "concentrations" so I'd imagine the actual implementation of such a program wouldn't be too complex. And if they're only one year long, the price would be halved.

I've personally considered, and considered against, an MBA degree due to the prohibitive costs to even apply, but a program like this would make it much easier to swallow that pill.

In a perfectly rational market, neither mother or father would disproportionately decide to make one choice or another to prioritize or de-prioritize work at the expense or benefit of raising children. Equal numbers of men would be making that same choice as women do. But that's not the case today.

Despite all the hemming and hawing over the wage gap issue, it's clear where the wage gap comes from: childcare, childcare, childcare. Even if women, in general, are making an informed decision to de-prioritize work, it's not a rational decision at the societal level if men don't also make that decision in equal numbers. No one faults a woman for making that decision for themselves and their family. But on a societal level, we're not going to see wage equality until men are given an equal chance to make these same decisions in a way that's not dictated by age-old stereotypes of masculinity and breadwinners.

I think mandatory paternity leave would help here. I also think on-site childcare, or subsidized childcare given to employees as a benefit like healthcare, could benefit both mothers and fathers and help influence more women to stay in the workforce. The costs of subsidizing childcare for a 30-something manager are probably lower than the costs of finding and training someone new to replace them if they're forced to leave the workforce to care for a newborn. There are a number of interventions the private sector can take that can be integrated around pregnancy, birth, and raising newborns that can make work a bit more rational for both mothers and fathers and help retain employees.

The biggest hurdle is regulatory. There are a number of legal barriers to direct primary care, and the laws vary state to state. Most private practitioners don’t have the choice to start a direct primary care practice because their state laws classify the model as insurance. This makes “scalable” DPC hard to achieve unless these laws change.

The other barrier is the supply of primary care doctors in the first place. There simply aren’t enough primary care doctors to make DPC an efficient scaled model. Family medicine is sadly the lowest paid field in medicine; while DPC can lead to higher salaries for current practitioners, it won’t solve the supply problem in the short term.