crunkykd

IronSource & WETA acquisitions may have been expensive mistakes

hack: do a startup only after you already have living money assured (savings from earlier corporate jobs, now invested & producing). you have time & energy, and no obligations.

now do Ironsource ($4.4B)

pure speculation: ChatGPT training dataset contains massive amounts of copyrighted material, and he told the board it didn't. now there's a big looming liability.

spending $4B for ironsource ads and $1B for weta authoring stuff was expensive and took lots of their more indie-friendly choices off the table. maybe the ipo path they took made these things inevitable. anyways, their choices are behind them now. godot and elsewhere are where the parade will move on to

I still use Palm Desktop (c1996)

I remember getting a Lafayette 3-pickup electric guitar and building a Heathkit guitar amplifier. That thing had a dual-spring reverb too. I got a 4x12" speaker cabinet with Celstion speakers from the newspaper classifieds for $75. That thing was loud, and had a super high-frequency squeal when you turned it up. I think they just used a high-bandwidth amp design from their scopes rather than design a ground-up audio amp. But it taught me about oscillations, shocks from ungrounded chassis voltages, and electronics in general.

used their soaps for years. dilute it with water and use in foaming pump dispensers for hand soap - super economical. use it to wash dishes versus using name-brand detergents (soap is soap). love their camp at burningman. their heart's in the right place. what's not to like?

There's putting in tons of hours of effort to uncover an answer. There's knowing all the ways that didn't work before and why, and then knowing where to look for an answer. Certainly depends on the field, but choose which way you want to go.

Still waiting for the Octave equivalent for Matlab's Simulink. I'd drop Matlab for good if that appeared.

Ive is a great soldier, but Jobs knew which battles to fight. Apple has lost its way and doesn't know what directions to go in, where technology needs to move to serve its users. And Apple's huge money chest and insularity are of no help. They need an inspired product leader.

Consumer DNA sequencing to get personalized nutritional, exercise, pharmaceuticals, and medical preventative monitoring advice will become commonplace.

At the risk of offending some folks, let me offer some conclusions based on living near the Waymo facilities for 4+ years. Their autonomous cars are already driving better than about 30% of the licensed people on the road in my town.

Man, she sounds like she hates her life. That truly sucks. My advice is to get to Burning Man. She needs to see another way of defining value in herself and others.

Never a big believer in energy over ultrasound. Maybe for low amounts of power it could work. But so could power beamed over IR lasers into photovoltaic patches. And lasers would work better.

A great approach to find a good opportunity is to look at the failed business ideas of 10 years ago. The reasons they failed back then may not be valid today because of 10 years of tech progress.

--- putting the "dead" back into "deadlock"

Eye see what you're looking at, their vision has blurred, and putting on blinders or rose-colored glasses won't alter that view.

VR would be nice for shut-ins (infirm, imprisoned, remote, etc) to vector somewhere else.

Strip & Flip Bain loads their acquisitions up with debt to pay themselves off, and then runs for the hills. Like with Toys-R-Us now going bankrupt. Recall Mitt Romney was CEO of Bain. This is the GOP business modus operandi.

Creativity comes in various flavors

- exploiting the latest technical advances into something new. Favors recent academic grads ==> youth

- ideas that require lots of hours of work to create ==> youth with more energy and productive work hours

- connecting things from unrelated fields together to create something new and unexpected. Favors those with larger, broader experiences ==> age

Two aspects: performance and content. For performance I concur with the other folks advice here to practice a lot. For content I recommend reading Story - by Robert McKee. There's lots of knowledge on how to hold an audience's attention.

Depending on the industry, there is a tendency to hire founders of a certain age group. Certain industries like mfg and international trade favor older founders who have acquired knowledge and widespread contacts over decades. Other industries that need the latest college-produced science & tech favor the newest grads from 1st tier universities. It's all about risk reduction and outsized returns. Where energy and time count most, send in the youth. Where widespread personal networks and deep domain knowledge count most, send in the grey hairs.

I think IMAX achieved a counter-effect of people actually realizing that a VR headset would have a widescreen field of view larger than IMAX could ever have. It's only a matter of time until the big screen, highly immersive theater experience will not be seen as an IMAX.

Shameless self-promotion of a high-tech solar charger I've been working on for a year. Just went live today. It's got all the best ideas around solar gathered into a single box.

Wow, he's the real deal looking out for the entrepreneurs. Kinda reflects badly on the other sharks that they weren't agitating to end the Finnmax abusive equity grab too. I concur that a better class of startups can now show up, versus just desperate ones who would give away 5% of their company to extortionists.

It's like the Twitter version of Angellist. You can do text filtering on whatever keywords you are looking for. Unlike Angellist, you don't have to wade through lots of links and documents.