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ericand

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VC investing in infrastructure companies. Former Google and AWS product manager.

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Sounds like it is mostly business operations and organizational planning concerns. From the solutions page...

Here are a few problems the community is working on:

Cloud infrastructure orchestration

Sales team remuneration

Mergers and acquisitions

Price sensitivity and revenue

Warehouse operations

Fleet efficiency

Supply chain risk

Macroeconomic policy

Call center operations

Store design/layout

Critical national infrastructure

Evacuation planning

Political risk

Marketing campaign efficiency

Public health

Summarized well by these lines:

Back in the day, front end, back end, operations, and DBAs separated because they needed different skills. Now we accept that a software team needs all the skills. We group by responsibility instead — responsibility for business value, not for activities

We once layered by serving data to software. Now we layer by serving value to people.

This is a nice narrative for the rise of developer products, where there used to not be a market.

Getting a way out by selling your RIs was important due to there inflexibility. I think those who feel they may want that could opt for the compute plan which is useful as long as you use EC2 in any form.

The compute plan is a big deal (meaning important not cost break although that too). The inflexibility of RIs really hurts and makes it hard to actually benefit from the savings. This doesn't quite match Google's approach but it is much simpler to understand.

I've been researching these recently. Some things I've found: - Macrometa is a new startup and stateful edge (distributed database) service. I just tried them this morning. User experience is very raw but it works great. You can shim it in front of existing DBs (Dynamo, Firebase, etc) for better performance. - Gun: where macrometa runs on edge servers, Gun runs on the client. Mark is a fantastic community and they are doing interesting things. I had trouble implementing it but that's because I'm lousy at javascript. - Redis uses CRDTs or something similar: https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise/technology/active-act... - This presentation is fantastic: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/crdt-distributed-consist...

They are buying control, no? Neumann sold economic interest (non voting equity) to Soft Bank earlier. Now they want the voting power and they are offering him 200M for it. It has to be worth something. It sounds like it is unclear if that is enough (although if they are reporting it I assume it is) for him to agree.

the importance of the batch itself

This may be the most profound statement about YC relative to the rest of VC. YC provides founders with a founder community, which is very valuable and fairly inexpensive to offer. Traditional VC resources are variable in quality based on often based on expensive experts.

In the last year, YC companies raised over $945mm across 95 Series As. That’s an increase of 50% over the prior year in terms of rounds done, and 71% in dollars raised

Anyone know if the batches were of similar size in terms of the number of companies? It would be nice to have relative statistics (YC companies are on average raising As more often and at higher amounts) than absolute ones which could be just due to batch size.

Feature engineering is a mechanism of creating new levels of abstraction in knowledge representation because each (non-trivial) feature extract and makes explicit some piece of knowledge hidden in the data. It is almost precisely what deep learning is intended for. In this sense, feature engineering does what hidden layers of a neural network do or what the convolutional layer of a neural network does

Very intriguing and thoughtful statement. I hadn't ever thought of it that way.

I've been using Chromebooks more and more where upgrades are almost transparent. When I go back to my macbook (haven't been on windows for a while), I'm surprised how disruptive upgrades are. I'll trade far fewer OS features for a seamless upgrade experience any day. I wonder if these OS developers realize the UX implications.