inthewoods

I dunno - I heard about tariffs in every single Harris speech. I don't get ads because of my location, but they were clearly saying it.

Many corporations pay so low that people have to be on assistance even though they are gainfully employed. Thus, corporations off-load their costs onto the American taxpayer. This is also true for some people in the US military.

Yes agreed - the internationalization of the college application process has changed everything. The other factor is that when you have such competitiveness, you start seeing a professionalization of the process - so admissions consultants, high-end tutoring.

Simple: he's crushed because he had a dream of going there - he wasn't framing it as "I'm better than everyone else." As I mentioned, it is his dream running into reality. So saying "not being in the 0.1% as a teenager is tacky" is not the right framing because he wasn't thinking about it that way - he just had a dream and now realizes how difficult (and unlikely) it is.

What I'm really curious about is how he got into Stanford, a school that famously no one gets into, given what we know about him. Not to say he's not smart or interesting - he's clearly a good writer - but I don't see what made him stand out to get into that school. I'd be interested to understand that.

I've got a freshman in high school - and he's very bright - doing AP Calc now. But he already feels like it's impossible to get into these schools so why bother. He started the conversation tonight with "I don't think I want to go to MIT anymore." Which broke my heart a little bit - not because I care whether he goes to MIT - but because it you could see his expectations being crushed by reality.

This is the system that we have built for higher education in the United States, and it's incredibly f*cked up.

Oh where there's a will (and a profit) there's a way. See this story about bags of nickels stored turned out to be filled with rocks.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgans-nickel-bags-turned...

If you're concerned about those things, then I get it. I'm not - I've never had an issue.

"Second, I also don't get how people trust strangers with intimate details of their thought life."

Pretty simple: legal barriers to revealing that information creates an open space for discussing those thoughts that you don't feel comfortable revealing to friends or family.

Binance, Coinbase, et al: "We'd like new rules from the SEC/CFTC to let us crime."

SEC: "No."

Binance et al: "You're stopping innovation!"

SEC: "You're going to jail."

He got the payout of $480m as a settlement for stepping down. But he also got a $1b when Softbank bought out shareholders:

"Neumann led WeWork to a failed attempt at an initial public offering in 2019 and was ousted shortly afterward. As part of the original bailout effort, SoftBank had agreed to buy $3 billion in stock from WeWork investors, including close to $1 billion from Neumann."

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-02-26/softbank-s...

VCs talk a game about being ethical, but let's be real - if it works they probably don't care. Uber is a great example of this - the rules can be bent to serve the purpose.

I think that if you have free/easy money, with low risk of a meaningful downside (e.g. going to jail), and there is increasing competition from other VCs with access to the same money, then you greatly increase the risks you're willing to take. It's a game of homeruns, not singles.

So to answer your question, I think this is way they think: "If this goes wrong, I don't have any real personal skin in the game, and there are a bunch of smart people at other firms that are putting their money in. I better be in because if I don't allocate this capital it goes away. And if I miss a big one, that's worse than losing."

I like the idea of there being some requirement on student spending for these educational institutions to maintain their tax-free status. Not dissimilar from requiring insurance plans to spend a set percentage (say 85%) on healthcare vs. administration. Having said that, I'd want to game it out to see how the institutions would react and what it would do to prices.

The other idea I like is that once an educational endowment reaches a certain size, all students should go for free (or it could be on a scale relative to endowment size) in order for the institution to maintain their tax-free status.

As someone who was involved in the creation of Infini-D back in the day, I can only say that this brought a smile to my face and that I've shared it with the whole original team. Thank you! Thank you!

Many of the large companies will say "we have a complex sales cycle" (and they often do) and leverage multi-touch attribution models which removes the direct ROI calculation.

It wasn't the pricing model - when I went to the website originally all the pricing levels were the same - it looked like a template that hadn't been updated. I have no issue with charging for value.

Performance marketing is essentially the only way most startup marketers can go. The reason is that they generally have 6 to 12 months to prove themselves as performance marketers. Generally the CEO has sold some insane growth model to the VCs. As a marketer, you do the math: $ growth required/ASP = number of deals. You get to your lead targets by reversing the funnel (Closed Won -> Opportunity -> Lead). And you see you need a sh*t-ton of leads to ever get close to hitting that number. And you need them quick because the number just bigger every quarter. So you can't even think about long-term approaches - you have to grab at tactics that you know can maybe generate the number of leads - even if you know in your heart-of-hearts that they won't generate anywhere near the number of opportunities.

This is all just my opinion and I'm sure there are better marketers than me that make this work, but this is what I've seen happen in too many VC-funded/backed companies. And it gets even harder when we're at the super levels of funding that we're now seeing. So if I'm a relatively small company (funded to $50m) that is spending $5m a year on marketing, and I'm competing against a company with $500m in funding and, say $100m on marketing, then it's even worse.

"Also, as another member pointed out, Airbnb's performance marketing budget is still well over $200M/year, which no responsible/public company would spend if it wasn't returning a great ROAS. Finally, Airbnb is known for all sorts of marketing shenanigans in their early days, and they certainly can't take the credit for a pure brand play."

My experience is exactly the opposite. The larger the budget, the less real hard analysis is done. This is especially true with the rise of attribution modeling which allows marketers to essentially motion blur the data.

Natural outcome of all internet advertising based models imho.

This is the fundamental issue with all advertising-based models. Eventually, they all run into the problem of having to continue to grow. The only way to continue to grow is to display more ads, thus compromising the user experience, which starts the downfall. AOL was a great example of this. Google seems to be heading this way.

Google's original values were the ability to provide better search (common answer) and be fast (less common answer) - both of which were a complete contrast to the Alta Vista and other search engines. I could easily see Google facing disruption from a new player - but I don't think it will be another search engine. Probably a paradigm/systemic shift.

Usegravity looks interesting - but the pricing page really made me stop taking it seriously.

One interesting theory I've heard on this is that, given there are about 6400 accounts with 1000+ ETH, that these folks essentially don't recognize the amount of money they're using to buy this stuff. In other words, it's like casino chips and that may be altering the way they view the purchases.

Obviously no way to really know, but I do find it amazing (and very suspect) that Openseas went from $8m a month to $2.3b a month - that's a pretty heady number. It does make me suspect either wash trading or other activities going on.

Some compelling reasons - I think most of them can be addressed in Excel, but the reality is most people don't know how Excel really works or how to do anything complex in it. Having said that, as your need to batch process numbers goes up, R and other solutions have more value in my opinion.

I'm particularly interested in "half-way" solutions - something between R and Excel. I've been looking at https://www.causal.app/ - no affiliation but I find their approach similar to a Mac app I like called Numi.

I don't have this experience at all - first, I have slide decks that have 100s of slides and it works fine. I have no issue finding documents either - however I do struggle with the invites to documents inside of Gmail.

on24 is perhaps one of the worst events platforms I've every experienced or worked with. They seem to have changed little about their platform in a long time. More comparable would be gotowebinar or webinarninja.

Morningstar and S&P are not academic institutions. If you have data to refute what they're saying, I'd welcome it.

That's great but you didn't answer one question I asked - mutual funds or hedge funds? AUM or performance?

Most active manager performance is mean reverting. They have a good year, and then there is little evidence of persistence in their future returns. Here's a larger study from S&P:

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/research/researc...

"We observe little to no evidence of performance persistence among active managers, except in the large-cap value and real estate categories. For example, out of 1,034 large-cap funds that existed in the universe as of Sept. 30, 2013, only 19.73%, or 204 funds, outperformed the S&P 500. In the following year, 15.69% of those 204 funds outperformed the benchmark. By the end of the third year, none of those original 204 funds were able to outperform the S&P 500 on a consecutive basis."

What is implied from this data is that if a manager has a good year, they are unlikely to match it going forward. So only 20% beat an index, and then only 16% of those that did beat it the next year.

So you're saying the same funds always have the top performance? Or have the top AUM? And are you talking about hedge funds or mutual funds?

No I didn't - it's easy to research. See the articles I reference above.