leashless

I knew him a little in his capacity as a mad Hindu cultist. He was mad, Hindu, and a cultist.

https://shivashakti.com is where you can find that aspect of his work.

https://www.westonboxes.com/ I recently discovered these. Lifechanging in two ways:

* you can put them on their ends and they don't fall over, which is ideal for storage on shelves

* translucent so you can see what's inside

Pull off the shelf, open up, rummage / sort / process (with extra space in the lid if needed) then pour everything back into the main storage from the lid and reshelve.

It's amazing how being able to shelve on their sides (rather than in a stack) changes things.

Absolutely! He’s a Star!

A person I know reasonably well is currently the Lord Mayor of London.

I suspect I could get him to do an AMA here if people would like to hear more about the City and its fascinating ways.

Seriously, we could actually do this!

They started with 8 mice.

This seems like an inbreeding problem not a utopia is hell problem.

Has anybody replicated with a more diverse mouse population?

The bleakest cyberpunk future event to date.

Oh I meant from the perspective of the one selling the insurance, not the person buying it.

In insurance you expect to come out ahead in the average case.

In gambling you expect to come out behind in the average case.

Therefore insurance is rational and gambling is irrational.

They look practically custom designed for this task.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

If America had the same covid death rate as Canada, nearly 700,000 less Americans would have died of covid.

Alarm by the Epidemic Intelligence Service officers is not "alarmism." It was an accurate forecast that the system was going to fail, which it did, then killing roughly 10 times as many Americans as the Vietnam War did.

How does a corrupt society become less corrupt?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200428230447/https://northatla...

I used to work on failed states for a living.

This is what I had to say. It absolutely applies to America today too.

If you really want to scare yourself, read this.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7748252/

We are out of the flight envelope for civilisation on a number of fronts right now.

well said.

"A few years ago there were memes about how the problem with zombie movies is that they never showed people running out to get zombified."

I laughed far too hard at this, in the context of the upcoming bird flu pandemic.

Campaign finance reform: Lessig's "Lesterland" springs to mind.

Eh. The problem pandemic-wise is the number of humans in slobbering distance of the animals: pets like cats are less of a problem (toxoplasmosis) because they're in less proximity with each-other. But all the unsanitary conditions add up to a gigantically increased chance of developing new pathogens when compared to most natural settings.

I'm too far away to know: based in London, mostly working in the legaltech domain, we're far far away from the SV cultural nexus (other than occasional trips to Burning Man for a refresher!)

I think there's a pretty good chance that as their original team is further and further from the operation that they're "reverting to the mean" but I have no evidence.

So... where's the magic pixie in this story? If VC is not a job -- and remember most of the junior people in funds, it's like their first job in finance -- then what is it?

I mean you've gotta define terms here...

Yes.

I learned this the hard way. I'm glad to see people _getting it_!

Good luck!

Agreed. VCs are companies, start ups are companies, they've got very similar dynamics.

There's no magic anywhere in here.

Check the bio.

Seven years in business. Number of staff varies with the environment but we've had as many as 40 on all hands, mostly part-timers with specialised skills.

It's not a very ordinary company. Too many lawyers.

Let me throw in one other tip for founders looking to get funded: do not ignore regional VCs.

Most of the stories about "how VC works" are 10, 15 years out of date. The cultural "sense of things" lags behind the reality. We found this out the hard way.

In fact, contrary to all expectations and myths, VCs (outside perhaps of the top 50 or 100 firms?) read their emails and take cold meetings.

They have to.

Every region in the world has some clone of Silicon Valley - technical universities and accelerators and incubators and funds - and most of them have very little deal flow or exposure to outside opportunities and ideas. The guy from a second tier French city part-funded by an Economic Development Agency has as much luck getting into a deal with Union Square as you do. But he still has money to invest.

So most of the VCs outside of a small, narrow set do answer emails, are glad to be approached, and are basically glad to see you if you've got anything at all which is interesting to say. It doesn't cost much to try, either. It's the price of an email.

Yes, warm intros to top tier VCs are really handy.

But that's also why the top tier VCs are so massively subject to group think and wind up collectively dropping five billion dollars on electric scooters and stuff like that.

Everybody is human.

Everybody is here to do the deal.

At the top of the chrome towers are men and women in shoes and socks trying to look good to their management. Nothing behind the curtain, no wizard of oz. Do what you can. Don't break yourself for the myths. Do intelligently bet the odds!

Tech is going to be the dominant story in human history for the rest of our lives in almost all scenarios. It's not a bad industry to be in. It's just the financial side of that industry is really heavy on the mythology and maybe that's holding us back now.

Hardly, I'm a CEO.

I don't understand what you are saying or asking. We can only measure against real world data.

Paul Graham, Black Swan Farming: https://paulgraham.com/swan.html

"The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas."

_initially look like bad ideas_ meaning "we can't pick them out of the crowd of other bad ideas"

"there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business"

"For that reason one of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it."

"We'll probably never be able to bring ourselves to take risks proportionate to the returns in this business."

So it's not like this model is alien to Our Kind Hosts at YC. They understand that this is a crap shoot with a slightly tilted table, but they're optimising for staying out of the zones where everybody else is betting and not that much more.

To be remembered: if you're having a hard time getting funded, the VCs are also having a hard time funding you, because the huge returns go to things that look odd, lame, and weird.

For the most part.

Nobody said work for free.

Raise money for the fund's operations with a separate investment product, and take no 2% management fee. Instead take 40% of the upside: this is _efficient_ if you think the upside will be huge.

In fact if you were certain of the huge upside, people would borrow the operating costs for the VC rather than selling equity in the fund. Most VCs in practice live off the 2% quite nicely, and pray for a big hit, but _the big hit is a bonus not the point of the fund_

The point of the fund is the 2%. The once-in-a-blue moon hit is just that.

And let me point out. The YC "big hit rate" is about 1 per 200 investments. Ballpark; you'd need to ask them the current stat.

So a fund that makes 100 investments, on those numbers, has a 50/50 chance of a big hit. 50 investments, a 25% chance.

To reliably get a big hit you either need to massively alter the odds of success for your portfolio companies, or kiss an awful lot of frogs hoping to hit the occasional prince.

VC is _extremely hard_ because it bakes in tech risk and projections about future society into a financial product called startup equity. The big hits are staggering - the best investments ever made by human beings at any point in history I would guess - but reliable prediction of those big hits is impossible.

Nearly every unicorn has a stack of 70 rejection emails. The special factor is intangible and invisible.

If it even exists.

I think Paul Graham explained all of this quite clearly in Black Swan Farming. It's slightly "between the lines" but he knows exactly what business he is in: spread betting and tipping the table as far as possible in his favour!

A good VC approach.

I think the answer is marginal utility of money. If I have $20 million, and I take $1m to the casino and bet it all on Red 21, maybe I come back with another $20m after taxes. Or I lose $1m then and there.

But in the process there's no control and no sense of skill or judgement or expertise. I'm just a gambler.

If on-the-other-hand I gave that money to a GP in a fund to invest on my behalf, they could come back with a game-changing amount of money in some circumstances, and there's a plausible claim of skill and expertise in my selection of the GP, and the GP's selection of investments.

Same potential for asymmetric returns as gambling, but in a format that reinforces the illusions of skill and control and just maybe really is a question of skill at some level.

I want to say that losing money by being bad at things is always possible, but making money by being good at things is far more a matter of intangibles than anybody want to admit, and proving that any success was deterministic rather than little turtles racing down the beach to the sea and on-average half make it is nearly impossible.

We all love the illusion of control. But the statistics just don't bear it out as a fact in business.

VC as an asset class loses money.

Within that loss, some companies do better than others.

Whether that is skill, luck or finding some way to tilt the board in your favour (political influence for example) depends on who you ask.

I have read that the statistics the distribution of success in the VC field was compatible with a random distribution with a very small skill bias.

I do not know if that analysis was accurate and it will be 10 years out of date now.

But that there are winners and losers does not mean that it is not a game of chance.

They would take equity in the fund, of course.

"If the business model wasn't working it would have failed and the VC firm would have closed a long time ago."

Tons of VCs do fail.

As noted, the VC would raise capital like any other business to cover its operating costs.

Think about why they don’t do that.