HN user

mbesto

16,045 karma

M&A advisor to tech investors. Mainly providing tech due diligence and transaction integration advisory to PE/VC clients and their portfolio companies.

my user name AT google's mail service

I generally don't much effort into my grammar when commenting on HN, so I apologize in advance.

Posts132
Comments5,003
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old.reddit.com 9mo ago

I was once an AI true believer

mbesto
11pts0
www.theregister.com 9mo ago

AI Prompt injection – trick Salesforce Agentforce into leaking sales

mbesto
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www.profgalloway.com 4y ago

Tell Me a Story

mbesto
3pts0
www.nngroup.com 7y ago

The Vortex: Why Users Feel Trapped in Their Devices

mbesto
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medium.com 8y ago

How to search for Open Amazon s3 Buckets and their contents

mbesto
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www.cnbc.com 8y ago

Shopify shares dive after short seller's negative report

mbesto
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www.directdefense.com 8y ago

Harvesting Cb Response Data Leaks

mbesto
8pts1
www.nngroup.com 9y ago

Most hated advertising techniques

mbesto
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www.youtube.com 10y ago

Blizzard's Overwatch Netcode Analysis [video]

mbesto
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zurb.com 10y ago

Foundation for Emails 2 is Here

mbesto
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techcrunch.com 10y ago

Was Black Friday a DiSaaSter or Simply Reversion to the Mean?

mbesto
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techcrunch.com 10y ago

12 Veteran-Founded Startups

mbesto
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www.versame.com 10y ago

Show HN: Starling – Wearable to measure number of words spoken to your child

mbesto
16pts11
www.latimes.com 10y ago

ESPN to lay off nearly 4% of workforce amid changing pay-TV landscape

mbesto
30pts56
www.extremetech.com 10y ago

MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons

mbesto
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www.latimes.com 10y ago

ESPN to lay off nearly 4% of workforce amid changing pay-TV landscape

mbesto
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signalvnoise.com 11y ago

Empty stomach, poor decisions

mbesto
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www.youtube.com 11y ago

The Void – Virtual worlds built over physical environments

mbesto
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letpjstay.com 11y ago

Let PJ Stay

mbesto
27pts7
icon-a-day.com 11y ago

Icon a day

mbesto
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www.wsj.com 11y ago

WeWork: Now a $5B Co-Working Startup

mbesto
50pts31
chrome.google.com 11y ago

Show HN: Share your YC application pre-submission

mbesto
38pts8
www.bloomberg.com 11y ago

Twitter Raises $1.8B After Boosting Debt Offering

mbesto
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www.techdisruptive.com 12y ago

Seeking Rejection Immunity

mbesto
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www.competehub.com 12y ago

Show HN: Compete Hub – discover, share and manage your triathlon race schedule

mbesto
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www.techdisruptive.com 12y ago

Vanity Sells

mbesto
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blog.bufferapp.com 12y ago

How to Write The Perfect Headline: The Top Words Used in Viral Headlines

mbesto
1pts1
www.wearable-technologies.com 12y ago

Hearables – the new Wearables

mbesto
2pts0
armen.tv 12y ago

Want to see my royalty statement showing payments from Pandora, Spotify, etc?

mbesto
12pts9
www.macrumors.com 12y ago

Apple's Healthbook App for iOS Shown in Renderings

mbesto
1pts0

You can't unilaterally say all AI blogs are low quality. That's bullshit.

would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading

To your point however, the reason people don't like AI generated blogs is because there is a explicit recognition that the author of the blog lacked effort. There is a visceral response for the reader about the social contract "if you didn't spend as much time as I did why should I care about what's written here", it's however NOT that the quality is inherently poor (but perhaps one my insinuate that notion).

The first link is the FTC punishing Pornhub for something they did wrong. That is the parent commentator's main point (e.g. it can be regulated), which you keep ignoring.

You wouldn't say we should stop age verifying people for online gambling just because there are "dark web" gambling websites.

False equivalencies. Gambling and porn have VERY different dynamics to them.

trip also knows where I live and vice versa.

Do those people also have access to your travel schedule? Mine don't.

Maybe you're just not as globally social as me? I've lived in 5 different countries and have friends all over the world and in probably 20 different US states that I can name off the top of my head.

Do I have close friends that I regularly contact? Do I send them a message when I'm in town to see if they are there? Absolutely. But it's not mutually exclusive with a cohort of people I will link up with when I'm traveling.

well enough to link up

It seems bizarre to me that you only limit yourself to these people. I regularly try to meet up with people I don't know super well but want to get them or their city better. Social media has absolutely helped facilitate this.

Travis Kalanick had zero taxi experience and Brian Chesky had zero hospitality experience.

Now they created new models to existing paradigms, because I do tend to agree that founders that have verticalized experience tend to be far more successful (but perhaps arguably less 'disruptive')

I’ve had sales people tell me to my face that they are the most important part of the business and the actual product or services is not that important.

Same here. This happened when I was 22 years old I didn't want to believe it.

BUT, I've seen far more shitty codebases win marketplaces with strong sales & marketing, than I've seen stellar codebases with shitty sales & marketplaces win marketplaces.

It's unfortunately really that simple.

but it took me 18 years to grow the user base , figure out entreprise sales strategy and exit.

The audience here has never wanted to admit that the codebase doesn't really matter. Now that codebases can be created in a weekend, people are opening their eyes to this sentiment - the hard part is the sales, the code is easy.

would people stop doing PE even though it's profitable?

No but there would be a lot less PE dry powder available. To the parent's point - there is currently a trillion dollars in dry powder that is allocated to acquiring businesses. If that trillion dollars drys up then less businesses get acquired - it's that simple.

As long as customers choose services based on quality.

If the market doesn't reward this then maybe quality isn't important to the customer. Could be price, location, availability, etc. - PE can absolutely create that value even when they roll up 70% of your local HVAC market.

My core point is more that April 2026 was the point when Anthropic and OpenAI finally appeared to have figured out a credible business model.

How so? What's specifically changed? We still don't know what their unit economics are and everything you've documented is basically speculation at this point.

but I suspect there’s a more important factor here: I think they’ve finally found product-market fit

Ahhh the classic startup term that's definition is nebulous. But also, since when does any definition of product/market fit mean a product is profitable? And profitable in what sense? Unit economics? Overall company?

Hi - homeowner here who is NOT in an fixer-upper. "every single weekend" is clearly hyperbole however here is regular maintenance for me:

- once a quarter clean the pollen off the A/Cs

- once a week clean the pool (okay I pay someone but still its part of maintenance)

- inevitably something on the pool goes wrong

- once a week clean my grill

- Blow leaves (seasonal) off porch

- pull weeds

- power wash the deck

And then most homeowners, no matter how new your house is, inevitably find an endless amount of "projects" to improve their home experience. Wife wants a table for the grill made, I add automated sprinklers, we put new planters for a garden in our backyard...the list goes on..

is because the author claims Japan's success in precision parts is driven by 'horizontal' and 'collaborative' practices. That just isn't true.

In reality, this system is largely sustained by the ruthless squeezing of subcontractors (for the record, I am Korean, but I actually like Japan), which is a massive social issue there.

Well that's just like your opinion...man. I think you're both singularly wrong. Trying to attribute a single factor to a highly complex system is a fool's errand.

If your conclusion is correct "ruthless squeezing of subcontractors" are there other cultures whether there is true and the country has been successful in precision parts? Otherwise, it's pretty impossible to conclude the causality.

I could easily say that everyone who says its profitible is msking unsubstantiated claims lol.

And people who don't understand the difference between capex and opex are making uneducated claims. It's not basic math.

Running an inference data center is a mix of variable and fixed costs. The fixed costs are currently in the billions of billions of dollars for pretty much any investment in this space. Many of those fixed costs have (currently) unknown refresh cycles. So, unless you have access to the financial books of these companies it's currently just speculation whether inference is profitable.

Did the PR achieve it's stated goal or not? Thats what we should be focusing on.

because one of the main issues with AI content is the ability to generate an overwhelming amount of it.

So then let's focus on that, and not whether it's generated by AI. Yeesh you people are hard to please.

I know, but if Google was replacing their search with AI today doesn't that mean this should already be happening? otherwise is google going to make zero revenue starting today?

I think what he said is deplorable (hence "yes and no"). However I'm speaking specifically to the premise of what the parent said around "it destroys team morale". What I'm saying is that your team's morale may not necessarily be hurt if you are a team member at a bank full of investment bankers, capital financiers, etc. if the promise to them is that many of them can make more money with AI.