HN user

robmay

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CEO at Neurometric.ai and Managing Director at Halfcourt Capital

Former CEO/CoFounder Backupify., former CEO at Talla. Angel investor:100+ companies . A.I. newsletter at investinginai.substack.com

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www.gonzocapital.net 5d ago

GonzoCapital – The Inside VC Stories

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7pts1
neurometric.substack.com 1mo ago

Pros and Cons of the Harbor Framework

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3pts0
www.tokenminning.com 1mo ago

Tokenminning: Because Tokenmaxxing Is a Bad Idea

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4pts4
neurometric.substack.com 1mo ago

Lean Inference: Lean Manufacturing Principles Applied to AI

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5pts0
marketplace.neurometric.ai 2mo ago

A Marketplace of Fine Tuned SLMs for Agentic Tasks

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3pts1
neurometric.substack.com 2mo ago

HarborMaster: Run Harbor at Scale

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2pts0
neurometric.substack.com 3mo ago

HX Is the New UX: Designing for the Harness Experience

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1pts0
www.neurometric.ai 3mo ago

Yo-GPT: A Model That Can Say "Yo"

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3pts0
neurometric.substack.com 3mo ago

We Built 115 Free SLMs for Specific Agentic Tasks

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3pts0
marketplace.neurometric.ai 4mo ago

Show HN: Small Model Marketplace W 100M Tokens Free

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1pts0
investinginai.substack.com 4mo ago

Contrarian AI Investment Theses

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2pts1
neurometric.substack.com 4mo ago

The Research Behind Our Auto-SLM Generator

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1pts0
neurometric.substack.com 4mo ago

Show HN: Clawbake: Multi-User Instance Management for OpenClaw

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4pts0
neurometric.substack.com 5mo ago

Training Qwen 4B to Beat Large Models on Work Tasks

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16pts0
neurometric.substack.com 6mo ago

Research Papers on SLMs

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neurometric.substack.com 6mo ago

Research Papers Defining the SLM Revolution

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1pts0
neurometric.substack.com 8mo ago

Dynamically Choosing a TTC algorithm has huge performance implications

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1pts1
neurometric.substack.com 9mo ago

How Test Time Compute Algorithms Impact Different Models

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neurometric.substack.com 1y ago

What I Learned Reading Abstracts of 200 Test Time Compute Research Papers

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1pts1
github.com 1y ago

Illusion of Thinking Exploration Tool

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4pts1
graphlan.com 2y ago

Show HN: Graphlan-OpenAPI for Your Business Graph

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2pts1
www.msn.com 2y ago

Why Americans Stopped Hanging Out

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11pts1
gigamonkeys.com 3y ago

Impact of Early Tech Decisions on Twitter

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4pts0
www.theatlantic.com 5y ago

America First Became America Alone

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4pts0
coconutheadsets.com 5y ago

Read the Paper: Don't Be a Victim of Algorithms

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2pts0
coconutheadsets.com 5y ago

The Counterintuitive Effects of Cancel Culture

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5pts2
medium.com 6y ago

Protests, Walkouts, and Counterintuitive Effects

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1pts0
wch.io 6y ago

Licenses in a Subscription World

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32pts8
en.wikipedia.org 6y ago

Alief: A Mental State of Conflicting Habitual Belief

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1pts0
twitter.com 6y ago

Coronavirus lockdown may be over sooner than you think

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2pts0

My last company was a Saas company, and buyers wanted to discuss maintenance contracts like they would for packaged software. They dont matter for Saas. Buyers disnt always understand that and it took time to change their buying habits. It was goid in those days to challenge customers on that.

In parallel though, many entrepreneurs are staying on the sidelines because of fear of the regulatory bodies. I think the SEC should adopt something the like the proposed Arizona crypto laws.

Options vs. Cash 9 years ago

Isn't it amazing that every day, Apple offers new options, diluting everyone else who owns stock? Crazy anyone would work there, or want any Apple stock given that fact.

Most companies have a Right of First Refusal (ROFR) doc as part of the financing. If you can find someone in the secondary market to buy your shares, the company, if they want them, has to buy them at that price. Finding such a buyer is difficult but still possible. If it's a hot company, a lot of private wealth management groups are looking to package up stocks like this to their clients.

I run an AI company, and have a dozen or so AI angel investments, so I have a really interesting perspective on what is happening in the field. This newsletter is focused on AI and robotics from a perspective that is more lightweight tech, and more business focused. I focus on legal issues, strategy, business models, etc. Some of the newsletter commentary gets blogged at www.technicallysentient.com/blog if you want to check out some samples.

Makes you wonder if all that praise for design is really why Apple was successful, or if it was more because he pushed the limits of the law and was successful the way the old robber barons were, like a Rockefeller or Carnegie.

Backupify didn't take the post down for legal reasons. We took it down because I talked to the founder of World Backup Day and he explained it was all a misunderstanding.

As a tech company CEO who has to deal a lot with lawyers, I'm not surprised this happened. Most of us in tech view lawyers as a necessary evil to be used sparingly. Lawyers often view themselves as protectors of original ideas. They often don't understand the social structure in which most techies operate.

So, I'm sure as a 20 something college student who hasn't experienced this yet, you lean on authority. If you have a bad experience with the first World Backup Day and someone tells you lawyers can prevent that, then you go and find a lawyer. The right thing to do would have been to use the community to police it and point out the scammers, but it's hard to understand the dynamics of these interactions until you have been through them.

Let me just say that Backupify supports World Backup Day, and intends to be a sponsor sometime in the future. We are on good terms with the founder, and I think his attorney was just a bit overzealous with enforcement.

My expectation and understanding of the future is that World Backup Day will belong to the community, and anyone will be able to discuss it, but to be a formal sponsor and be listed on the WBD site will be a paid option. I think that sounds fine.

There is a great book called "Management by Baseball." The author of the book points out that baseball managers are typically former players, and they usually believe that the most important position on the team is whatever position they used to play. I doubt PMs regularly make more than engineers across all levels at all companies, but in general the outcry you are seeing about this isn't limited to engineers. In my experience, almost everybody at almost every company thinks the thing that they do is the most important.

I can tell you that I have worked in 4 major roles: - engineer - sales engineer - business development - CEO

In my experience, the pay is directly tied to the need of the position to manage uncertainty and ambiguity, and evaluate difficult risk/reward tradeoffs. As you move up the hierarchy, you do more of this.

Just to clarify the "don't read blogs" comment... what I meant was that tech blogs are disproportionately written by engineers. You don't see, for instance, many middle managers at Apple or Amazon blogging about their work. So if that's all you read, you have this skewed view of how a company should work based on what a bunch of young, small startup engineers tell you.

There is a disconnect between how the world works and how you think it works if you spend too much time reading these blogs, and that disconnect hurts you more than it helps you.

I will add that Backupify started in Louisville, KY, and we were funded by First Round while we were still there. We didn't have to move to raise money, but we couldn't find the tech/startup talent we needed. So we looked at NYC, Boston, and the Valley. I talked to lots of people who lived in each place and ultimately, as you would expect, everyone raved about whichever place it was that they lived. Ultimately, I chose Boston because MIT is the most innovative place in the world, and because it is a highly intellectual city and I have a lot of interests outside of just tech startups. I've been very very happy here, and think it's a great place to build a company.

And protecting startups. There are disclosure issues here that are much more risky for startups. For a publicly traded company to disclose a lot about its business is one thing... but such disclosures could kill a startup.