#3 is insane, if for no other reason than the VC is signaling that he’s likely going to try and do the same thing to you some day… even if you were totally willing to screw over your team, why would you ever get involved with that VC given you’ll then have to watch your back until the end of time?
I think a lot of people fail to recognize that they're the next target, or convince themselves they're special in some way that makes them immune. It's like when someone knowingly participates in an affair and tells themselves "Sure, they're cheating on their current partner to be with me, but after they break things off I know we'll be together forever!"
Some people really do thrive on this shit though. They know the rules of the game and want to play it. What they’re really thinking is they’ll be better at the game than their opponents.
I mean can you actually imagine the internal monologue of a guy like Sam Altman?
Because if you get involved with most VCs, you will then have to watch your back until the end of time.
None of those "worst experiences" seem all that unusual to me (though nobody will say #1 out loud anymore until after they've invested), and #3 is completely in character for Vinod.
If one partner is the core of the company, and the others the VC thinks are useless ( I am not saying in this case they were...just that the VC might have that perception) what should the VC do?
After all its just business decisions like Cloudflare recent layoffs no?
If they truly are useless that's one thing, but the ability to "impress" some asshole in a 30 minute pitch has little to do with running a successful tech company.
With what authority are VCs claiming to be capable of being an accurate judge of talent or character in less than an hour?
Sounds like said VC in your example is doing insufficient due diligence and just investing based on vibes.
Yeah, this is par for the course with VC. You should never believe your VC (even post funding) is your friend. They can be a great business partner and resource but they're never your friend under that dynamic
Because rich and powerful people also have massive egos to go with their power and money. Some of them will find your rejection a personal attack and try to actively sabotage you. Not all VCs are like that, but there are enough of them that you need to be careful about how you handle the situation.
Sadly, I've experienced this myself, and I'm aware of other people who were cut off from opportunities in similar ways. I applaud the tweet because this is important to say out loud: we are often not living in the world we think we are observing. Many people know this, but few talk about it. It's an open secret.
My pet theory is that it is more nurture than nature. These (VC) veterans have seen thousands of startups come and go, and become so desensitized to the ruthlessness.
Of course to people like the author, it seems borderline sociopathic to casually suggest such levels of betrayal. It is like trying to get into the most exclusive nightclubs, and when you're finally in the front, the bouncer will look at the group and say "You can get in, but not those two". It sucks, but to the bouncer it is just business as usual, and you're just another face.
Nah, he was talking about taking their stock. That’s morally theft even if by some convoluted reason it’s not legally theft.
I get the business as usual analogy but the specifics of the interaction are different. You just showing up to your club with your friends is different than having equity in a company you cofounded.
That actually doesn’t seem that toxic. Doesn’t seem like a carcinogen either. Obviously still bad, but at least we’re not talking about something on the tier of phenol or benzene here!
Amazing how we are ok with it being in petrol, getting exposed every day, literally blowing exhaust in kids faces, yet someone found a trace of it in name-brand sunscreen and everyone lost their minds.
While benzene vapors are bad, we probably shouldn't tolerate very much benzene being in things that are rubbed onto the skin intentionally. Trace amounts as you say might not really matter though.
Unfortunately I suspect this idea is somewhat dead-on-arrival… anti-renewable people will fight it for obvious reasons, while environmentalists will fight it due to concerns over shading the waterways.
What's the fallacy called where you oppose something based on the fact that it has impact on something, not realising that the alternative is is even worse?
I see people talk about how ugly solar panels make mountainsides, but when I ask "would you prefer a coal factory there instead?" nobody would.
> Very few mere mortals could run that fast for even 100m.
That works out to roughly a 16.7-second 100m. While certainly not crawling, that would be a fairly average pace for a fairly fit middle- to early-high-schooler with a bit of practice.
Yes that’s insane to maintain for a marathon, but it’s not even remotely out of reach for 100m for most relatively-fit people at some point in their lives.
I think it's even slow for high schoolers. I didn't practice that much and ran 100m in 12.5s from rest at my peak. 4s slower is snail pace. I think most in my class could run that fast (or slow).
I agree. I ran mid 16s in 8th grade, and was in the 14s in high school, with the only training being whatever we did in gym class. But I do also look at the sheer number of overweight kids these days and figured, well maybe mid-16s is actually a reasonable average point.
Here's a random high school in Northern California. Everyone on the team is beating 16.7 seconds in the 100m. For the 1600m there are six kids with times under 4m30s and another seven with times under 4m40s, all in the last month.
Not sure that disproves the point :) Most people have never been anywhere close to competing with the top 6 athletes at a high school with ~2k students.
OK, so let's do the math. There's about 25k high schools in the USA. Let's suppose they all have a track team, and let's assume that they all have 5 team members who can break 04:30 for 1600m. Sure, at some schools that's too few, but at others it is too many.
That gives us 125k high schoolers in the USA who can break 04:30 for 1600m. There are about 18M high school students. So of just the high school population alone, about 0.7% of them can do this.
Assuming there are the 4x as many adults that can do this as there are high school students, that gives us slightly less than 0.2% of the total US population capable of this.
We just have different ideas of what constitutes "mere mortals." 1 in 150 high school students or even 1 in 500 from the general population doesn't sound super human to me at all. Talented, yes but not god like.
The fastest 1km I ever ran was around 3m20s, I felt like I was sprinting, and was fully cooked at the finish line.
Afterwards I did some quick numbers and realised the average marathon runner was not only going a lot quicker than I was, but they were doing it for a further 41km
Sometimes they have big running machines with a crash mat around them running at 2h marathon pace at running shows. I’ve o ly seen them on video - no one can keep up with it for more than 30 odd seconds. It’s INSANE they are running this fast.
Also bear in mind running a single mile under 4 mins was considered impossible for a long time.
We used to be amazed when I ran cross country in high school that these pro marathoners would best all of us in our approx 5K(3ish mile) races and then go on to repeat that distance multiple times.
I quite liked this article.
That said, I think it misses the two big advantages of denormalized (one big table) data -
It’s much easier for people to use, especially non-technical stakeholders who tend to just not understand joins.
It doesn’t require anything from the query optimizer… until you’ve had a complex query randomly go from “runs instantly” to “spins for hours” overnight, you can’t appreciate the value of a simple execution plan.
A bonus benefit is that it scares off the architecture astronauts!
The author really lucked out that the government employee was not actually malicious. I can think of a good few ways she could have made life much more difficult for the author, even if he was likely to ultimately succeed.
Was thinking this too. She could have blocked that number on the (valid) basis that it was intentionally spamming them, and then stopped their benefits.
Lumen, Nanite, Substrate, Metahumans, and Chaos Physics all come to mind as major innovations driven by Epic. Nanite specifically has pretty much no alternatives. Additionally, the developer UX on UE5 gets better from release to release - for instance, being able to recompile your logic or animations while actively running the game is pretty insane.
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