It is desire for yield. If you take the risk-less rate down from ~4% to 0%, then you can shift the rates for higher risk asset classes down similarly. If VC is historically a 12% return asset class (properly risked), LPs will demand the asset more, driving up supply and down the return until it is in-line with the risk profile (perhaps 8%?).
The physical holding of a stock certificate is a dangerous thing. If you are an investor in a company that gets sold or goes public (and you have to surrender your shares) and misplace them, it is an expensive mess, even in Delaware.
I played this game. It wasn't expensive, but it sure was annoying sending affidavits back and forth to be signed and countersigned and so forth. For bonus hilarity, we got to do it several times because the number of shares was wrong, then the date the stock was lost was wrong, then the date of the affidavit was wrong.
In my case, I think everybody was at least motivated in the same direction. But if they had decided to put up a fight? Good heavens.
Thus the existence of companies like eShares that do away with this very problem for privately-held companies by issuing stock electronically and providing transparency (audit trails) to stockholders that paper certificates suck at.
eShares is an interesting solution but with so many parties involved (company, lawyers, several investor groups) how do you get one person to drive the solution? My experience is that something like that may be rocking the boat a little bit too hard.
Apologies for the late reply. Most of the time, the company is the driver, since they are the ones with the highest motivation to actually get a clean cap table. Law firms also drive – smart lawyers and paralegals will recognize they can use something like eShares to cut down on work and free up time for more valuable work.
Sure, there are a few companies that it takes a while for everyone to agree on the facts (example: prior CEO raised a bunch of angel capital on bridge notes, but some notes are missing, incomplete, or not executed...) but we have a lot more companies with near 100% acceptance rate of their outstanding cap.
Brokers used to keep physical certificates in their own vaults. I had physical stock certificates in the vaults of a broker than went out of business. It took a few weeks and a lot of phone calls and legal threats to get them back. But they did come back.
The bigger problem than the corrosion is the inability to inspect the system in an efficient way. In a regulated nuclear industry, not knowing the status of the system means it will not be allowed.
Given that the system has intrinsic safety built in, I'm not sure why regular inspection would be required.
Perhaps the NRC does require regular inspections for existing plants, but none of those existing plants are failsafe are they? If something starts to go wrong, it can snowball very quickly into a much worse situation.
With a MSR the worst-case scenario (short of terrorism) is that you empty into the dump tank until you sort the problem out and restart. If you make the entire facility's floor the dump tank then inspections are going to be rather redundant. Except perhaps to ensure that the dump tank is intact. But that can be made fairly easy I think.
I think there is a tendency to think of fuel rods as a problem rather than the solution to a problem, which is raw spent fuel is nasty. The cheapest and easiest way to deal with spent fuel is to store it for decades while the worst of the radio-isotopes decay. Fuel rod technology allows you to do that, a molten salt design doesn't. I'm okay with this argument but is seems to bother people that you can't recover spent fuel now rather than waiting 25 years so they cast about for solutions to what is really a psychological annoyance.
See the quest for reusable launch systems like the space shuttle.
The funny thing about nuclear waste is that it's not the "hottest stuff" you have to worry about. The hottest stuff has a very short half life and disappears relatively quickly. On the other side things like Carbon 14 that have a multiple millennium half life are not radioactive enough to cause much of a problem. It's the stuff that has a half life of about 10 to 1000 years that you have to worry about.
As an active investor in the energy space, I would love to hear how Sam/YC see their model working here. The MVP and concept of early sales is something that is very difficult in this and many of the other markets they mentioned. We try with all of our companies to partner with larger organizations and generate early, profitable revenue. But it is difficult in many industries and there is still a large capital need.
That being said, would love to attend a YC non-software demo day.
8 kJ out from 1.7 MJ (1700 kJ) in. At the end of the month they were able to get 14 kJ. I believe they are referring to the energy released within the hohlraum.
Also, if you are interested there are privately funded companies doing this, General Fusion (http://www.generalfusion.com/) and TriAlpha Energy (secretive and funded by the Russian govt., but in California). The VC fund I work for has invested in GF and obviously we think there is promise :)
"And modern supply chains were built around that very premise – that hands were needed"
That is quite far from the truth. Having been in many plants, automation is almost everywhere. The pay-back period on automation (Variable Speed Drives, for example) is under a year.
If you watch an updated version of the crayon process (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl1v1m_you-ve-got-crayola-c...), you see how many of those people have been replaced by robots. A fully burdened worker salary (~$70k) can buy you a good deal of robots.
Ok, so I watched them both, and clearly some of the same machines are still there, it looks like the only guy who lost his job to automation was the guy who took the molded crayons and put them into the labeler. All the other steps were pretty much identical.
Now personally I love manufacturing porn, I don't know why but I can watch an hour or two of 'How its Made' and just spin all these ideas about in my head. And what you see when you watch more than a bit of that show is that there are things that are designed to be built by automation, and things that aren't.
So on the one hand you look at things that aren't made to be automated and you think "Hmm, can I disrupt that market by designing an automated way to build that widget?" or as the OP wrote you might think "Hmm what pieces need to be assembled to make an arbitrary widget?"
One of the things that came up in an earlier thread was that you could go across the street in Shenzen(sp?) and have an arbitrary fastener made. Things take lots of fasteners, and they are essential to manufacturing, but making them requires specific tooling for each kind. Can that be automated? Can I make a factory that will make an arbitrary fastener in small quantities (say 1,000) efficiently or cost effectively? You know steel rod in one side of various diameters and fasteners out the other. And then what would the API be to that factory? Select Head, diameter, material, length, quantity? Maybe finish?
One of the things that mixing sizes on the assembly line would have is keeping them separate, but have you seen how fast a pick-n-place robot can sort things? Could you just have a tray full of random fasteners come out of the anodizing tank and have a robot sort them into types?
> Now personally I love manufacturing porn, I don't know why but I can watch an hour or two of 'How its Made' and just spin all these ideas about in my head.
I also like manufacturing porn, so I made a playlist you might like:
There is definitely automation, but it's far from ubiquitous and there are huge swings from industry to industry. Some industries are much farther along than others.
Also, if automation is almost everywhere how come Foxconn has 1.2 million employees?
I'm guessing you've been to a lot of ::American:: plants - which have to deal with the salaries you speak of, but as OP pointed out - most of our consumer products (like an iPhone or a toaster) are largely made in China by lots of humans assembling by hand.
I was at Ford's Rouge River plant in Detroit and there were about 10 robots in the Assembly doing high-precision work (installing the windshield) - and a lot of ergonomics and fixturing for the overwhelming amount of humans that were screwing the F150's together by hand. I know this is partially the fault of unions - but still pretty crazy it's done like this.
As a current BCG consultant, thanks for this. Have been fortunate to work on real strategy work, but have lots of co-workers doing IT diagnostics and other not-so-exciting things.
