Personally I'm okay with being outcompeted if their's a billion dollar payout at the end.

Everything that's wrong with venture capitalism condensed into a single fifteen word sentence. Bravo.

If you can't provide a billion dollars worth of value, extract a billion dollars worth of grift!

I hear A16Z is hiring.

How is being outcompeted “grift”? I feel like I’m missing some context here.

Why do you start a startup? Is it to build an idea you believe in and believe it is potentially lucrative or is it so you can go through the motions, say the trendy things, and get outcompeted because in the end you are primarily focused on getting acquired with a 1B exit?

Spoken like someone who has never started a business. Brex raised much less than $5b and Capital One apparently thinks it is worth more than that (otherwise they wouldn’t buy it).

This is called value creation.

I think the investors who put $300m in at a $12b valuation would disagree

I don’t think you understand how liquidation preferences work.

They will get $300m back.

Opportunity cost sure. But zero nominal loss.

Your statement is true on average because the world’s economy is continuing to function.

> Your statement is true on average because the world’s economy is continuing to function.

The entire field of economics depends on post ipso facto statements like this.

> can't continue to function even if acquisitions were only 80% value creation on average

The number is much much lower than that. Most acquisitions fail or don't have much impact.

Definitely. And some random guy on HN knows the value of Brex to Capital One better than Capital One does.

Brex can be worth $5b today and also be worth less in the future. These two realities don’t conflict. Acquisitions can and do end poorly. But the vast majority work well. I am not sure what you don’t understand about that?

Makes me realize how much I love New York, thank you.

Paying for things that aren't worth it is noble, but not good economics in the long run. If people want to buy a tool not for what it produces but for the story it tells, this is fine. But just like startups need product-market fit, tools also need product-market fit, and if no one is buying, it could simply be that the alternatives are suitable replacements.

In other markets, that is called dumping, and it is illegal. And in fact, Microsoft was convicted of being a monopolist and dumping.

I think this number is derived from the water used to create all the goods they consume. Let's say every American eats 1lb of beef per day, and nothing else, to create a simple model. Then every American has a water footprint of about 1,850 gallons.

[0] https://watercalculator.org/news/articles/beef-king-big-wate...

It's like Conway's Law. Both humans and agents arrive at roughly identical hierarchies for organizing labor. There is something inherent in the game of telephone required by limited working memory that requires this structure. Gas Town's only failure is not being familiar with prior art and coming up with very strange names for established patterns that already exist in large hierarchical organizations like governments, corporations and militaries.

it has been amazing to watch how much of agentic ai is driven by "can you write clear instructions to explain your goals and use cases" and "can you clearly define the rules of each step in your process."

When I read that there were three separate pilot programs to test how to introduce algebra back to 10 year olds all I see is dollar signs and bureaucratic paralysis. I will avoid political arguments and instead make a simple economic one, which is that in California there is a lot of money to be made by endlessly experimenting and trialing and suing for any given public proposal. And this incentivizes things like not teaching 10 year olds algebra, or taking 10 years to reintroduce algebra, when such a pedagogy is already well established for many decades, because you can make a career out of toying with outcomes. But we're not talking about software simulations here: A whole generation of kids have been denied an educational opportunity that will have effects on the rest of their lives. This reintroduction is a decision that should have been made in a single day long ago if the well-being of the pupils was the goal of these schools.

In the States, due to the silly way education works, the whole game for parents is physically to move to the good school district.

I feel like I am still doing it the hard way, I just have to type 10x less into my keyboard to get the same amount of code out. But as soon as my understanding of the system diverges from its reality, I still do the old fashioned work of figuring out the difference and how to resolve it. It feels like a printing press replacing scribes to me.

I used to work in healthtech. Information that can be used to identify a person is regulated in America under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). These regulations are much stricter than the free-for-all that constitutes usage of information in companies that are dependent on ad networks. These regulations are strict and enforceable, so a healthcare company would be fined for failing to protect HIPAA data. OpenAI isn't a healthcare provider yet, but I'm guessing this is the framework they're basing their data retention and protection around for this new app.

Modal is great for infrequent batches.