>> More and more I see why bootstrapping is the way to go.
That does not match the definition of success here...the trick is to become a billionaire and call yourself an entrepreneur without ever turning a profit.... :-)
Then keep getting acquired, become a VC, do the same on and on.
Clouflare is an example as a loss making company, every single Musk company with the exception of his state subsided Tesla, Epic Games, Snap, DoorDash, WeWork, Rivian, Lucid, Peloton, Roblox, Wayfair, Lyft, Reddit, ...
Being a real business, and turning a profit, is very, very hard, you have Google, Amazon and a infinitesimal few...
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.
I suppose one could argue that VCs develop a taste for it after speaking with so many founders.
But, of course, you often don’t find out what lay down the road not travelled, except for those companies that get funded elsewhere, so it’s not like there’s an obvious objective measure.
I can’t help wondering if it’s a bit like Moneyball though and, if you had good enough data that you could model it well enough, you’d discover a lot of that taste is just shooting bull and doesn’t amount to much. Possibly there’d be a lot of variability across VCs.
Sure but the act of actually securing VC funding is a small part of running a company. Those VCs are not going to recoup their investments if they pick people who optimize for funding and not for product vision and good leadership.
Grok is pretty good. It really excels when the results can be improved by deep online search. It tends to be more aggressive in looking things up than competitors. I use it in certain situations.
I've used/use it. For a while it had one of the best lightweight coding LLM's, which actually lead to a #1 spot on openrouter usage ranking although they've fallen off the top 10 used now. It's also provided some good reasoning models, which perform better when dealing with non-PC topics.
Also, although I've never used it for this, I believe some of the paid models produce some of the best "adult" content, and I know there are even subreddits which do nothing but praise Grok and "content" produces who use it.
Without giving too many details I thought it would be fun to make 2D games based off of banned books (sort of as a marketing ploy, paradoxically everybody likes banned books). Camp of the saints seemed like a good target, which is a fictional book based in 1980's France dealing with incoming flotillas of immigration. I found that ChatGPT would push back on the premise of the novel instead of coding, while grok models just called things "edgy" and went to work.
I have more examples (mostly dealing with realtime web filtering) but that's the immediate one that comes to mind.
At this specific moment if SpaceX and Musk said they would be building a Dyson Sphere, CNBC would make a round table to discuss it. Watch and learn, we only see these bubbles once every 25 years.
All the market news today is because a strong jobs report dropped, which shuts down any notion of rates going down. This of course seriously hampers casino operations.
At the target market caps people are talking about, I wouldn't blame anyone who shorts all three: even if you're optimistic about the value of the tech, monetising is hard, and competition reduces profits.
That is leveraged speculation on a future listing before real float, real index flows, or real public market ownership exist. With a 20% premium that is evidence that the hype machine is working, and the best evidence of engineered retail FOMO.
That does not match the definition of success here...the trick is to become a billionaire and call yourself an entrepreneur without ever turning a profit.... :-)
Then keep getting acquired, become a VC, do the same on and on.
Clouflare is an example as a loss making company, every single Musk company with the exception of his state subsided Tesla, Epic Games, Snap, DoorDash, WeWork, Rivian, Lucid, Peloton, Roblox, Wayfair, Lyft, Reddit, ...
Being a real business, and turning a profit, is very, very hard, you have Google, Amazon and a infinitesimal few...
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