I love the posts about how YC was better back in the day.
It was the same, it's the same. It's just bigger and there's more timeline now to reflect.
If you think the partners (the core of which have been there since day 1) have really changed their outlook that much then you've not been paying attention.
YC has always been a smorgasbord of status seekers, dreamers, ruthless pragmatists, creators and artists. It's a big community that keeps growing, the good parts and the bad parts.
There were scandals then, there are scandals now. They pick some teams perfectly and others totally wrong. The most important thing is that they keep doing it every year and more people get access and a shot at doing their thing.
FWIW I was YC W14 and yes it was totally better back then and we were all geniuses and pure lovers of startups only with no ego...
Yeah. At its root, all of this only matters because it makes people feel like they own more of the company than they actually do. People work hard and care when they feel like they own the product of their labor - the actual product, not just cash compensation for rendering their services.
When people feel alienated from the product of their labor, that's what feels demotivating.
So obviously in a capitalist system, the solution is to try to make people feel as much like owners as possible without actually giving them ownership in the only way that actually matters in a capitalist framework - in equity in the company.
The reason there is not a lot of dialogue around this is because the numbers don't work for all parties at the right time.
When you have a small founder team, you need capital for essentially nothing to show. You can't raise that capital selling the $170M exit dream to angels or a fund.
Conversely, VCs are assuming a 10% or less success rate across their portfolio. And of that, maybe 2-3% of portcos really returning everything.
So they don't have the luxury of shepherding 100 portcos to $170M exits, since in reality, a $1b exit has a similar chance of happening as a $170M exit. Which is to say very very low.
There's no magic sauce, no prime formula, no wizened or sageinvestor. It's a shit show from start to finish. You're best off finding investors who are on the same wavelength as you, and focusing less on whether you hit a home run or a grand slam.
When you get to a place where you're printing cash or whatever, then sure, make sure the math works out for you. But for 99% of all founders, this question never comes, and they spend too much time thinking about it.
So in the failure case, very little of it matters, but in the success case the VC industry can be exceptionally predatory - participating preferences, multipliers, etc. etc. etc.
Honestly, it takes no time at all to have clean term sheets and you don't have the option to fix it later.
Sage advice. Most startups fail, so squabbling over the numbers has always seemed absurd to me. I'd rather see discussion along the lines of "what happens after we do well" because you have no idea of what "well" will be down the line.
There is no way to ensure you don't get screwed in an equity agreement for a failed company. Since most startups fail, worrying about some future event that most likely won't happen, is a waste of time.
Most equity agreements can also be rewritten with numerous "tricks" down the line. A cap table re-org is a great one. Another example: I got written out of a companies equity table once when they shut down the original company, sold the name to a new company for $1 and then did a DBA for the old company name.
You're better off figuring out what happens when the company is actually successful, not what happens if it eventually becomes successful. Does that make better sense now?
> And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.
Reads to me like 2/3 of truck owners use their bed at least twice a year.
From the same paragraph:
> 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never).
Over 25% of trucks are used for towing.
> Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less.
A third of truck owners go offroad.
Add all that up and it sounds like pickups are getting a lot of use. There are no stats on what percentage of people do at least one of those things so we are left to guess but by the claims in the article it is at least "most".
> 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never).
Even once is not never, because nothing else will do that job.
Note too that there people who use their bed but never tow, the fact that a truck could serve either purpose but for some only does one doesn't mean that those people don't use a truck.
As mentioned in another subthread, rental contracts for pickup trucks often prohibit towing, and the trucks aren't even fitted with a tow hitch. If you want to tow with a rented truck, you'll need to rent from a "commercial" rental company and you'll be paying a lot more.
Even then, the rental trucks i've found that let me tow have the wrong hitch (bolted on ball of the wrong size) and don't have a brake controller meaning they can't tow my trailer.
In the suburbs, there is no penalty for owning a large vehicle.
Even if it doesn't fit in your garage (because it's full of cars/stuff), you can park in your driveway. No one will complain if you block the sidewalk, because no one walks anywhere.
Shopping areas have large parking areas and structures. It is not unusual to see pickup trucks taking up more than two spaces. Parallel parking is uncommon and usually can be avoided.
Yes. I would have liked if they bucketed the responses. Something like 0, 1-10, 20-50, etc. But they just asked (or The Drive only reported) the 0-1 numbers.
What is conspicuously absent from these numbers is a response to the question "do you never use the bed or go offroad or tow with your truck". Which is the case that the article seems to be trying to make but can't.
Still seems to be an American phenomenon (saw it first hand in Mexico, not US/Canada) - in Europe everyone has a van for (construction) work, not a pickup truck. And by everyone I mean easily 90% (unless you're talking real truck of 7.5t+) with maybe an exception for garden workers.
"However, according to the EMA, the benefits of both mRNA shots in preventing COVID-19 continue to outweigh the risks, the regulator said, echoing similar views expressed by U.S. regulators and the World Health Organization."
The first sentence of the article is a lot better (emphasis mine):
"France's public health authority has recommended people under 30 be given Pfizer's Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine when available instead of Moderna Inc's Spikevax jab, which carried comparatively higher risks of heart-related problems."
"...Boys between 16 and 19 years of age had the highest incidence of myocarditis after the second dose, according to a second study in the journal. The risk of heart problems in boys of that age was about nine times higher than in unvaccinated boys of the same age..."
Edit: The article above has a quote that I find fascinating
"Myocarditis is among the concerns that may have led the Food and Drug Administration to ask Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to enroll more children in their vaccine trials. Potential side effects are likely to dominate the discussion when agency advisers meet next week to review the evidence for a vaccine in children aged 5 to 11 years."
What kind of person voluntarily enrolls their children in vaccine "trials"?
In the US, since the start of the pandemic, the total number of deaths "involving COVID-19" in children aged 17 or younger is 595. During the same period, total deaths in this age group amount to 61,523.[1]
The vaccine does not provide sterilizing immunity. Fully vaccinated individuals can become infected and transmit the virus to others.
Based on these facts, can you explain how vaccinating children will "end" the pandemic and make children significantly more safe?
I still don't understand how people don't get it. I don't think is worth the risk for old people either (it's my opinion guys, please don't bury me). But for children? They suffer way more with influenza and they don't get shots... don't you really understand that? Covid has Flu like symptoms, but at the beggining and maybe still, many covid patients were dying from something else but gave positive in a PCR... C'mon.. we can do better
> I still don't understand how people don't get it.
I've come to believe that it's all political and ideological at this point. There is indeed a contingent of crazy people who don't think COVID is real, believe in wild conspiracy theories about COVID, oppose any preventative measure (be it masking, social distancing or vaccination), etc.
And then there is another, larger contingent of people who believe that if they acknowledge any limitations of the vaccines, the minimal utility of rushing to vaccinate children, etc., they are letting the crazies win.
So now we're stuck in a Twilight Zone where the vaccinated have to be protected from the unvaccinated, vaccinating the group least likely to be affected by COVID is promoted as the latest key to ending the pandemic, "natural immunity" has gone from being accepted as basic science to treated like pseudoscience, and everybody who is vaccinated will probably be pressured to boost every 6 months no matter how much protection they continue to be told they have against hospitalization and death.
Because the comment seems to ignore the context here. And the context is one where there are some concerns and so
the Food and Drug Administration asks vaccine producers to enroll more children in their vaccine trials. So as to clarify something they dont know. A commendable intention
if you ask me but I prefer to phrase it as in:
"We have something that might cause heart inflammation in children...Might be true or not. We would like to find out more as we have seen a few cases...Would you mind send your toddler in Monday morning please? We are going to give him this product"
My twins were born three months early, and we enrolled them in several studies during their NICU stay. Several came with potential but limited risks, either of side effects or a treatment regimen that might be somewhat less optimal (one was exploring different frequency of bilirubin lighting, for example).
We did so in part because my kids benefited from other people making that same decision years ago - to participate in clinical trials that might benefit future children like mine.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, aside from knee-jerk reactions to any questioning of taking the vaccine being perceived as being in bad faith. Which is perhaps fair as of late. But I think your comment asks a fair question, too.
I would then it would then look beyond the benefit to the self and take into account civic duty. If your own personal probability of mortality is exactly the same with the vaccine and without, then we need to ask, what is then best for the system within which I live? (Remember, never send to know for whom the bell tolls.)
myocarditis isn't contagious, but covid is, and if left unchecked, might (will?) mutate into something that might be a lot more than 1% deadly to you. So you expected value of taking the covid vaccine will be higher than not.
I really think we should encourage people to be willing to think objectively like this. There IS a set of efficacy and risk numbers that would make the vaccines not worth it. They're just obviously not the numbers we have (which make it very worth it). It's just unfortunate that such an astonishingly large portion of the populace apparently can't do the math right enough or objectively enough to come to the same conclusion.
"...By analyzing viral loads of over 16,000 infections during the current, Delta-variant-dominated pandemic wave in Israel, we found that BTIs in recently fully vaccinated individuals have lower viral loads than infections in unvaccinated individuals. However, this effect starts to decline 2 months after vaccination and ultimately vanishes 6 months or longer after vaccination..."
Sure. Eating is similar; after a while, you have to do it some more. As a result, we build a large infrastructure to ensure people can get new food when they need it, so starvation isn't endemic.
If vaccines and their boosters infer temporary immunity, there's a certain level of rapid vaccine production and administration that can leverage that temporary immunity. Whether we can reach it is somewhat of a political problem.
First, the risk of getting myocarditis after vaccination seems to be around 14 in 100,000.
"As of June 11, 2021, approximately 296 million doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in the United States, with 52 million administered to persons aged 12–29 years; of these, 30 million were first and 22 million were second doses. Within the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) (4), the national vaccine safety passive monitoring system, 1,226 reports of myocarditis after mRNA vaccination were received during December 29, 2020–June 11, 2021."
Second, the risk of death is much lower:
"Of the 323 persons meeting CDC’s case definitions, 309 (96%) were hospitalized. Acute clinical courses were generally mild; among 304 hospitalized patients with known clinical outcomes, 95% had been discharged at time of review, and none had died."
Based on total yearly cases of myocarditis, your yearly risk of getting myocarditis without vaccination is around 1 in 1,000-10,000. This suggests that many of the events reported in VAERS is due to random happenstance, not any causative effect of the vaccine.
(Many, but not all--from the EU data, IIRC, excess myocarditis events were in the range of about 1 in 100,000, not 1 in 10,000.)
That would be clear. Except "1%" isn't some "small number". The actual rate of myocardial problems, in young men due to covid vaccination is nearly 100x less than that at .014%.
you should listen to the health authorities, who have already done these calculations and considered a wide range of other evidence, and continue to recommend that poeople get vaccinated, instead of not.
Risk of covid is cumulative, wheras vaccine is one time risk.
Also long covid is present in 5-10% of infections. For some those are life affecting changes.
Why do you think the vaccine is a one time risk? In the US, you are "highly motivated" in many circumstances to take two doses, and people under 30 are getting booster doses, even though FDA advisory committee members thought that was going to kill more people in that group than help.
> What kind of person voluntarily enrolls their children in vaccine "trials"?
Okay, I'll bite.
Exactly how do you propose demonstrating the safety and effectiveness of a vaccine (or any drug) in children without running clinical trials where you test it on actual, you know, children?
"This Article explores the flaws inherent in this ethics of pediatric research. Specifically, it challenges the view from ethics that the law permits parents to consent to their children's inclusion in harmful or risky research to the extent that related invasions would meet legal maltreatment standards. More broadly, it challenges the movement to increase access to healthy children for harmful and risky research on the ground that it risks two important regressions: First, in its willingness to risk harm to individual children in the interests of the group, it threatens the progress the law has made in its development of the concept of the child as an individual worthy of respect in his or her own right, a concept that imagines parents as fiduciaries and that includes strong protections against invasions of bodily integrity. Second, in its failure to assure that the burdens of non-therapeutic research are not placed disproportionately on children of lower socioeconomic and minority status, it violates the antidiscrimination principle, which has only begun to make good on its promise of equal treatment for all children."
Something being nine times more common does not make it common. Myocarditis is extremely extremely rare. Making it nine times more common would still make it extremely rare. This has not changed the overall calculus for the vaccine. It's still better to get it then to not.
Saying the French recommend one vaccine over the other for a given age group won't get the clicks and attention of a skirting-around-antivaxxer headline, and the comment engagement generated by drawing in antivaxxers to conflict with pro-vaccine commentators will further amplify its signal.
it's very possible for you to have the experience you're describing from a system, and for the system to be predatory and extractive.
Just as many people live in nice suburbs and work in cities where there's extreme poverty. They get a good life, don't often have to contend with the pain and suffering of others, and can dismiss those claims as exaggeration.
Many of the comments in this thread do not understand the concept of free speech from a legal perspective.
Free speech does not mean that you have the right to say or distribute whatever you want on whatever platform, owned by a private corporation you want.
on a side note - these are super dog whistle comments, and I'm surprised the mods are ok with them.
>Free speech does not mean that you have the right to say or distribute whatever you want on whatever platform, owned by a private corporation you want.
Most people understand this. It doesn't need to keep being repeated in every thread.
Facebook isn't bobsmessageboard.com. The debate is over whether it is a de facto public communications utility and should be regulated as such, or if it is private company that is free to do whatever it wants on it's platform.
I’m quite free market... but in this case Google with its infinite resources tried to take just a piece of the Facebook pie and failed miserably.
If Google can’t compete with them - then SocialSite5000 startup has no shot in hell.
Facebook is unfortunately a monopoly. We can wait it out, but they are in a position to keep their advantage for generations so I don’t think that’s entirely reasonable.
If there are a monopoly, then they should be held to the ideals of common carrier and free speech and platform vs publisher, etc.
Inciting violence is illegal speech. Facebook is giving the president a platform for his illegal speech.
The courts (and the senate) are not going to enforce the law, so as a society we are duty bound to take whatever legal actions we can to correct the situation.
I understand that very well. There was an understanding how it was handled on the net. That is why got legislation like removing platforms for the content of users. It was necessary to allow interesting content to flourish.
All that is now getting thrown out because some don't like a free net with diverse opinions. And yes, some of those are really shit. Life is hard.
It is the other way around, that people citing this legal fact don't understand the mechanisms that made the net as a whole workable for the largest amount of people, not just rich kids from prestigious universities without real life goals.
There are also people that understand the social contract of free speech and those that do not.
Likewise, citizens are free to criticize the actions of private corporations - whether they are criticizing Verizon or Facebook.
Say an environmentalist criticizes the practices of an oil company, and the overwhelming majority of rebuttals consist of saying that the oil company is acting perfectly legally and within its prerogatives. That would be a straw-man misdirection - no one is arguing that point.
If you think the partners (the core of which have been there since day 1) have really changed their outlook that much then you've not been paying attention.
YC has always been a smorgasbord of status seekers, dreamers, ruthless pragmatists, creators and artists. It's a big community that keeps growing, the good parts and the bad parts.
There were scandals then, there are scandals now. They pick some teams perfectly and others totally wrong. The most important thing is that they keep doing it every year and more people get access and a shot at doing their thing.
FWIW I was YC W14 and yes it was totally better back then and we were all geniuses and pure lovers of startups only with no ego...