Mostly I agree. But I also think that someone who is very good, and in a very good MBA program, can do their share of contributions, iff they're committed fully to the startup upon graduation.
But if the follow-through doesn't happen, then the whole thing was probably a huge waste for non-MBA-student co-founders. (Unless those co-founders weren't really committed themselves.)
> Full-time cofounder(s) should have the right to fire other cofounders,
I'd guess there's usually no point in a technical co-founder "firing" their capable business co-founder; it just ends the company.
While the technical person is spending most of their time on technical bits (no matter how much customer-facing product management time you have), etc., the business person is spending most of their time on relationships (investors, partners, customers, etc.). To a large extent, they take those relationships and reputation with them wherever they go next.
Unless the technical cofounder has some very rare and marketable technical expertise that the business people recognize (e.g., some recent big AI invention, or a fancy title at a FAANG), the technical cofounder will probably be considered an ordinary commodity by most.
> IMO an MBA is not the kind of degree that is worthy of delaying founding a startup
My guess is that an MBA from one of the most prestigious programs is usually worth delaying founding a startup. The MBA student can lay some of the groundwork while in the program, get mentoring and connections, and then out-execute many competitors once the student graduates.
The kinds of startups a lot of us have been thinking of are essentially the last 20 years of mostly ZIRP investment scams, but that can't go on forever (current dotcom-bubble-like "AI" hype wave low barriers to acquihire exit notwithstanding). I'd guess more people will have to do viable businesses than our field has in a long time.
Single Payer would go a long way towards making our healthcare system non-excludable and non-rivalrous. What we have, the MIDDLEMEN which the post complains about, are rent seekers.
Excludable = you can exclude people from benefiting from it. (E.g., Fixing global warming is not excludable while temperature control in your own house is.)
Rivalrous = more people getting it leads to less for others. (E.g., Software is not rivalrous, but hardware is.)
I’m the CTO of commenda.io. We help Indian startups get set up with RBI-compliant, venture-ready Delaware c-corps.
There are 2 reasons why Indian corporations like to incorporate in the US:
1: VC. American VCs love investing in Indian startups, but they hate investing in Indian corporations. YC invests only in corporations set up in the US, Canada, Singapore, or Cayman Islands. Other VCs have different requirements, but they all accept US.
2: Sales. If you’re selling to US customers (which most Indian SAAS startups want to do), a US entity will help you build trust and a US bank account will make it easier for your customers to pay you.
Cayman Islands, really? I thought it's a huge read flag for banks, IRS and other agencies, so VCs, including YC, would avoid it. Maybe I'm wrong as I'm not an expert, so can you please tell more?
Also, you didn't mention EU and UK. Does it mean that YC would prefer Singapore to a EU/UK startup?
Cayman Islands to Marutius to India was a common route [0].
Also there is a lot of FDI that is brought via the Caymans into India.
Btw, YC lists Caymans as one of the handful of jurisdictions it will support investing in [1]. I dealt with it some time back when I was helping companies choose between YC and Sequoia Surge.
But it's not the UK, right? I mean I cannot incorporate in UK and then say it's a Cayman Islands company for YC purposes (i.e., without incorporating another entity to own the first)
> From 1992 to 2005, foreign investment increased 316.9%, and India's gross domestic product (GDP) grew from $266 billion in 1991 to $2.3 trillion in 2018[6][7] According to one study, wages rose on the whole, as well as wages as the labor-to-capital relative share.[5]
> As an effect of the liberalisation in 1991, extreme poverty reduced from 36 percent in 1993-94 to 24.1 percent in 1999-2000.[8]
The question is, at what cost, and with what legitimacy?
Too often despots and their cronies get countries into economic trouble, countries that have been taken advantaged by Western interests for hundreds of years.
When the country collapses, the IMF and World Bank subjugate the country to Western interests further often to the destruction of the environment and detriment to upward mobility of the population.
Using statistics like reduction of extreme poverty or wage growth when not taking into account other factors like inflation or mortality for example does not help when discussing the complex topic of the IMF and the World Bank and if these institutions are a net benefit to the impoverished.
> Too often despots and their cronies get countries into economic trouble, countries that have been taken advantaged by Western interests for hundreds of years.
Agreed.
> When the country collapses, the IMF and World Bank subjugate the country to Western interests further often to the destruction of the environment and detriment to upward mobility of the population.
Can you give me any concrete examples of IMF reforms making a country worse off economically?
> Using statistics like reduction of extreme poverty or wage growth when not taking into account other factors like inflation or mortality for example
Okay, mortality in India has fallen steadily from 1% in 1991 to 0.7% in 2020. And inflation doesn’t have a clear pattern but it’s never returned to its 1991 peak of 13.5%.
I’m not just cherry-picking stats here! India has actually gotten way way better in the last few decades, and the rate of improvement rose dramatically after the 1991 reforms!
It also makes sense that this would happen. Despot takes loan from IMF, spends it on random crap that doesn't benefit the citizens. Despot gets thrown out. IMF still wants its money back. Cue austerity, making the citizens pay for what the despot did.
Argentina, maybe? Also I don't know if this is primarily the IMF but didn't Russia post-USSR-collapse implement the sudden market reforms everyone told it to, causing an economic collapse (since sort-of recovered), dramatic fall in life expectancy (now just above its 1986 levels) while setting in motion the events that led us to the war in Ukraine?
Note: I'm not the GP commenter and I'm not trying to start an argument or denounce the IMF, if there's good reasons why these aren't good examples that's totally OK :)
As an argentinian, I believe the IMF is not pushy enough with us.
"Here, have this big pile of money to pay for your more urgent and higher-interest-rate debts, and here are some policies for you to implement so you stop having inflation once and for all. But it's ok if you cook the books, or don't comply with the policies, you're a big economy anyways so we have to keep you going and not catastrophically fail anyways".
India had a gigantic domestic market, vast pools of human resources, and core infrastructure that wasn't completely crumbling. For all its ills, India already had nearly 50 years of relatively peaceful democratic transfer of power, compared to other post-colonial countries.
The fact that this core infrastructure - law, higher education, political systems - hasn't changed that much since 1991 (the best colleges in 1991 are still the best colleges today, for instance) is proof that India's foundations were solid.
You nitpicked an outlier. Most countries that undergone the IMF process have not been successful to put it lightly. Also, the passage does not prove that the growth was a consequence of implementing IMF policies. It might have happened in spite of that.
Requirements change. I’ve seen 10+ year old proto files at google still being used by services that are still being actively developed.
Over those ten years your data model has evolved. Your first client, the one whose data model you were imitating when you added the required field, was deprecated five years ago and turned down last year. You have a dozen or a thousand client services, each using you as a backend in a slightly different way. Are you sure every single one of them is going to require that field? Are you sure the field will even be semantically meaningful for their use case?
Those are exactly the kinds of things I was thinking of when I suggested that proto is designed for Google scale.
It’s not that smaller companies never have these problems. It’s that, at smaller companies, the ways in which they manifest themselves and the cost/benefit ratios tend to favor different solutions to these problems. For example, the company I was at that stuck with Proto2 so they could keep required fields, all the engineers worked in a single room, and could resolve questions about the needs of all a protocols consumers by simply standing up and saying, "Hey everybody, …"
> the richest people in america got that way by creating enormous amounts of ? value and then capturing lots of it for themselves.
> the richest people in russia got that way by plundering the country of its natural resources and the remnants of the soviet-era industry.
> those are not the same.
Importantly, the wealth of the richest in the oligarchy is maintained (or destroyed like in the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky) by the use of force by the authoritarian. The power of the authoritarian is in turn backstopped financially by the oligarchs.
The wealth of the richest in the US is maintained by the economic system and its associated laws (however flawed). There is a conceivable path to make the system fairer in the US via elections, but not in Russia.
To be honest, the poster child for American businesses are Intuit, Equifax, that company that manufactures EpiPens, or the company that manufactures insulin etc. They all essentially exist by rent-seeking without creating value, enforced through lobbying or regulatory capture.
Painting American companies and Russian companies in such stark contrast is overly simplistic. And pretending American elites are any more altruistic than Russian elites would be insanity.
Why are those the poster children for American businesses?
Wouldn't it be some combination of JPMorgan, Google, Boeing, Berkshire Hathaway, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and Cardinal Health or something (you can mix in whatever Fortune 500 companies you want)?
The rent-seeking companies appear to me to be a far smaller portion of the economy than others that inarguably produce economic value.
Most people don't know who founded Equifax, how it makes money, who it's CEO is or how much the business is worth. Did Equifax even mint any billionaires?
Random exceptions don't invalidate the point of the parent comment.
> the richest people in america got that way by creating enormous amounts of value and then capturing lots of it for themselves.
This may have been the case through the 1960s but post 1970s American is very much back on the crypto-aristocrat track with people inheriting vast wealth or being given jobs as money managers or financiers due to family influence and then rent-seeking the hell out of anything that smells like money.
People think of the people at the very top of the list, who are mostly late-20th-century entrepreneurs, but you're right: the bulk of the American rich are people like the Waltons, Mars's, and other heirs.
A number of the most wealthiest (Top 15?) people in America inherited their wealth. The rest, well they seem to have exploited various aspects of the country and people.
the US’ top billionaires have often profited a lot from government funding, whether it’s subsidies, tax breaks, regulatory capture, etc… the “rich because they created equivalent value” is old school American Dream flavor propaganda
I'm not sure if I would equivolate Elon Musk taking advantage of the literal purpose that EV tax credits were designed to a Russian grifter with the right connections being gifted the state oil company in 1992 for no reason other than he was buddies with someone in the old Soviet politburo.
You can try to make an argument that EV tax credits are bad and should be abolished, but the two situations just aren't even in the same universe.
they’re not in the same universe, but i’m not about to let someone perpetuate the myth that american billionaires are some kind of pure self-made businessmen - they’re system exploiters
How do we know who the richest people in the US are? Forbes' list is based largely on first-order research of federal filings, like stock ownership, compensation, and extrapolation from data that is made public. But with so many ways of channeling wealth, it seems likely the very wealthiest could easily remain anonymous. I don't recall who said this, but the president of a hedge fund was being interviewed by Forbes and told them, paraphrased, "You have no idea how much money I have, and you never will." I could be wrong about how the Forbes list is computed, but it seems to be more guesswork than rooted in reality, since the Paradise and Pandora papers uncovered more wealth than has been reported. (Again, I'm not 100% certain I'm mixing up internet disinfo.)
You’re misunderstanding the paper. This is not the number of people who can correctly define the word, it’s the number of people who can correctly recognize that it is actually a word.
EBV is linked to many, many things. But why does it only have these effects in some people and not others? Why is the prevalance of weird EBV-linked conditions increasing with time?
Until these question are answered I don't think it's possible to call it uniquely bad.
Appendicitis is activated by inflammation and "not a problem" for most people. The Appendix organ hides in the body and waits to become inflamed to attack.
It's certainly in the realm of possibility EBV or other viruses have no benefit, but the history of medicine is harmful medical intervention after harmful medical intervention...
In defence of medicine, its history (of the last 100 years or so anyways) is filled with beneficial intervention after beneficial intervention. Never have humans lived longer and healthier, with such low rates of infant mortality and lack of disease.
It's almost certain that EBV has no benefit. We have a nice control group of people without EBV and as far as I'm aware absolutely no benefit is apparent.
Agreeing with you but it's crazy to see people hand-wave "EBV is fine".
Everyone seems to have to go through life the hard way where "nothing is a problem don't overreact" until suddenly it's destroying your life and then it's too late.
EBV can turn to mono and once your body is making auto-antibodies you are screwed for a long time, maybe the rest of your life because your quality of life is just gone. It will keep coming back every time you get weakened.
How about VZV turning into shingles? If you ever had a shingles attack it will change your whole perspective for life on illness and pain. If you could eradicate VZV from your body to prevent that you most certainly should, EBV too.
Indeed. It seems quite insane to me. That a virus that causes hundreds of thousands of cancers and many more debilitating illnesses every year could be reasonably expected to be fine, let alone beneficial is just baffling to me.
The non-carriers are not a control group unless we are 100% sure that the assignment is random. I find it hard to believe when the vast majority of population are carriers.
It's not random. More developed countries and richer people in more developped countries have a lower incidence rate. The chance of catching it increases with age. The part of the population that doesn't catch it seems to be avoiding it by luck, higher hygiene, and fewer vectors. See: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/208/8/1286/2192838
The first recorded appendectomy is in 1880. Probably the first major study conclusively indicating adverse consequences was published in 2014.
It did hold for a long time, until it didn't because we found scientific evidence that said the opposite. Are you really so confident that no such evidence could ever be found for anything else? There is so much we don't know about the human body.
That's really not it. There is a heavy bias that the appendix is somehow beneficial because we evolved to keep it for some reason (though it could have been just a relic).
EBV is a virus. Our immune system does whatever it can to get rid of it. It causes significant illness. There is absolutely no reason to believe it is beneficial whatsoever.
If you think it is, you can prove it. We have literally hundreds of millions of people walking around that never got EBV. Go on, and find a statistically significant way in which EBV is beneficial for them. You have the burden of proof here.
If that bias is so strong, why did people believe the appendix was vestigial for a 100 years?
If the immue system does "whatever it can" to get rid of EBV, why is it happy to let EBV lie dormant in most people who have it?
Most of what you said can be said about bacteria too. It turns out bacteria can be helpful and blindly applying antibiotics is linked to the rise of numerous autoimmune diseases. It took quite a long time for us to figure it out.
I think the burden of proof is on the people who want to modify other people's bodies (i.e. prophylactic EBV vaccination). You can do what you want to yourself. But unless we want to repeat the mistakes of the recent past we should be ~really~ sure there is no reason the body keeps it around lying dormant. One could even say this is a larger "control group" than the one you are talking about.
Besides, correlational medical studies can't even determine if eggs and coffee are good or bad for you. If we really want to answer these questions adequately, we need better tools.
The immune system isn't happy to let EBV dormant. EBV infects the immune system in order to lie dormant. It hides inside long-lived B-cells in a way that is impossible for your immune system to see from the outside, so there is no way to mount an efficient response at that point.
Again, we knew about side effects for antibiotics from the get-go. It's link to autoimmune diseases specifically is recent because autoimmune diseases were misunderstood. We knew that bacteria could be beneficial and necessary from before we had the first antibiotic.
If we can't tell if eggs or coffee are bad for you, it's because there just isn't a strong correlation either way, and diet studies are not very good at deriving signal.
Thankfully, simply comparing people that are and aren't infected is a much clearer signal.
Again, this isn't hard. We've been able to associate dozens of negative outcomes to EBV infection. We would be able to figure out a positive outcome.
The idea that "the body keeps it around" just completely flies in the face of reality. The fact is, the body doesn't really have a way of preventing it from staying there.
> The idea that "the body keeps it around" just completely flies in the face of reality. The fact is, the body doesn't really have a way of preventing it from staying there.
This is a difference in semantics, not reality. The body also doesn't have a way of spontaneously ejecting the appendix. I would describe this as the body being happy to let it stay there. Of course, sometimes the body becomes unhappy with the existence of the appendix. I think the interesting question is why this happens and the proper treatment is to remove or mitigate these triggers. This is harder than removing the appendix.
We thought there were no serious consequences of antibiotics for a century. We were wrong. As someone living with autoimmune disease, I can assure you that we continue to misunderstand these diseases. I wish I could be so confident that we would never be wrong about anything else ever again. A few days ago there was an article where a virus was used to fight a bacterial infection [1]. How can you earnestly say it's impossible that any virus that makes its home in the immune system could play a role in the immune response? Proving negatives is really hard. Maybe if I saw a 10000 studies that showed no correlation for a wide range of different infections I could be convinced, but our system doesn't encourage publication of negative results so I'm not holding my breath. How many have you seen?
The problem with statistical medical studies is that in general samples are non-random (as you note in another comment) and cannot easily control for any of the 1M (lower bound) confounding variables. Our current methods here are mainly good for p-hacking publications, not uncovering causal relationships or complex effects. This is a discussion for somewhere else though probably.
>We thought there were no serious consequences of antibiotics for a century.
That's not true. We knew there were serious consequences and that microbiome was important from before antibiotics were even a thing.
>The body also doesn't have a way of spontaneously ejecting the appendix. I would describe this as the body being happy to let it stay there.
It has a way of doing so over evolutionary timescales, which is not true for EBV.
>A few days ago there was an article where a virus was used to fight a bacterial infection [1].
That is a bacteriophage. It is a virus that does not infect human cells, but only bacteria. We've known about them for decades.
> How can you earnestly say it's impossible that any virus that makes its home in the immune system could play a role in the immune response? Proving negatives is really hard.
I don't need to prove a negative, you have the burden of proof. It's absolutely certain that has an impact on immune response, we know that, it's just that every single effect we have seen so far has been negative.
> The problem with statistical medical studies is that in general samples are non-random (as you note in another comment) and cannot easily control for any of the 1M (lower bound) confounding variables.
There aren't 1 million confounding variables as far as sampling for EBV. You could feasibly account for all remaining variance, or enough of it to know that it doesn't have a sufficient impact.
We had some minor inklings of the microbiome, but we were not aware of serious consequences. Unless you are accusing the all the governments and medical bodies of the world of gross malpractice.
> It has a way of doing so over evolutionary timescales, which is not true for EBV.
Do you have evidence for this claim?
> That is a bacteriophage.
Do you really think nature has drawn a bright line between viruses than can affect humans and viruses that can affect bacteria? I'm not sure this lines up with reality. People are even seriously starting to talk about the "Human Virome" [1]
> I don't need to prove a negative, you have the burden of proof.
This is what they said about tobacco causing cancer and pesticides killing bees and carbon emissions causing global warming. How did that work out? I'd prefer a more proactive scientific framework than a reactive one. Maybe we could stop the next crisis before it happens.
> There aren't 1 million confounding variables as far as sampling for EBV.
There are 1M confounding factors in sampling outcomes. Not controlling for confounding variables is a great way to get weak conclusions.
> We had some minor inklings of the microbiome, but we were not aware of serious consequences. Unless you are accusing the all the governments and medical bodies of the world of gross malpractice.
That is not true. Microbiome treatments were proposed at the beginning of the 20th century.
I don't see how it would be malpractice. Pathogenic bacteria are a much worse problem than damage to microbiome in most cases. If your microbiome was damaged by evidently useless antibacterial treatments, it could be malpractice.
> Do you really think nature has drawn a bright line between viruses than can affect humans and viruses that can affect bacteria? I'm not sure this lines up with reality. People are even seriously starting to talk about the "Human Virome"
Yes, there is bright biological line between viruses that can infect humans and bacteria. And sure, the human virome could be thing, and certainly natural bacteriophages are important and so are many benign, transient infections important for the human system.
> This is what they said about tobacco causing cancer and pesticides killing bees and carbon emissions causing global warming. How did that work out? I'd prefer a more proactive scientific framework than a reactive one.
Certainly not. Tobacco causing cancer was the default because it is a foreign contaminant in the human body. Insecticides killing bees (insects) is also the default position. Global warming was theorized and predicted since the late 19th century, see Arrhenius, so yes energy companies had the burden of proof.
We already have the priors of EBV causing massive damage to the human body. You're saying that we must prove the negative that it causes nothing beneficial at all. That's akin to saying that despite we know that global warming has many negative effects, we have to show it has no positive effects.
> There are 1M confounding factors in sampling outcomes. Not controlling for confounding variables is a great way to get weak conclusions.
That isn't how statistics work. You can calculate a distribution of impact of every confounding factor onto the measured variance, and from then on you can know if you have controlled enough confounders or not. If you have 999,990 factors that alltogether account for 0.1% of variance, and 10 members that account for 99.9% of variance, you know it's enough.
> If your microbiome was damaged by evidently useless antibacterial treatments, it could be malpractice.
This is how I would describe the vast majority of applications of antibiotics. I'd like to be more charitable and say the people encouraging the use of antibiotics didn't realize the scale of the damage they were causing.
> Yes, there is bright biological line between viruses that can infect humans and bacteria. And sure, the human virome could be thing, and certainly natural bacteriophages are important and so are many benign, transient infections important for the human system.
The human virome ~is confirmed~ to be a thing, and includes bacteriophages. This bright biological line conclusively does not exist. Why would humans evolve to coexist with (or include) a large number of benign viral populations?
> Tobacco causing cancer was the default because it is a foreign contaminant in the human body.
If this is your argument, then what is the default for removing something that is benignly present in the vast majority of people? Surely it should be that it is potentially unsafe, like it is with the appendix and gut microbiome and frontal lobe etc. Anyway this is a historical argument. We've applied huge amounts of pesticides because there was 'no evidence they were harmful.' It turns out this was a bad idea. This framework is clearly very dangerous. Perhaps we should look harder for evidence of harm before we do things.
> That's akin to saying that despite we know that global warming has many negative effects, we have to show it has no positive effects.
Global warming is human-induced change. Removing EBV from the entire human population is human-induced change. The bar for causing change should be higher than leaving things as they are. A better analogy would be removing the appendix. There was no evidence this was harmful for 100 years! That doesn't mean it wasn't harmful!
> You can calculate a distribution of impact of every confounding factor onto the measured variance
In my experience, no one does this. And certainly never with the most important confouding varibables like diet and lifestyle.
>This bright biological line conclusively does not exist.
It does. Bacteriophages cannot infect human cells. They can only do it by changing our microbiome.
>If this is your argument, then what is the default for removing something that is benignly present in the vast majority of people? Surely it should be that it is potentially unsafe, like it is with the appendix and gut microbiome and frontal lobe etc. Anyway this is a historical argument. We've applied huge amounts of pesticides because there was 'no evidence they were harmful.' It turns out this was a bad idea. This framework is clearly very dangerous. Perhaps we should look harder for evidence of harm before we do things.
EBV causes millions of cancers, and it seems that it is likely to cause millions of cases of autoimmune diseases. It is known to cause vast amounts of harm. By the same logic. Beyond this, a large proportion of viral infections of EBV cause mono, which in and of itself is a great harm. You can't ask that every future intervention prove a negative.
> In my experience, no one does this. And certainly never with the most important confouding varibables like diet and lifestyle.
Is your theory that for some diets and lifestyles, EBV has beneficial effects? You can certainly design a study to account for this.
