40acres

After years of companies refusing to go public (looking at you Stripe), it's almost refreshing to see a hyped tech go actually IPO.

Someone framed debt to gdp ratio like this: if your debt is 150% of your GDP. It would take a year and a half to pay off your debt if all the national income (gdp) was allocated to payments.

No obviously this isn’t a realistic policy - but if we can have “war-time” economies as proven in the past it reasons that we can have an economy solely focused on the repayment of debt (idk, high taxes for a decade?). Am I tripping?

What does that have to do with the debt?

I’m not sure about this one - seems like it significantly reduces the value of data, which would have a downstream impact on the entire industry. I guess that’s what you intended, but my mind quickly went to a rabbit hole with the second order effects of this one.

The market is definitely there for enterprise LLMs. Everyone is using GPT for work. I use it to provide stubs for memos and to brainstorm - but the real value comes from replace internal “tribal knowledge” with an AI who knows your org in and out.

Some would say your first paragraph describes Apple.

Thanks. It’s a startup of about 100-150 people.

I was laid off in November - few false starts here and there but I start my new gig on the 20th. Better yet I have $20k left from severance which is really nice.

JK Rowling built a billion dollar children’s franchise shortly after Dahls death.

I don’t know how to quantify it but I have definitely noticed an increase in productivity. I don’t need my whole team in the office but a few key people once a week was a game changer.

Funnily enough I really like YouTube shorts. A lot of Tiktokers cross post and because of this I haven’t found a reason to download TikTok.

This is the exact same message Microsoft CEO said in his message. So yes MSFT is directing these layoffs.

I was laid off in November. I've applied to dozens, probably hundreds of jobs. I've had two interviews (one bigtechco) and a YC startup. Both did not work out as they went with more senior candidates. I decided to take a different approach and tailor my resume to each job and narrow the types of jobs I applied too. This has led to an increase in recruiter calls and I'm setting up interviews now.

However it does seem there is still a lot of flux, especially with larger companies who are still trying to allocate headcount. I've had calls with Google that were basically like: "we're interested, but we don't know HC yet, let's circle back in 3 weeks".

I still don’t get why it’s a problem. There should be an advantage in taking the investment needed required to go vertical and leverage that for your entire business.

I don't understand the anti-trust argument against Amazon Retail and AWS. Amazon Retail went vertical by building their own cloud solution and then sold that solution to customers - what's anti-trust about this?

I'd love to understand how the "Plus" naming convention became so popular.

Stripe has announced recent enterprise wins (Amazon, BMW) but these are negotiated deals with less margin. Seems like as they increase their share of enterprise they are simultaneously turning the screw on SMBs and start ups.

I can't wait.

I’ve been binging A History of Europe, Key Battles podcast which traces European History from Alexander to WW1. It really gives a great overview of European history and allows for one to see broad trends. For me, the Industrial Revolution is a product of the Enlightenment, Centralization of states (decline of feudalism) and the competitive nature of Europe (no single hegemony on the power).

Even without the overseas Empires Europe probably would’ve been the birth of the revolution.

Did the Stripe mafia tag this?

I don’t understand the criticism of the Dealbook interview. I want to hear SBF side and found that he’s definitely hanging himself with his public statements. If the media were to “deplatform” him that would be an incredible disservice. I thought ARS asked fair questions.

I’ve been hearing this a lot and while GS is a huge part of SpaceX success this says nothing about Tesla and the way Elon has grown the company.

How embarrassing - VC over the past decade has simply been folks riding market beta, zirp and piggybacking on their friends deals. Maybe this market crunch will weed out the bad bunch but I’m not holding my breath.

I worked for the same large semiconductor company and saw the same thing play out. It was hinted to me by some mentors that I was in a good position because my manager was White as opposed to Indian or Chinese.

Kudos to Apple - I wonder how does this work in practice. Policing discrimination is difficult period, however for better or worse racial and gender discrimination have a visual impact which makes it somewhat easier to identify. From what I've learned there are a lot of niche aspects to caste discrimination and I wonder what sort of guidelines Apple has built internally to monitor this. Does Apple know which caste their employees traditionally belong to?

This is interesting. I believe vegetarianism is higher caste but dessert is a tricky one.

How would a non Indian person even tell? Is it really all in the last name? I've worked with a fair amount of Indian folks with a wide variety of names - how would you even go about determining someone's caste? Based on this article it sounds like most people who end up in Big Tech will be upper caste.

Casey Newton has been doing this lately with decent results.

Charles LeClerc: "first time"?

Can anyone with experience at Google actually explain what's going on here? Assuming that social apps roll up to the same VP or whatever -- shouldn't there have been a decision long ago to simply their app offerings? I can understand separate orgs wanting to establish their turf by proposing a new app but isn't a leader there to stop the madness.