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It's different in SF. The homeless are much more "in your face" than in any other city I've been to by a long shot e.g. in NYC the homeless mostly keep to themselves and aren't very aggressive in my experience. In SF they are very aggressive, many with mental issues, talking to themselves or yelling at others, and appear to be on drugs. I've never visited a city where they are so many homeless who are simply passed out in the middle of the sidewalk on the hard ground with people in suits stepping over them downtown. It's also more "visible" because services that cater to homeless are all located downtown.

I live in Castro, but obviously like many spend a lot of time downtown for work.

Sure, there are families in the outer neighborhoods, but it's different in the sense that those are mostly families that have lived in SF for generations. Good luck trying to raise a family as a newcomer on the reported median household income for SF of ~$78k.

CA and Bay Area will be fine, economically speaking, but at least from my perspective we've already reached a tipping point where it's become so expensive for your average family that it's created this strange, dystopian atmosphere (in SF) where you have obscene wealth next to in-your-face poverty, there are basically no kids because no one can afford to raise families here, streets downtown are lined with human feces and used needles, $1m gets you a small 1-bedroom fixer upper in a bad area, diversity (in profession/race/ages) is extremely limited, and people are generally stretched/anxious due to cost of living.

San Francisco is just...dystopian at this point. In-your-face poverty mingling with obscene wealth, human feces and used needles everywhere downtown/SoMa, decrepit 1 bedroom homes that sell for $1m, very few families/kids, and to make things worse stores that would be open til 10pm in any other city don't seem to stay open past 5-6 (at least in the Castro).

Edit: I thought it was weird for me as a single youngish male to "care" that there are kids and families in a city, but you're reminded when you go to basically any other city how much "realer" a city feels when you actually see families (moms, dads, kids, grandparents) walking around and enjoying each other's company and life in general.

Lyft can be profitable today if they wanted to. The only reason they aren't is because they are fueling growth by propping up the supply of drivers through driver signup bonuses.

Ride sharing is generally supply constrained (meaning there's plenty of demand but drivers are in limited supply). If they stopped paying driver bonuses to expand in new markets or maintain share of drivers in mature markets, then the number of drivers would likely start plateauing or declining (due to high turnover) -> prices would increase and/or rider wait times would increase -> rider demand would fall -> growth would stall.

In short, they're choosing growth over profitability because that's what investor want to see. As soon as they choose profitability (which they might have to after IPO), their growth will come to a halt and their share price will tank. Watch.

I'm on insurance, and to be very real I have gotten bills in the past from providers that I never ended up paying. The reality is that this is more common than not...providers only collect some small % of the part of the bill the patient (and not insurance company) is responsible for. They usually end up selling this debt for pennies on the dollar to collections agencies.

Do I feel guilty? Not really. But the lesson is that the number you see on some bill from a hospital or provider is not non-negotiable, and in general unlike the IRS they don't exactly have any power to garner your wages to collect.

If you find yourself in a position where you're getting some ridiculous bill, you should definitely hire a trusted lawyer to negotiate down a bill on your behalf.

There's one for student debt: https://www.trutv.com/shows/paid-off-with-michael-torpey/ind...

There is actually a real game show on TruTV like this except for student debt

https://www.trutv.com/shows/paid-off-with-michael-torpey/ind...

I wonder if Amazon will get into the wholesale game i.e. massive warehouse stores to compete with Costco and Sam's Club that you can get into with a (super) prime membership?

It is because they need some blockchain analytics provider (in-house or external) for every chain they list as a compliance prerequisite. Chainalysis/Elliptic only have a few available.

Man I can't wait for this wave of "VC as pseudo social media philosopher" to end.

Might be the wifi network if you logged in while at work...

The reality is that Coinbase through their due diligence process had to have known about these ties and how they may have been perceived by the media/crypto community and yet proceeded to buy it anyway because they are desperate to list new tokens to shore up declining revenue.

The deal was already signed...Coinbase can't just back out because they miscalculated the backlash despite the background of the founders being well known. The acquired team probably just gets to vest immediately and leave Coinbase without having to work for them.

The actual startup dream

In what market are they remotely close to being a "monopoly"??

If there's a ridesharing co that is actually a monopoly it's probably Grab in SEA.

Actually, I'm interpreting it as "we're making this purposely ambiguous because we actually negotiated a sweetheart exit deal that allows them to continue vesting stock without working or staying on as a paid advisor/consultant."

I'm confused by your logic. Isn't the median home price in the Peninsula a multiple of the median home price in SF or OAK?

Weather in NYC is pretty bad.

SF has one of the lowest rates of kids of any major metro

Anyone else working in tech for the past few years having more frequent existential crises about what they have enabled?

I have never worked at FB, but I've worked at a few well known yet somewhat controversial companies (in fintech, marketplaces, etc.) that I sometimes feel uneasy about.

People leave all the time...especially anyone who is late 20s/early 30s knows plenty of friends who move out.

I suspect the VC industry itself will be disrupted at some point (the irony of the VC industry is that the biz model has remained basically the same for 50 years when everything else has changed).

It will become incrementally easier to raise money from non-traditional sources at better terms as "accredited investor" laws are relaxed e.g. through a Security Token Offering.

I think it basically became the year when the "norm" for talent in SF Bay Area was 1) work at a FAANG or 2) work at a late stage private co (like Uber).

Working at an early stage startup was already risky, but the opportunity cost sort of peaked around then and remains high.

Unless the opportunity cost noticeably drops (i.e. a massive recession that causes a 50%+ drop in public stock market) I think smaller startups will thrive in places like NYC more so than SF.

And 50% of people living in SF want to leave https://sf.curbed.com/2019/2/20/18233498/poll-2019-leaving-s...

I live in a world without coke and sugar just fine...

Let's be real...local or not soda is objectively terrible for you.

Would love to see something like a "YC ETF" where an investor could invest, say, $50k, in a portfolio of YC startups.

I'm looking at https://yclist.com/ (no idea how updated or accurate it is) and seeing a lot of companies are have been around for years and not dead or acquired that I've never heard of. I'm mostly referring to cos that have raised another seed or series A for a few mil and then just sort of lingered. I do not know of every 100 cos how many successfully raise another seed or series A beyond what YC provides (I would assume many do)

There are new funding models that have popped up just in the last month or so e.g. Earnest Capital and TinySeed. I suspect for many of these companies they would be better served by those models, which vary but are essentially designed with no expectation that the company must march toward "Unicorn" status to be considered a success.

Maybe this is partially a personality thing, but my biggest fear with starting a VC-backed co is that you're effectively trapped as soon as you accept money even if your company goes nowhere. If your burn rate is low, you could just exist for years without accomplishing much of anything.