Do you think the paid features for enterprise use is enough to support a VC model? (How do you avoid this becoming Quora (which also had an enterprise proposed use case)?)
What was the decision process around taking this a VC route vs not?
Jude from Golden here. Yes, I believe we can have the top 50k companies of the world as paying clients and help power open knowledge for the world. We have paying customers today on that front.
The decision for VC includes the following reasons:
1. Making this happen at scale / quicker.
2. Having people like Marc from a16z, FF and Gigafund adding valuable insight in order to pull this off.
there was nothing inherently wrong with the older "electroshock therapy." in fact it worked quite often than you'd think. but obviously this we have more precise targeting and result metrics now.
Also electroshock therapy ran at much higher currents, while current (hehe) thought is that milliamps as low as 2 over the scalp is enough for therapeutic effects. tho ofc there are those that disagree that 2 mA is enough to penetrate the skull.
ECT, electroconvulsive therapy, actually is tremendously effective for refractory depression. I’ve known several individuals for whom it made all the difference.
It comes with massive memory loss; this leads me to think that the antidepressant effects of NMDA antagonists, cannabis, and ECT are all mediated by memory modulation.
To the point, it would be amazing if these benefits could be realized without nuking the brain.
I have no doubt ECT is very beneficial for many people with refractory depression, but I suspect the memory loss may be correlation and not causation.
I think the memory loss might be unnecessary collateral damage, perhaps due to a lack of precision, and future ECT advances may reduce the memory loss while retaining the antidepressant effects. I'm also not aware of any research indicating that the antidepressant effects of cannabis or NMDA antagonists like ketamine are connected to memory. But I'm definitely no expert in either field.
You can't claim to be as a Service if you don't want all the downsides associated with it.
You can sell tools as is (not as a service), and if it is used for nefarious purposes, your hands are morally and legally clean. you can seek to make that specific tool illegal, but until then, everything's fair game, e.g. you can try to ban automatic weapons but you can't charge companies for selling them.
my research in undergrad and applications for grad school were for computational neuroscience (sort of the whole what would Feynman do if he was still alive route)
1. Didn't get into as many programs as I wanted.
2. East Coast schools even explicitly told me that wetlabs were more important (I semi-agree).
3. West Coast schools were all being gutted for ML/Data science work.
4. all the post docs and grad students I had worked with had switched to doing ML
I deferred for a year and worked at a biotech startup doing neural network simulations to prove the product worked and scrappy hardware startup things.
I've since been at a startup doing NLP for the last two years.
Don't regret the degree which to me is like a STEM liberal arts degree.
Hmm for some reason I thought this was already the case actually.
I was looking at Ally CD rates a few weeks ago, and I saw an inversion there and I just chalked that up to the CD rates being dependent on the yield curve.
There was a less extreme yield curve inversion a few months ago, which is likely what you're referring to. But it wasn't so far reaching as the current inversion, which puts the 1 year Treasury over the 10 year.
Because SF is a town, not a city. And with the cost of doing business only on the rise there isn't room for places to be open during non-peak hours anymore. The number of coffee shops and restaurants that stay open later has noticeably decreased in my 19 years of living in SF.
Believe me I wish it were different but there are diners that are open late.
Dave Chappelle goes to Grubsteak when he's in town and they're open till 4AM. Or you can go hang out with the USF students at the 24hr Starbucks over in Laurel Hts.
Enjoy that basement with haphazardly placed shelves while you can. Before long, an ADA lawsuit will wipe it out. Lawyers and disabled people team up to do this on purpose, searching for places to sue. It's not normally a disabled person randomly showing up and being inconvenienced; this is an industry. For example, in my neighborhood every business on a particular street got hit all at once. These teams know exactly what to look for, and will use the smallest insignificant violation to start a lawsuit.
people here complaining about the wasted packaging. EOD accounting probably will still show it is net waste, but remember that Japanese people will reuse and repair everything.
They will actually consider the first 2 R's much more than Americans do.
Do you think the paid features for enterprise use is enough to support a VC model? (How do you avoid this becoming Quora (which also had an enterprise proposed use case)?)
What was the decision process around taking this a VC route vs not?