David Graeber, the author of the book Bullshit Jobs, walked out of the room twice when Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant confronted him with pitfalls in his reasoning.
Yep, people don't realize that Grarber is just a refresh of the fashionable nonsense trend, particularly in economics.
From the article:
""Those two British and Dutch polls were the only ones I knew when I wrote the book. Since then, there has been a poll that came out at 10 percent. But I'm a bit skeptical about that, because the other two polls matched. It depends very much on what questions you ask people. In any case, I think that more detailed work is needed. '"
The part I highlighted in Italic seals the deal: the guy is either blissfully ignorant, or wildly dishonest.
Interesting, and really disappointing— I loved Graeber's book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. This makes me wonder if he also avoided criticism when writing it.
Most surprising thing about this article: Diane von Furstenberg, fashion designer and wife of billionaire media entrepreneur Barry Diller, was a proofreader.
The author does write about GE's business problems. GE capital, as mentioned above. And the Alstom acquisition, which was a too expensive bet on the wrong horse.
In march of 2016, Asana also raised $50 million. Sam Altman led that round, at a valuation of $550 million. Crunchbase wrongfully states that YC led it.
If Sam Altman's investment exits add such amounts to his bank reserve that the reserve gets bigger than $10 million, he spends the surplus above that $10 million on 'improving humanity,' which I read as charity. (1)
It's also badly written, with many me's an I's, like
'I squint at the plant names that have been rendered into Dutch.'
and uninteresting facts about the appearance of the scientist, like:
'Meis is a big man, almost a foot taller than me, broad-shouldered and bullet-headed with an exuberant laugh. Eyeing the boxes, though, he looks solemn.'
> and uninteresting facts about the appearance of the scientist, like: 'Meis is a big man, almost a foot taller than me, broad-shouldered and bullet-headed with an exuberant laugh. Eyeing the boxes, though, he looks solemn.'
I'd seriously like to know how many of today's journalists were at one point creative writing majors, as it seems like every year we get more articles with this kind of narrative fluff.
Just look at the first paragraph:
> The glass-walled landscaping center on the road south of Nijmegen looks like a gardener’s dream of heaven. My fingers tingle as I thread my way through stands of soaring bamboo, drifts of asters, and lanes of rhododendrons, tempted to grab a trowel and forget what I’m here for.
It was a dark and stormy night...
So much "in depth" journalism today starts out with this kind of storytelling, and I'm sure that this is rationalized as a way of "grabbing the reader's attention", but I'm not sure it's doing the actual content of the story a service. It might grab the attention of casual readers, but somehow I doubt that people actually curious about science really want to sift through a bunch of words that basically say nothing.
This is almost certainly the result of how popular articles/books by Malcolm Gladwell, etc. have been, which goes back a long ways (The Tipping Point was published in 2000), rather than a prevalence of journalists who were creative writing majors.
The tactic, though effective, has unfortunately become annoyingly common.
> The tactic, though effective, has unfortunately become annoyingly common.
'Annoyingly common' is obvious. I would be interested in opinions from people in the industry if it is effective.
I know for a fact I can't bare to work my way through these style pieces; I'm also aware that there are publications that almost exclusively use it, so I'm guessing there is a large enough group of people who want to be told a story, rather than want to learn something. Is it a majority?
I notice a similar style issue in TV documentaries. Too often modern ones are about the presenter, with the majority of screen time showing the presenter, sometimes interacting with the actual subject but often enough just talking about themselves or unrelated subjects. Given that I think there is general consensus about what some of the great documentaries are, it seems that they are not even attempting to be good documentaries and are instead just attempting to make light entertainment.
I'd say there's been long-form journalism that people have appreciated for a long time that describes people, places, life history, and the journalist's impressions. For example, Berton Roueché and John McPhee have both written well-regarded long-form science journalism in The New Yorker that touches on some of these sorts of things, and not just "TLDR; it was lupus" or "apparently, making an atomic bomb no longer requires the resources that it once did". Both of them prominently featured the people who were responsible for discoveries or investigations and tried to give a sense of their stories and their character.
But maybe there's a trend toward too much purple prose in journalism over time, or maybe people specifically want a place to find out about important new discoveries in a less biographic or experiential way that still doesn't require much technical background.
> "I'd seriously like to know how many of today's journalists were at one point creative writing majors, as it seems like every year we get more articles with this kind of narrative fluff."
I don't want to get off topic, but I wanted to respond to this. For many years I've been saying that the problem with the media is most journalists are actually "failed" English Lit majors. That is, without an adequate career path via Eng Lit many turn to journaliam.
The problem is fiction and journalism are polar opposites. Is it any wonder mainstream media is so unreliable? And untrusted?
YC has funded approximately 1,900 companies. 93 are valued at $100 million or more. 19 are valued at $1 billion or more. Stripped from nuance, one could say that if you get accepted into YC, you have a 5 percent chance of building a $100 million company, and a 1 percent chance of building a $1 billion company. That's impressive.
Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more.
At least until three years ago, it hasn't passed funding on a single billion dollar company (1).
Also, rumours are that Coinbase is raising money at a valuation of $8 billion (2). This is the same valuation that the company supposedly gave itself when it acquired earn.com in april this year (3).
> Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more.
Seedcamp (London) has backed 3 unicorns: Revolut [$1.7B], UiPath [$3B], and TransferWise [$1.6B], and that's just a venture firm I know off the top of my head. While these days they're closer to a first-round fund (with a similar economic deal to YC) than an accelerator, most of those were from back when they were operating in a proper accelerator model.
I suspect there are probably a few other accelerators around the world that have unicorns in their portfolio - you just don't hear about them because they're not local.
Suppose each founder owns 10% at $1b and only count the unicorns. Graduating from YC would represent $1b * 10 % * 1% = $1m of value.
Suppose that applying to YC gives you a 1% chance of graduating, this would mean that just applying represents $10k of value!
Of course it doesn't work like this, you need to apply bayesian statistics. Of the great applications almost all get accepted and of the bad applications almost none do.
The _average_ Y Combinator company is worth ~100M [1]
The _median_ Y Combinator company, however, is worth closer to $0 (the majority of YC companies don't get to a Series A).
This just highlights how counter-intuitive power-law distributions are.
[1] Calculation:
Discard pre YC'17 companies for the purposes of this calculation, as these are still too early stage for meaningful analysis. Brex, Faire and Atrium are the only YC '17 or later on this list.
Numerator: The top 100 companies have a combined valuation of ~$110B, according to this list.
In the most successful class (AirBnB in W09), the majority of companies went to $0. In the most successful recent class (W14), the median startup raised a seed round but nothing else in four years.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een-ongeloof...