I really like your point on the Unicorns "having their cake and eating it too" in regards to public funding.
I am very worried that the technology industry is creating this new capital market that reserves access for the super rich and is completely free from goverment oversight. Are there any points in history that had similar market structure? And if so, how did those markets respond to successes and failures?
It's turned that way because of onerous regulations (Sarbanes-Oxley). We made it way too painful to go public, and now we can't benefit from most of the tech growth
How is average defined? If it's aggregateDollarsCompliance / aggregateRevenue for all companies then small companies are going to pay a much higher percentage versus big companies. Apparently it can be as much as ~1.5% of revenue (http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acspc/appendi.pdf Table 10 shows audit through 2000-2004)
Definitely not an insignificant cost for small companies, especially when you factor in the enormous management overhead
The major advantage of Relay/GraphQL seems to be if you have one monolithic data model for your entire codebase. You are in effect, binding your views directly to your backend. This is great if you are a company like Facebook with a single graph holding all data.
Sadly working as a consultant, using Relay as prescribed offers little use for me as I port from client to client with widely different data models. I am interested in maybe using Relay in parent React components to keep logical separation between my models and views.
This is actually incorrect. The Relay/GraphQL folks explicitly call out the concept of directly exposing your persistence structure via GraphQL as detrimental. Instead, you simply describe what your business models are with GraphQL (regardless of how they're stored), just as you would with a REST api. GraphQL acts as an abstraction layer on top of your persistence. The key difference with GraphQL vs a REST API is that you don't have to commit specific endpoints that return specific models, the clients can simply pick and choose (within the confines of what your GraphQL schema allows).
>>> Of course, there could be a macro collapse in 2018 or 2019, which wouldn’t have time to recover by 2020. I think that’s the most likely way for me to lose.
Macro collapse = Bubble Bursting. The performance of YC's personal portfolio is irrelevant to the idea of bubble bursting if there are other investors running a pump and dump on the industry at large.
I took "macro collapse" to mean some tumultuous event independent of existing market valuations, such as
natural (or man-made) disasters, epidemics, war, etc.
I've never heard the term myself, so I am speculating.
I totally agree with your point. Not only does it bypass the need for an OS update, but it also allows more consistent experiences across all android devices.
While the cynic in me is deathly afraid of Google having complete control over my digital interactions, I find myself in favor of a Google-controlled experience. Google Now is making contextual computing possible in a way that no other company is remotely capable of bringing to the market. For the time being, I invite Google to control Android this way.
valuation of a social network = <# of users> * <$ value/user>
valuation of infrastructure = <# of deployments> * <margin/deployment>
The problem is that we cannot get an accurate estimate for the total value of a social network. We can usually get an accurate count of the number of users, and can even decently predict the number of potential users. However, when it comes to the value per user we have no idea what that number is because the avenues of monitization are so murky. Can instagram get just as much money per user as facebook? How about compared to Flickr users? How about SnapChat? Can we get a reasonable predict which social networks are fads and which are here to stay? To me, the value of a social network is much too foggy to reasonably predict.
The valuation of an infrastructure company is much easier to predict - it's a matter of price setting. If you are charging $100k for a product, and every fortune 500 company needs your product at that price, you can expect to be worth about $500M.
I don't really disagree with anything you say. But I think keeping longevity in perspective is important as well. Instagram is (mostly) at the mercy of fickle tweens and 20 somethings. If Mongo has a good management team they could be in the game long after Instagram becomes a shadow of it's former self, if you're selling to Fortune 500s odds are you aren't selling to them only once.
This is exactly backwards - all of the iOS 7 complaints I've heard so far have been about the UI polish and not the underlying functionality. Polishing a turd would be a beautiful UI in front of a buggy, slow system. Apple didn't ship a polished turd, they shipped a rough, unhewn diamond.
But each major iOS version is slower than the one before, it's just that we got used to it (and loud people on the internet always use recent devices anyway). I think this blog post is a good example of something that is definitely a polished turd. A clean, beautiful UI for a resource hog:
And something else that we have accepted is that Apple's services are what they are. For example, iOS 7 has polished the Photos and Camera apps. But in the big picture, Apple's ecosystem for photos is still a complete mess. There is Photos.app with its own Camera Roll, iPhoto for iOS, Photostreams, Journals, Moments, iPhoto '09 with its own Events, and no sane way to keep everything in sync.
If the stopwatch timer didn't record time properly, I'd see where you're coming from. UI polish isn't going to make fix an error in the timer. But here, all the core functionality works, the clocks show the right time, the stopwatch starts and stops. The main complaint here is about the colour of the buttons, which I agree could do with some polish.
I've just installed the update, and the inconsistency between the countdown timer start button and the stopwatch start button are probably deliberate. I didn't think about it at the time, but starting and stopping a stopwatch should have as precise a timing as possible, adding a fuzz of a "pressed" state for buttons which can respond instantly will reduce accuracy of the stopwatch. But for the countdown timer, accuracy doesn't matter so much, and these buttons work like normal ones, with a pressed state.
So, rather than evidence of bad design, this could be evidence of good design.
I wasn't making a judgement, I was responding to the above comment about the BlackBerry 10. iOS7 is great, and I think this article describes polishing a diamond.
No, I couldn't find about any direct fiber [1] between India and US. But somehow while tracerout'ing, the very next hop after my ISP is a Los Angeles based IP. Another thing to note is that there are three direct fiber connecting India and Singapore but it is not being used by my ISP (BSNL).
My Azure IP shows up in Seattle, yet the connection goes to Amsterdam. What you're seeing is where the owner of the IP is located; that is not necessarily the same as the server.
I am very worried that the technology industry is creating this new capital market that reserves access for the super rich and is completely free from goverment oversight. Are there any points in history that had similar market structure? And if so, how did those markets respond to successes and failures?