Intel missed GPUs, missed ARM, missed ASICs, missed everything right under their nose for the last 15 years. This from Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive" company, a company that in it's own past pivoted from commoditized RAM production to become the one that won the CPU race, a company perfectly positioned to win the next big cycle as the dominant leader in the industry.
This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.
> They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.
The issues with MBAs and bean counters are that they rarely have intuition about which is which, and only investing in areas a company is already successful in is rarely a winning long term strategy.
“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.”
I’m watching this happen at my current company. It’s tragic, and so obvious.
It's happening at Apple right now. The hand picked successor to Steve was the one who could keep the ship running smoothly, not the one who pushed back with new radical product directions.
I don't disagree with you, but I'd argue the Apple Vision is (was) in that vein (and predictably unsuccessful). I'm also glad they're not charging ahead with AI at the rate everyone else seems to be.
I'll also say one of the best things Apple did in recent years was in-house their CPUs.
The iPhone was essentially enabled by (a) broadly deployed cellular networks, (b) touchscreens, (c) power efficient mobile chips, (d) battery technology.
The iWatch or iPad are probably better examples, as their technological prerequisites existed for quite a while before Apple packed them.
And I’d point out that they’re all fundamentally different physical interfacing methods.
Apple’s last non-physical major products were iTunes (more of a legal / licensing product than a technical one) and the App Store (basically driven by iPhone deployment and lock-in).
Has Apple ever released a groundbreaking non-physical/interface product? MacOS? Final Cut Pro?
It's probably happening to ape right now as well. They haven't released interesting new hardware product like in more than 5 years. Apple vision is interesting but market validated not worth the money they asking.
Worth to compare xiaomi extensive product offering and apple. Even Amazon and Google trying to be more inventive.
You can go to any point in Apple’s history and you’ll find people saying the exact same sentence: they haven’t innovated anything in 5 years.
Almost always exactly that number. Almost always dismissing any product in that period because they’re not normalized yet, and then once they’re normalized then they’re boring and not considered.
It is impossible for Apple to be considered innovative by their standards.
Another innovation is their line of M-series chips. I'm typing this on an M1 Max and this is by far the best combination of industrial design and physical hardware that I have used over the past 20 years. I've had it for four years, three new generations of chips have come out since then and this thing chews through anything I throw at it.
A ground-breaking, industry-changing innovation like the iPhone is like lightning in a bottle. It would be insane to think Apple can capture lightning every 5 years like clockwork.
It's also easy to point to the failures as evidence, but both innovative and boring companies have failures...it's just that innovative cos have the occasional success that makes up for the rest.
(Hell, sometimes it's the same product, just in different eras, like the Newton vs the iPad.)
I'm with you. For some reason, the hardware / tech crowd insist that evil finance people or evil MBAs killed Intel. It's such lazy thinking.
But if you look at the past CEOs, Intel had Krzanich (fab guy), Swan (CFO guy who didn't even want the job but they couldn't find anyone else), and Gelsinger (design guy and Grove disciple) in 11 years. I'll even throw in Jim Keller, not a CEO but still The Chip God, who left in frustration after two years.
What's the one common problem that all of them had despite all their different backgrounds? Getting relevant nodes to market and scaling them up. Their foundry efforts (v1 and v2) have been disastrous. The CEOs or MBAs perhaps were a friction, but they aren't the root cause. Technology Development has been the center of power that the fabs and products revolved around for decades.
I blame Bill and Sohail, principally. I think they essentially orchestrated a coverup of TD’s growing problems in the era of PSO and BK should have known better but was out to lunch.
> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.
Agree with the first sentence, strongly disagree with the second.
Intel's problems over the past 15 or so years certainly wasn't that they had cut away all the "fat" and then into the "muscle and bone". It was they had gotten too fat and directionless. Indeed, one of the quotes from the letter regarding their foundry business is that they invested in the wrong things: "Over the past several years, the company invested too much, too soon – without adequate demand. In the process, our factory footprint became needlessly fragmented and underutilized. We must correct our course." If they had ruthlessly prioritized before (which may have included getting rid of ill-fated initiatives earlier) they would most likely be in a better position today.
Heavily paraphrasing but I believe I remember Ed Catmul saying in his Pixar book having slogans like this are dangerous because you just say the thing and don’t actually do it.
> This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over.
This is a very tiring narrative. People keep complaining about Paul Ottelini missing the iPhone, but his performance at Intel was better than the next 3 CEOs, 2 of which were engineers with roots at Intel.
uv for Python is a game changer, better than anything else out there and solves a lot of the core problems with pip/venv/poetry/pyenv (the list goes on).
I feel like you can write some variant of this comment every few years and just add the previous "best" to the front of the stack of things it's better than.
You're not wrong, this is the nth iteration of python tools that try to solve all the problems of what came before, including whatever the n-1th iteration introduced.
That said, in my personal experience with uv, it solves nearly all of the problems I've come across that were created by other python package management tools. It seems to have been very thoughtfully designed and I think there's a strong chance it'll become the standard, and that there won't need to be more standards after this. We'll see!
> - Execs truly believe that culture and productivity are better in office (i.e., what they actually say in their announcements)
I think this is the reason, but its more nuanced than this. Management finds in-office employees easier to manage. They are more likely to attend meetings, participate in team communication, give status updates, etc. There's much less of a question around "is this person doing the work" if you can see them doing something that looks like work in the office. If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
Management of remote employees is a huge information gathering exercise - very little of the above information is proactively surfaced to you, and instead you have to go looking for it. Frankly, it's just a lot more work for managers.
I realize the above may not be fair to employees, or that the perceptions of managers accurately resemble the truth - just stating what I think is going on.
Well, I'm curious how this management life improvement will manifest as they're also kicking out managers or at least forcing them to have quite a few more reports. At about 10 reports teams can't really be managed well.
> They are more likely to attend meetings ... give status updates, etc.
Weird. If I missed meetings and failed to give status updates (especially ones where my update was explicitly requested) my manager would go find out what the fuck was wrong with me.
> If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
After more than four years of most software folks doing remote work, if your team hasn't established a solid protocol for doing IMs, voice/video chats, and email communications then your management has been fucking off and management deserves all the remote-communications failures they're getting. So, for the rest of this discussion let's assume that management hasn't been fucking off and you actually have a solid communications protocol.
If a coworker is regularly blowing off messages, then that's something that their manager NEEDS to know about. (And it's likely that if they're blowing off messages, they'd also be fucking off if their ass was in a company-provided seat.) However, if a coworker is failing to reply because they're working on something else that's more important then this is another thing that their manager needs to know about and consider reprioritizing your, their, or both people's tasks.
Frankly, I find the "get someone's attention with an IM (whether direct or in a team chat channel) or email" mechanism to be far, far, far better than having someone shatter my chain of thought by coming over to physically interrupt me. I know when I can't handle interruptions, so I can configure my software to not interrupt me. Others can't possibly know when I can't handle interruptions, so they can't help BUT to interrupt me during those periods.
The government also supports bombing the living fuck out of people on the other side of the world. Similarly, someone throwing 100m in the market does not unless they are taxed to do so.
Am I correct in understanding how firms like Jane Street work? They are a market maker - they run an exchange where buyers and sellers can transact. They can arbitrage these trades by connecting buyers and sellers where there is a price discrepancy. Something like that?
Almost always outside of crypto, the market makers and exchanges are different entities. Exchanges maintain order books- who is willing to buy or sell what, at what prices, plus a lot of rules about tie breaking, order visibility, "implied" prices (e.g. sometimes the combination of two products is logically equivalent to a third), etc. When orders "cross"- that is, someone is offering to buy at a price at least as good as someone is willing to sell for, the exchanges matches those participants and they are considered to have traded (though for a mix of technical and regulatory reasons, the trade actually settles two days later)
Market makers generally maintain offers to both buy and sell a product, generally ~all the time the market is open. For example, they might offer to buy up to 30 X for $0.99 or sell up to 70 for $1.01. If small buy and sell orders come in more or less randomly, the market maker will sell about as many X as they buy, for (1.01 - 0.99) a profit of 2c for each set of orders. The trick for a market maker is to offer the best price, so that they get any orders at all, while accounting for the risk that the person buying or selling from them (the liquidity taker) isn't just a random order, but is either market moving or correctly predicting the market is about to move- e.g. a market maker offering to buy a million shares of a X at $0.99 will lose a lot of money to someone who correctly predicted X is about to go to $0.70, and took them up on the full offer.
The big exchanges function much like a traditional exchange and Jane St, Virtu, etc all connect the same way (FIX) to make the market. Really crypto exchanges are just like FX markets.
Very little difference.
They light also be mining, but market making behaves the same as other traditional markets.
> Dietary risk factors (diet high in red meat, low in fruits, high in sodium and low in milk, etc), alcohol consumption and tobacco use are the main risk factors underlying early-onset cancers.
Are women under 50 who are now getting breast cancer really getting it because women are eating more red meat now than 1990? I don't buy it.
Breast cancer is generally thought to be caused by excessively high estrogen levels. There are other environmental and dietary factors that contribute to increasing estrogen levels..eating a burger is not one of them.
> Breast cancer is generally thought to be caused by excessively high estrogen levels.
If by "excessively high", you mean the normal range for pre-menopausal adult women, then yes. Otherwise, citation needed. Afaik, breast cancer is thought to be caused primarily by having breast tissue, and secondarily by the response of breast tissue to normal levels of estrogen. (People with higher estrogen levels than average tend to have more breast tissue, but that's more because they tend to have breasts than because of any impact estrogen has on the rest of the body – unlike people with lower estrogen levels than average, who tend to be men.)
And yes, estrogen blockers / SERMs are a good treatment for some breast cancers, but they don't eliminate breast cancer risk. Even cis men who have relatively low estrogen levels and hardly any breast tissue can get breast cancer.
This article buries the lede, but boy is that lede fascinating.
> Estrogen receptors are known to bind to certain regions of the genome when a cell is stimulated by estrogen. The researchers found that these estrogen-binding sites were frequently next to the zones where the early DNA breaks took place.
Estrogens are important for other things, so (what's effectively) menopause would be a rather impractical preventative measure for most people – but knowledge is still power. I'll have to read the paper sometime.
> Data from the late 2000s showed that the top 10 percent of American drinkers (approximately 24 million people) consumed an average of 74 alcoholic drinks a week, which means those with the most severe form of AUD purchase over half the alcohol bought in the country.
Like most of nutrition "science" the whole thing is a bad joke. There has never been a single high-quality study which showed a significant causative relationship between red meat consumption and worse health outcomes. All of the studies that I've seen have been observational, relied largely on unreliable patient-reported data, had small effect sizes, and failed to control for key confounding variables such as the healthy subject effect.
And what even is "red meat"? Are we talking about corned beef? Bacon? Venison? Grass-fed Argentinian beef? It's such a broad category as to be scientifically meaningless.
I think it's correlation -- people who eat a lot of red meat tend to eat a lot in general -- so it's just a proxy for obesity. That's the usual problem with studies of high protein diets, anyway.
Red meat studies, based on my googling skills a few years back, do not control for the cut of meat or method of preparation, so they are close to useless
I moved to NYC from SF about 4 years ago. I’ve faced a lot of culture shock and I’m not sure I’d recommend it. I don’t think NYC has what it takes to become an innovation hub, the way SF/San Jose/Seattle are. There’s a pervasive small-c conservatism here, an attachment to tradition in so many ways, that makes it tough for interesting, out of the box, uncomfortable ideas to take root. There are tons of lifestyle pros to living here (entertainment, food, people, transportation), but if you’re deeply interested in technology, innovation, pushing boundaries, etc, then you might not find what you’re looking for here.
1. Set an aggressive (but achievable) revenue goal for your first year. If you're having trouble figuring out what that might be, I suggest 500k ARR, because that will put you on a path to raising a series A. You should be able to hit this goal with fewer than 5 people in your first year. You should take a very hard look at your business and what's going wrong if you don't hit that goal.
2. Don't raise too much money for your seed. Plain and simple, you just do not need much money to build and validate your business plan. Whatever your number is, consider whether you'd really be much worse off if you raised half as much.
3. Start by providing professional services before you have a product. This will help you generate some early revenue, it will validate that someone is willing to pay for your services, it'll help you understand the requirements for your product before it's built, and most importantly, it'll help you build early relationships with crucial clients. Streamline these professional services by automating them with your early product. Over time, replace the professional services entirely with your product.
The role of a CTO at a startup (at any size company, but at a startup especially) can be very amorphous and depends on the needs of the business. Sure, a lot of the time the CTO is involved in the technical day-to-day ongoings of the business, but that doesn't need to be the case. If your business is struggling to find product-market fit, or close customers, or figure out product strategy, then your CTO might be preoccupied with those things instead of with technical tasks/management.
This is what happens when the MBAs and the bean counters take over. They cut the fat, then they slice right through the muscle and bone.