This isn't a great list--it's a lot of fluff, and self-help books masquerading as business content.
There are basically two skills you really need to hone in an MBA. The first are the hard skills/knowledge on finance, accounting, (basic) stats, and (basic) economics. The second is being able to assess and analyze business models, from both strategic and operational angles. The former can be learned in MOOCs, while the latter is best approached with case studies, ideally discussed as a group. I'd honestly suggest trying to start a business/entrepreneurs book club with ~12-20 people to try to replicate that experience over reading books on your own.
We're going to see a lot of smaller startups wind down by the end of the year: I know a few that have either wound down operations, or are in the process of an acqi-hire or asset sale to other firms. Anecdotally, I started hearing the numbers of startups in this position pick up significantly about a month ago (but I don't have a bird's eye view, I just pick up on industry news/gossip).
The rest are default alive, but growing slowly. The rapidly scaling startup model is gone for the time being: no one is trying to double headcount or take over a market segment. (Some AI startups are an exception, but that market is nascent/unpredictable.) Default alive startups can be fodder for acquisitions from larger, established firms as well, if VCs are willing to take a cut on prior valuations. It's not clear to me where those VCs are going to find their 10x power law exits without the kind of growth and scale that used to be the norm; default alive is not a good outcome for investors.
I think “software is eating the world” has evolved into “software is eating barriers to entry.” All these fintech startups are entering a market that software already penetrated years ago--but those first gen tools are clunky, or have so much so much bureaucracy that it’s not cost efficient to work with them. What's interesting about these dev-first fintechs (Stripe, now Lithic) is that they can grow the overall market demand by stripping all that away (and not just extract market share from the first gen software companies).
Wonder what this will mean for fintech exits in general. Will VC fintech funding start to cool if exits by legacy finance companies look to be subject to higher regulatory scrutiny than previously expected?
> "The order, which takes effect Monday, bans Americans from trading the securities of dozens of Chinese companies... The order initially applied to 31 companies and has since grown to 35. Many are private firms with little connection to Wall Street, but a few have American depositary receipts listed on the NYSE. These include three large Chinese telecom carriers, as well as oil-and-gas driller Cnooc Ltd. , which was added to the blacklist in December."
In general you're better off working at a later stage startup if you want reasonable hours. I started working at a startup after it raised a Series A and then left a year after it raised its Series C; in that time I went from working 9:00am-7:30/8:00pm to 9:00am-5:30/6:00pm with the occasional late working day.
The labor of medical residents is something hospital systems exploit during normal times, but that exploitation has severely deepened during the pandemic. At the hospital my partner works at, respiratory therapists and nurses got a $10k bonus for working during COVID; the residents got nothing despite working insane hours in ICU, routinely working more than the legally mandated 90 hours per week. Just because doctors earn more later in their careers does not excuse the level of labor exploitation they are subject to during residency.
Stanford is not the only hospital system to restrict access to the vaccine from frontline residents. I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff before doctors, nurses, and other frontline employees. If vaccine allocation is getting messed up this early on within these closed systems, I can't help but think the next 2-3 phases will go awry as well--what checks are in place to ensure these vaccines get distributed to grocery store workers before people who are willing to pay more to get it early?
Agree with your point about 409(a) disclosures. As an ex-employee with outstanding options in two tech startups I find it crazy that nothing requires firms to annually disclose this information to options holders. And while I was working at these companies there was no mention of the #of shares outstanding and the % allocated to employees—even if you knew your personal percentage stake, you didn’t know how much was diluted with each subsequent round.
Salesforce is already a monopoly if you go by volume of revenue earned from CRM. No one other than small/niche SaaS businesses competes directly for CRM business, and any new CRM startups can't get venture funding because it's considered an untouchable space by VCs. Every other large player they compete with in the CRM space (Hubspot, Zendesk, Oracle) offers a CRM as a side product to their main line of business.
This transaction shouldn't be the catalyst for regulatory action; regulators should have already taken action.
The problem with prestige is that you, yourself, may not care about it, but those around it still do and still use it for social signaling. That affects the rationality of the decisions you make around your career in serious ways.
I think one of the problems around targeting prestige vs. targeting excellence is that we know what it takes to do something prestigious, but excellence is hard to define, and generally comes with much higher risk. Landing a fancy job at Facebook or Google means you tick the box on success without much risk. The criteria that defines success when you start a company, for instance, or work at a non-profit, is much less clear. That compounds the material risk of doing these ventures with a social risk of taking these jobs in the first place. So then what would would it take, in American society, to replace the prestige baiting with an emphasis on achieving actual excellence instead?
One of the lead doctors in the UK is saying life will start to look normal in Spring 2021 (albeit, I assume he was referring to the UK alone). There's good reason for cautious optimism & patience.
Science has done its job; now we need to push for coordination between infrastructure, government, and business to finish it.
1 - the DOJ is targeting a product/feature that Plaid hasn't even released: payment processing. That appears to be the reason other fintechs like Stripe/PayPal opposed the deal. Very odd to see this lawsuit filed on the potential for a future product vs. an existing product Plaid offers already. Not a lawyer but wonder what the precedence for this is.
2 - DOJ is targeting Visa as a monopoly in the online debit transaction space. They don't see them as a Visa-Mastercard duopoly. Interesting to compare the DOJ's decision to call Visa a monopoly & block the acquisition vs. a full on monopoly lawsuit for Google.
3 - Wonder what implications this will have on exits for other fintech firms, and startups generally. Definitely makes going public more attractive if the government is signaling that they're not opposed to putting up significant blocks to prevent acquisitions. Delaying an acquisition like this really will spook employees with stock options & VCs
What are the business risks to a company like Github when their source code has been released in the wild? Startups treat their code like IP, but I imagine it'd still be incredibly difficult for a competitor to try and build the same tool/features even if they have the code as a "cheat sheet" of sorts. Are there other risks (i.e. security vulnerabilities) it causes?
Acceleration stats aside, SUVs are, statistically, much more likely to kill more people--pedestrians and riders alike--than other types of cars. The increasing popularity of SUVs is one of the main reasons behind the rise in pedestrian deaths in the past decade. Given their bulk, they also cause slower traffic in general. Their popularity is a lose-lose for drivers (and everyone else trying to get around) at the end of the day.
I have mixed feelings about this car: on the one hand, it does give me hope that mainstream consumers who are attracted to trucks and SUVs will start to accept EVs as the standard, and the brand cache will accelerate EV adoption overall. It's also a pretty darn cool car; they did a great job with their initial marketing. On the other hand, it's going to suck to drive (or cycle, or walk) alongside people driving these vehicles. We're going to be complaining about selfish Hummer drivers when we see these on the roads again based purely on their behavior as drivers, EV or not.
Personally, I'm hoping we start to see a more diverse mix of electric vehicles on the market, including new kinds of micromobility. The Biro (https://biro.nl) is apparently a very cool car to own among wealthier Europeans. I've heard of a couple electric motorcycle brands that are trying to copy Tesla's playbook as a high end, prestige brand. More efficient delivery vehicles are desperately needed, too. But unfortunately, when other people drive SUVs, it makes it harder for you to drive these other vehicles safely and incentivizes you to drive an SUV, too.
The lineage of technological progress does not follow the same path as commercial development of a pre-existing technology applied to a pre-existing market. We need to be careful not to equate the two. As much as a D2C brand or SaaS startup may brilliantly bring a new market innovation to the fore, they rarely bring new technological innovations--and the potential to expand the pie rather than extract market value--with them. Technological progress is a halting, stop-and-start process, and the market isn't always welcoming to it even in cases when the economics of the innovation make sense. So, yes--if you're working on truly progressive technology, take this sense of purpose the author speaks of to heart. But tech as an industry shouldn't appropriate this purpose when it cannot follow through on it.
In order for internet communities to thrive, you need to install some sense of "psychological safety." I'm using this term in the same vein that Google uses when they say that psychological safety is the foundation needed to build highly effective, high-performing teams. (It has nothing to do with "safe spaces" and whatnot.)
On this thread, a female founder made the top comment with a personal experience relating to the article, only to get inundated by comments telling her she was wrong (from one commenter in particular). Similar reactions were found to the article itself. Yet someone's lived experience is just that; it's their perspective on their own, true personal experience. Calling perspective "untrue" right off the bat is like a form of internet gaslighting; it stifles open dialogue.
If we want have good conversations online--something that's incredibly hard to do, yes--we need to give space to the people who share their experiences. I'm disheartened because I look to Hacker News for open commentary on issues and problems in the tech industry, and it's sad to see that dialogue overrun with people who just want to tell others they're wrong. If it takes locking a thread to improve the overall conversation, and get back a sense of "psychological safety" needed for those good conversations--so be it.
I don't know how to flag this thread to the mods, but--hey mods, can we lock these comments? It's disheartening to see threads on women/minorities in tech on Hacker News get strong, negative reactions from the community like some of what's written here. I would hope the forum can hold itself to higher standards than what I'm reading here.
I blame it on quarantine, but for the past week or so I've really been longing to spend an afternoon in a library. They were one of the best parts of my childhood and teenage years: scanning a shelf and picking out something that catches your eye was a more efficient process, yielding more spontaneity and serendipity and quality, than the existing "recommended books" algorithms that exist on my library's online app. Finding books on similar topics was so much easier with the Dewey Decimal system. It's amazing to me that, decades into the information revolution, we still haven't been able to replicate the efficiencies of that manual sorting system online.
Mothers--the vast majority of mothers, not the aristocracic ones we model our current family structures off of--have always worked. They'd strap the baby on their back and go to the fields to plow or gather the harvest or cook or weave or chop firewood. Motherhood as as a full-time job is a modern invention; historically, it was a side gig.
I'd love to see a startup tackle this problem: think a benefits platform that allows companies to offer daycare as a benefit, or a Wonderschool-like daycare for working parents. Even an improved work from home policy for new parents would go a long way to plugging the talent "leak" that's prevalent right now.
There are basically two skills you really need to hone in an MBA. The first are the hard skills/knowledge on finance, accounting, (basic) stats, and (basic) economics. The second is being able to assess and analyze business models, from both strategic and operational angles. The former can be learned in MOOCs, while the latter is best approached with case studies, ideally discussed as a group. I'd honestly suggest trying to start a business/entrepreneurs book club with ~12-20 people to try to replicate that experience over reading books on your own.