
Yogababble - JumpCrisscross
https://www.profgalloway.com/yogababble
======
JackFr
Just last night I was at an alumni fundraiser for the football program of my
alma mater. It's a medium sized liberal arts school, while they've had
football for a hundred years, they're known for academics far more than
football.

After some hors d'ouevres and cocktails, the head coach took a microphone and
came with his ask. What he said was fascinating. He had been doing this for a
number of years. About 5-6 years into his tenure, he said, at one of these
fundraisers, an alumnus who was general in the US Army came up to him
afterwards and said "You're absolutely terrible at this. You spoke for 15
minutes and you never mentioned winning football games. You're the football
coach. Don't apologize for wanting to win football games. That's your job for
God's sake. These people are here cause they're alumni who like football. They
want to win games."

Needless to say, the coaches pitch is now "Here's how we win games if you give
us money." But I think the general had the right idea. Companies shouldn't be
embarrassed or shy away from talking about how they want to make money,
especially if they're pitching to investors.

~~~
saas_sam
As a tech co person on the business side, let me tell you it is consistently
amazing to me how much resistance I witness to the idea of a company making
money. There's a huge confusion going on right now about how business works,
the utility of profit, what capitalism is (and why it isn't [ _gasp_ clutch
your pearls now!] evil... Especially in the Bay Area, the companies I have
worked with and in are chock full of people who are opposed to the systems
they rely on and have a vague idea that Something Like Communism is the "right
way" to operate.

~~~
dharmon
I think you're misreading the aversion to making money.

Tech entrepreneurs in SV have been trained for years to avoid revenue, profit,
etc at all costs. The reason? Because as soon as you have profit, the
conversation and metrics at fund-raising time are entirely different, and
rather than lala land they will be rooted in a reality that no one wants to be
in.

I've seen many founders, even some with decent revenue and growth, actively
steering away from that to avoid valuation based on traditional metrics.

~~~
inimino
You're both right. The aversion to showing positive numbers (because a
negative number could become anything!!) is real, and so is the vague
uneasiness and deep unawareness of how capitalism works among people working
within a system it created.

~~~
roenxi
The capitalists are in a very awkward spot after 2008. A motivated anti-
capitalist can quite plausibly point out that the system as it stands after
the financial crisis is more about protecting the rich with free bail outs and
rules changes than securing material prosperity by keeping competent people in
charge of resources.

Defending capitalism will start being a little like defending communism - a
great idea in theory; where is the evidence that it can be implemented without
succumbing to corruption? It'll never be as bad because it doesn't come with
the death toll, but people don't seem to take that part of the argument
seriously.

I'm among the most hardened capitalists I've seen on HN but I really don't see
the credible counter-argument to the divergence of wages and productivity
combined with spiralling asset price inflation. Something needs to be done to
make it easier for people who work hard but don't like risk to tap into the
rewards of capitalism.

I'm not sure what physical metric to turn to to show poor people are holding
steady, let alone seeing an improved quality of life.

~~~
koonsolo
Like most things, it's not a matter of extremes, it's a matter of balance.

~~~
rapind
Agreed, but that seems to be a big problem with capitalism. It's rather
difficult to reign in. The class gap and wage disparity it's created over time
becomes so large it starts to look pretty ridiculous and hard to ignore, so
there's naturally going to be lash-back.

No doubt all systems have issues, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be
critical of capitalism and _gasp_ maybe try to improve it... without being
labeled a "Communist" (in response to saas_sam's dismissive comment). IMO that
label's starting to lose some of it's McCarthyism weight anyways...

P.S. It's not just the Bay Area questioning ball's out capitalism.

------
olooney
I don't know anything about mission statements, valuations, IPOs, or yoga. I
do know a little about regression, though, and that regression line is pure
bullshit. (Ironic, considering what they're purporting to analyze.) The
downward trend is mostly due to a single high leverage[1] outlier[2] in the
upper left. Take that out, and you still have a datset that not only exhibits
heteroskedasticity[3] (much higher variance on the left than on the right)
which invalidates many of the assumptions of ordinary least squares
regression[4]. Even if it didn't, the slope is so mild, the sample size so
small, and the residual variance so large that's there's no way you're going
to be able to reject the hypothesis that the true slope is equal to zero[5].

I recommend you throw away the scatter plot and regression line and instead
use Kendall's tau[6], a non-parametric statistic which considers only the rank
order of each variable and is therefore appropriate for ordinal variables like
the 0-9 "bullshit" scale.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_(statistics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leverage_\(statistics\))

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity)

[4]: [https://statisticsbyjim.com/regression/heteroscedasticity-
re...](https://statisticsbyjim.com/regression/heteroscedasticity-regression/)

[5]:
[https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/344006/understandi...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/344006/understanding-
t-test-for-linear-regression)

[6]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall_rank_correlation_coeff...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall_rank_correlation_coefficient)

~~~
inimino
Can't a guy throw a joke graph up in his post mocking startup bullshit without
folks going full Nate Silver on him?

> Ironic,

Yes.

~~~
olooney
On Hacker News? _Not if I can help it._ :)

------
davidw
I think a lot of people are missing the point.

As someone who was there when the dot com bubble collapsed, I think part of
his point is that sooner or later, companies based purely on BS, or that have
high valuations because they've BS'ed people... are going to come back down to
earth.

Judging what is BS and how much there is, is not something you can do in a
real scientific way.

~~~
weare138
I was around then too and what's happening now is so much worse than then it
borders on the absurd and the coming crash will be unimaginably and absurdly
worse.

~~~
hi5eyes
Peloton ipo'd at 8 billion.... literally a bike and a tablet app

I wasn't around during dotcom but plenty of people my age can tell this market
is absurd

~~~
comicjk
Peloton has almost a billion a year in revenue, and rising fast. I don't have
a dog in this fight, but I don't see that a valuation of 8 billion is
obviously wrong.

~~~
Nextgrid
You can have infinite revenue if you sell dollar bills for $0.50. What matters
is profits, not revenue, something the majority of these bullshit VC-funded
startups overlook because they don't actually have a viable business model and
hope for a miracle.

------
kaycebasques
> According to LinkedIn, there are more corporate comms personnel working for
> Bezos at Amazon (969) than journalists working for Bezos at the Washington
> Post (798).

Holy shit.

Edit: I interpreted that as 969 working on Bezos' personal brand. On second
glance they probably just mean 969 corporate comms personnel in Amazon. In
which case I retract my "holy shit"

~~~
umeshunni
Yeah, this feels like a bad comparison.

One is a major international company with close to a million employees,
hundreds of billions in revenue and operations in a 100+ countries.

The other is a small media firm based in one country with a thousand employees
and a few hundred million in revenue.

To make matters worse, Amazon has a reasonable mission statement - to build a
place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to
buy online, whereas WaPo's mission statement is "Democracy Dies in Darkness".
Yogababble score - 10/10

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _One is a major international company...the other is a small media firm
> based in one country_

The point is a single company's PR force rivals a major newspaper's entire
staff. The Fourth Estate is outmanned and outgunned.

> _WaPo 's mission statement is "Democracy Dies in Darkness"_

No, it's a seven-principle list [1]. Stringing together points one and two, it
is "to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained...concerning
the important affairs of America and the world."

"Democracy dies in darkness" is a tag line.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ask-the-
post/wp/2016/01/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ask-the-
post/wp/2016/01/01/policies-and-standards/#missionstatement)

~~~
zaroth
Can the Yogababble scale go higher than 10?

------
Animats
Microsoft early mission statement: "A computer on every desk, running
Microsoft software". They changed that because they _achieved_ that.

~~~
jv22222
With regard to OS, they held a 90%+ market share in the 90's.

Today they retain a 70%+ market share of desktops and laptops.

And with Surface they are a top 5 hardware manufacturer as well.

It's impressive.

------
lambdasquirrel
> According to CNBC, this week the We board fired CEO Adam Neumann. No, the
> board didn't fire him. The media, academics, and math fired him. The board
> enabled him and either was a co-conspirator in the fraud, or they were just
> idiots.

Can we be sure that they are idiots? Given how much control founders have over
their companies these days, we don't know how much they had their hands were
tied. They may not have been able to do anything until the tide of opinion (on
the board) turned against the CEO, to the extent that even the CEO's allies
decided they needed to save their own butts.

Between We and FB, we might start to see the pendulum start to swing back the
other way, with regards to founder control of companies.

------
cmroanirgo
A strange article. There's some good information in there but he seems to
undermine himself, leaving me confused as to his intent:

> _When firms are still searching for a viable business model, the temptation
> to go full yogababble gets stronger, as the truth (numbers, business model,
> EBITDA) needs concealer.

...

My new firm, Section4, was going to "Restore the Middle Class." My colleagues
rolled their eyes so hard I wondered if they’d been coached by my 12-year-old
son. Then we were "NSFW Business Media" or "Streaming MBA." We’re trying to
figure it out. Next week, I'll tell my board we've assembled a group of
talented people, are producing short-form video and podcasts, and hope to
educate and inform. We’ll go from there. _

~~~
WhyKill
He's demonstrating that he ate his own dog food. Instead of "restoring the
middle class" (bullshit), they are producing short form video and podcats (not
bullshit).

------
yumraj
It'd be interesting to do DL/NLP sentiment analysis of S-1s and quarterly
reports and correlate that with market returns to see if someone can come up
with a model to predict IPO, and stock, success/failure.

Though I'm sure some people are already looking into that.

~~~
thess24
Lazy Prices [1] is a paper I was looking at for a while (I work on a Quant
Research team) that does this in a simple way and the authors had good
results. It takes the changes in language in some key sections of financial
fillings as signals.

[1]
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1658471](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1658471)

~~~
yumraj
Thanks for pointing to the paper, haven't read it yet.

But it sounds pretty interesting, especially if you correlate it with things
like insider's tradings (both buy and sell) and of course whatever external
events there may be.

Talking of quant, would you mind sharing what is your typical stack,
especially non-proprietary, non-confidential, stuff such as languages and
libraries.

~~~
thess24
I don't do anything low latency so its mostly the common scientific python
stack -- numpy, pandas, sklearn, etc. Mostly linux, lots of Spark, some R and
C#. We're really flexible on what we can use to solve our problems but the
team has pretty much settled on python as both developers and analysts can
work together more easily.

------
ebg13
> _The chart below summarizes our research._

The chart is some cherrypicked bullshit that ignores the importance of outlier
rejection. Put your thumb over Google, Zoom, and Tesla and then look at the
chart again.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _The chart is some cherrypicked bullshit that ignores the importance of
> outlier rejection_

The vertical axis is the author's subjective opinion on a scale of "I’m a
professor of marketing who likes dogs" to "I am a spirit Dawg that unlocks
self-actualization." That should give away that it's, at best, a back-of-the-
envelope gut check.

"This thesis doesn't fall apart on basic scrutiny" is the best point it can
make. Which, given it's leaps and bounds more scrutiny than Theranos or WeWork
got, is part of the joke.

~~~
ebg13
> _" This thesis doesn't fall apart on basic scrutiny" is the entirety of its
> point_

The thesis DOES fall apart on basic scrutiny. The chart represents the
entirety of the exploration, and the chart doesn't support shit. Minus the
outliers, the chart presents a conclusion entirely different from the
author's.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _The thesis DOES fall apart on basic scrutiny_

Based on what?

To be serious for a moment, it has been repeatedly found that "prospectus
conservatism is positively related to underpricing, with the relation more
pronounced for technology than nontechnology firms" [1]. While the ability for
"prospectus conservatism...to predict the firm’s post-IPO operating
performance" has historically been limited to non-tech IPOs, it's plausible
for that effect to now incorporate all IPOs.

> _the chart doesn 't support shit_

The chart's underlying "data" are shit. It's "guy rates mission statements."
It's a joke.

(Or maybe it's not. Bullshit isn't something one can objectively measure. It's
dependent on context and the specifics of the observer.)

[1]
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Grace_Hao/publication/2...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Grace_Hao/publication/255728167_The_Effect_of_Issuer_Conservatism_on_IPO_Pricing_and_Performance/links/5bc63fbb92851cae21a85a99/The-
Effect-of-Issuer-Conservatism-on-IPO-Pricing-and-Performance.pdf)

~~~
ebg13
That's a fair response. I've given you an up triangle.

------
the_watcher
Not really fair to include Peleton in his analysis of one year post-IPO
performance based on a single day of trading. Particularly because it's fairly
well-known that IPO pop isn't really any kind of useful indicator.

~~~
kgwgk
An IPO flop is more reliable, though.

~~~
the_watcher
Not really, no. An IPO flop generally just means the bank screwed up.

------
weare138
"WeChrist shat in the punch bowl."

If you had to sum up Adam Neuman and WeWork in one line, I challenge anyone to
beat that.

------
nkurz
Would it be fair to read his argument as saying that companies that exaggerate
their prospects sell at higher IPO prices than companies that are more
conservative in their marketing? Since the company's goal is to raise as much
money as possible at the IPO while selling off as little of the company as
possible, this would indicate that exaggeration is a good strategy, and one
might predict that this trend of hyper-hyping is going to continue for a
while. Sure, over the long term the company still needs to succeed, but if you
are an pre-IPO investor who is holding for the long-term, as long as the IPO
is successful, you'd probably prefer for the company to have more money in the
bank over seeing a large post-IPO jump.

~~~
cbanek
> companies that exaggerate their prospects sell at higher IPO prices

If anything I think it's that they easily raise VC money, which then inflates
the IPO price because people compare it against what VC's paid for it. WeWork
VC value was about 4x what the IPO marked thought it might be worth.

> raise as much money as possible at the IPO

Seems more like the smart money is looking for dumb money to follow it, and a
way to convert their VC held shares back into dollars via a liquidity event.

But yes, a large post-IPO jump could be considered money left on the table,
since people will pay for it, but the company didn't get it - the people
buying at the IPO price then selling pocket that money.

------
colordrops
I'm confused, what does yoga have to do with this?

~~~
umeshunni
Yoga, as its practiced in the West, is mostly a fitness program. Yoga teachers
in the West, however, mix pseudo-scientific or New Age BS into their practice
("unite the chakras", "harness your inner goddess", "elevate your spirit") to
make themselves be seen as being more than fitness instructors.

I think the point to author is trying to make is that companies often add BS
to their mission statements to 'elevate' themselves from a regular company
into a lifestyle.

references: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yoga-
babble](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yoga-babble)
[https://omyogadiva.com/2016/03/25/yoga-babble-muddies-up-
the...](https://omyogadiva.com/2016/03/25/yoga-babble-muddies-up-the-yoga-
experience/)

~~~
rolha-capoeira
> Yoga teachers in the West, however, mix pseudo-scientific or New Age BS into
> their practice ("unite the chakras", "harness your inner goddess", "elevate
> your spirit") to make themselves be seen as being more than fitness
> instructors.

You're right about the author's point, but this is a gross generalization and
is unfairly dismissive of a lot of different practices that people find
personally beneficial.

~~~
EdwardDiego
People can find any belief system, no matter how unfounded in reality,
personally beneficial, look at Scientology.

Doesn't mean it's based on anything coherent or real.

~~~
aarpmcgee
When the word "real" is used as it is here, I sense that it often has nothing
to do with reality, and more to do with some kind of arbitrary consensus-
reality-concept, which may or may not have anything to do with reality. This
is useful insofar as it allows me personally to occasionally "fiddle with the
knobs" on my own perspective, which is easier to do when I don't actually
believe in it.

------
drchewbacca
I like this guys youtube channel.(I think it's the same guy anyway.)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjksNqQAVbA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjksNqQAVbA)

~~~
MaysonL
He also does a great podcast with Kara Swisher:
[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pivot/id1073226719](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pivot/id1073226719)

------
chvid
There is yogababble and there is trash talking.

There is ying and there is yang.

Mr Galloway is very entertaining and he has got his scalp. But ultimately he
has the same flaw as the yogaistas.

Overconfidence.

------
joncp
How do you protect yourself from someone that somehow rolled a 30 for charisma
and also has no scruples? Calling people idiots when they've fallen under the
spell of such a person isn't helpful. What would be helpful is this: suggest
ways to adjust the system so that cults of personality can't gain traction
when the stakes are high.

~~~
inimino
Maybe looking at people's character as demonstrated by their actions rather
than acting like numbers and metrics are all that matters.

------
homonculus1
That graph has a pretty weak correlation. If you remove the two outliers for
stock performance it's basically a cloud.

~~~
the_watcher
It's also misleading in that at least 7 of the data points have not traded
publicly for a full year, and one of them has literally only traded for one
day. And, there's no adjustment for market conditions. So it's as valuable as
plotting the average height of a cornstalk at harvest, but using one that was
just planted, one that was planted a month ago, 3 that were planted 4 months
ago, 2 that were planted 8 months ago, and 7 at harvest (3 of which in a
drought year, 3 in a record setting year, and one in an average year).

~~~
reilly3000
I don't think you're wrong about that factor, but I also don't think that
chart is possible any other way given that many of those IPOs are so recent.

Also, the other axis is entirely subjective. The main point is well-taken that
high-minded fluff rarely translates to high-performing firms.

~~~
the_watcher
You could just use companies that have been public for more than 1 year. And
you absolutely could survey 50 people about the mission/business alignment and
get a useful number that would actually examine the point he's making. The
main point is that he wants to make a certain point, but not back it with any
kind of data beyond cherry-picking to make it.

------
rdiddly
He brought up Chamberlain's pact with Hitler to make a point, but I also ended
up seeing a coincidence: What Chamberlain did was called appeasement, and
selling off the We jet is appeasement.

------
peterwwillis
'Yogababble' is more than a bit offensive to people who take Yoga as a
spiritual and religious practice seriously. It shows how little the author
knows about the culture they're referencing.

