Doesn't matter. Subreddits create vast islands of value. A single sub overrun with bots is quarantined effectively.
That is why Reddit is one of my favourite social sites. It is algorithmic but if you go to r/assholedesign you get asshole design. (and an anal mod who keeps it like that) Etc.
"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth."
Yes, this is what every venture capitalist says. You aren't doing a startup unless you want extreme growth, which requires our services and cuts us in. Building in a capital efficient way that generates substantial wealth for founders, but without giving VCs a cut of the pie, is, of course, "not a real startup," and often also slandered as a "lifestyle business" for low-ambition people.
PG is great in many ways but he's not the person I'd turn to for an unbiased opinion on what counts as a "startup."
The founders I'm particularly impressed with are the ones who have such a nuanced understanding of capital efficiency that they do not require VC, and only take money much later in the cycle when they can basically dictate terms and want hundreds of millions for liquidity or whatever (see, e.g., Joe Mansueto).
It is the definition of the word. Nowhere does pg say you can't start a non-startup business.
>The founders I'm particularly impressed with are the ones who have such a nuanced understanding of capital efficiency that they do not require VC, and only take money much later in the cycle
That isn't "understanding capital efficiency" it is called having enough capital already.
Your comment seems to suggest that you don't see any difference between "capital efficiency" and "having capital."
The terms mean very different things. Capital efficiency is measured by metrics such as the cash conversion cycle. It's possible to design a business model in such a way that you have negative cash conversion cycles, which cause you to actually generate cash as a function of growth (even when unprofitable by GAAP!), which is the opposite of most VC funded businesses whose burn rate is roughly a function of their growth rate.
>It's possible to design a business model in such a way that you have negative cash conversion cycles,
This seems like it would only be possible if your DPO is greater than the sum of your DIO and DSO. In other words, you are so tardy in paying your invoices (or good at negotiating payment terms, I suppose) that you manage to sit on cash worth more than the value of your inventory + outstanding receivables. That is... one way to run your business.
Maybe I am missing something but this seems like a house of cards. Eventually you need to pay your invoices, and time shifting that a bit doesn't actually make your business profitable.
Quite willing to accept I have missed something though.
Product catalogs are advertising... The Sears catalog was full of products made by other companies, and Sears paid a ton of money to get those catalogs to as many people as possible
I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is that the catalog is "pull" in the sense that if you decide to keep your catalog, the advertising is inside the catalog, and you have to physically retrieve your catalog and open it to find what you're looking for (when you're looking for it), instead of the "push" method of running advertisements in every news article and on every bus.
>I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is [...]
The discussion got muddied because in this subthread, it morphed from "What if we made _all_ advertising illegal?" (original article's exact words) ... to gp's (imiric) less restrictive example of "acceptable" advertising such as "product catalogs".
So when the person crafting a reply is using the article author's absolutist position of no ads, the distinction doesn't matter.
I wouldn't call a product catalog advertising, unless I'm forced to read it or receive it without asking. Otherwise it's my own choice to read about the products, which clearly isn't advertising.
You forget that people used to get spammed with catalogs, and you could opt-out of them with the postal service because it was such a problem. Receiving too many catalogs or magazines is absolutely a negative form of advertising, even though it is less of an issue today.
When Sears delivered the brand new Sear catelog to my door every year, all nicely wrapped in plastic with shiny images of brand new products, that sure as hell wasn't "pull".
I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.
When you visit a ad-supported news website, you're opting in too... No one is forcing you to use that website versus it's ad-free subscription alternatives, it's just that most people have decided they'd prefer the former
The difference is that a catalog is advertising that the viewer actually wants to see. Ads on a news site are ads that the viewer merely tolerates because they go with the thing they want to see.
MSRP of 3x COGS is a pretty common rule of thumb for hardware. Have to leave room for distribution, software, R&D, returns, SG&A, etc. End of the day, it's probably still only 30-40% gross margin -- less than half of a good SaaS company. Hardware is (indeed!) hard.
Having worked in a tiny start-up-turned-company doing hardware for medical training, my biggest takeaway was that it is very slow but that it can also be very stable.
Like, yeah our margins were/are super high, and so were/are the distributors’, but once everything was spun up and running it was also very stable and predictable.
We were located on the outskirts of a 3rd tier Eastern European city and yet we were plugged right into the same global parts supply chain and capable of doing the same global distribution you could elsewhere. If you’re on to something, it’s a good time to be doing hardware. But you’re correct - 2/3 of the entire company was distribution/sales and R&D.
Gross profit = sales or service revenue less the expenses directly related to producing that revenue (this does not include backoffice functions, R&D, rent, etc.)
Net profit, which is the total revenue of the business less all expenses of the business (so, this includes R&D, rent, and the "backoffice" like HR, finance, legal, etc.)
Larger businesses with multiple business segment may account for gross profit separately for each business segment, but the business only ever calculates one net profit item.
There's also unit profit, which is essentially gross profit but at the level of a single unit of goods or services (for services, a unit is usually a customer contract, for recurring services it would be each period of the contract). Unit profit is generally the revenue from that specific unit less the costs directly associated with producing that revenue. Most companies don't calculate unit profit as generally it's not meaningful unless you sell high-value items, like automobiles or planes.
It's absolutely essential to be able to differentiate between gross profit and net profit to establish unit economics, especially as the scale of a newly founded operation may drastically change relative to some amount of fixed capex or SG&A expense.
Of course. But here we're talking about the opportunity cost of the founders and other employees so gross profit isn't as relevant. Context matters and the context here is that the founders and employees would probably have a much higher take home split amongst all of them if they were to work in the wearables division of a large company like Google or Apple.
The difference between gross profit & net profit for companies like this is largely comprised of employee & founder salaries (SG&A and R&D). That delta is literally paying for their opportunity cost. Net profit is most relevant to shareholders.
What they call "gross profit" is not profit, by definition. It's certainly useful to track $revenue-$cost_of_goods, but you can't call that profit. People are free to use words incorrectly, but they shouldn't expect anyone else to go along with them.
Who chooses the "correct" use of words? Is it you? Wikipedia disagrees with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_margin. Maybe you should make your own encyclopedia.
Please hire an accountant asap if you ever start a business. Things don't mean what you think they mean in accounting. You are wrong and insist you are right despite multiple people pointing it out to you.
I think it’s subjective like any role, but mostly you are trying to evaluate what their team is delivering, are they making effective strategic plans, how’s their 360 degree feedback and survey scores of worker satisfaction, are they making successful hires and retaining their people, are they growing the next generation of leaders, and so on?
Unfortunately, index funds and mutual funds own about 68% of the Intel, with Vanguard retirement funds being the biggest. These passive custodian investor companies just vote along with the board's recommendation rather than making opinionated or activist decisions.
I’m with you except “unfortunately”. I don’t think we really want Vanguard trying to be an activist investor in all the companies they have major positions in.
It's a huge downside of passive investing. We lose a democratic element of corporate America by surrendering our votes to a couple big custodians that really don't care either way. I agree that I don't think Vanguard trying to make opinions on 1000s of company votes is the fix.
> We lose a democratic element of corporate America by surrendering our votes to a couple big custodians that really don't care either way.
By design, though, the people who invest with Vanguard do that precisely to offload decisions to experts and focus on other things.
Passive investors have neither the time nor expertise to monitor and vote on corporate decisions, so we're stuck with the current system regardless.
I think Intel is a bureaucracy that's gradually eating itself. Maybe it's harsh, but such companies might not be worth saving. They should be left to fizzle out and another should take their place.
The beauty of capitalism is that giants can fall down to earth, and smaller startups can take their place. Rinse and repeat.
I think the post above you asks a relevant question - shouldn't Vanguard, rather than always voting with the board, just not vote at all? Wouldn't that be the truly neutral position?
> These passive custodian investor companies just vote along with the board's recommendation rather than making opinionated or activist decisions.
I don't know where you get that idea from. They own so many shares they have direct control over who gets appointed to the board, and unlike a small investor when these guys walk away with their money it hurts. I often see the news reports of them flexing their muscles in the board room.
It's true they probably don't have much to say about bets like 18A or corporate culture. But they will almost certainly be involved on the decision on if or when Intel will be split up - if only because these investors decide which, if any of the new entities they are prepared to fund.
The quantum sensing (not computing!) they're referring to is more likely related to capabilities such as this:
Room-Temperature Solid-State Maser Amplifier
[...] Here, we report on a continuous-wave solid-state maser amplifier operating at room temperature. We achieve this feat using a practical setup that includes an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy center spins in a diamond crystal, a strong permanent magnet, and a simple laser diode. We describe important amplifier characteristics including gain, bandwidth, compression power, and noise temperature and discuss the prospects of realizing a room-temperature near-quantum-noise-limited amplifier with this system. Finally, we show that in a different mode of operation the spins can be used to reduce the microwave noise in an external circuit to cryogenic levels, all without the requirement for physical cooling.
The "near-quantum-noise-limited" aspect means that these systems might eliminate thermal noise assosciated with traditional electronic amplifiers & drastically improve the performance of radio receivers & detectors (among other things).
Let's also be really explicit... CFS is targeting Q>1 by 2027 for nuclear fusion via the SPARC reactor, but not Q>1 for electrical generation. The latter is slated for sometime in the early 2030s via the subsequent ARC reactor.
All of this is driven by HTS. Fusion reactors (generically) scale to the inverse^4 of magnetic field strength. HTS doubled the achievable magnetic field strength of electromagnets, which means that ITER-like performance can be achieved in university-scale reactors at comercially-viable, lower costs.
Dr. Dennis Whyte (MIT Nuclear Eng Prof) gave a great seminar at Berkeley that covered some technical nuances. It's mandatory watching if you want to geek out and understand the fusion hype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM
“Obsolete” probably isn’t the right word but they’re continuing as usual on ITER.. they’re aiming for 5.5T compared to >9T field strength on ARC. There’s still a ton of science to be learned, so it makes sense to keep pushing ahead but it’s clear any eventual commercial design will use HTS magnets instead of the NbSn ones in ITER.
I'd be ready to bet that the boring, international, big gouvernement funded ITER will be the only place to reach anything meaningful, long before the hip VC-backed startups ship anything.
Source : I generally don't believe VC-backup startups anymore, but that says more about me than about them (thankfully, sometimes they do stuff, like, 140 chars and useful tools for Russian trolls.)
Do you believe MIT? They used to run the Alcator C-Mod, which had the highest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, did preliminary work with the new superconductors, and based on all that they designed ARC before they spun off a company to actually build it.
I'll believe whoever first powers a light bulb from fusion.
I can completely imagine that it goes through stages like
Half a century of painful research at universities -> decades to build multiple prototypes -> years to build a POC -> decades to industrialize the POC -> years to connect the POC to the grid -> ???? -> light bulb moment -> ???? -> profit
I'm not sure we much further than the beginning of step 2. Indeed, (sorry to say that), I'd trust an MIT startup to do that more than a YC startup. But real life will serve as evidence.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2025/04/16/cve-...
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