My grandmother underwent medical treatment using Deca Durabolin, a well-known anabolic steroid, and she could walk again after a long time spent in beds and, at best, chairs.
I'm Brazilian and I tried building a company there after two successful products both in the EU and US.
Brazil simply doesn't have the culture that's necessary to foster a startup ecosystem.
Chile is in a much better position to be that sort of local leader, but still only relatively.
And it's not something you can change by prosecuting corrupt politicians - it goes all the way back to our colonial heritage, and the crookedness and "classicism" will always hinder the progress of companies and, more sadly, great engineers and entrepneurs.
This stereotype that "we're the most creative" is just another self entitlement like soccer or beautiful women that may build a brand, but certainly doesn't represent reality or live it up to its expectations.
I've come to realize that a Brazilian in power is often a synonym of extreme arrogance, shallowness, selfishness and an unbearable classicism that leads to an unfathomable mistreatment of both customers and employees.
It's unlike any other elites from the western world. It might compare to some countries in Africa.
If you're an investor thinking about Brazil , either understand and live by that culture or lose your money. They won't change the habits they gathered for a lifetime just because you have money or moral authority.
If you're Brazilian and talented, either as an engineer or entrepreneur, get out. Look for jobs remotely, incorporate a company in another country, find a market fit in a healthy economy that selects based on the productivity, efficiency and quality of your work.
Don't gamble your potential, talent and safety for the sake of FOMO on companies that rich, talentless, spoiled kids built with family money, and even our own (as taxpayers).
Since I can't downvote, I just wanted to note I find your comment really offensive. Is the current zeigeist is to devalue anything remotely Brazilian? My experience is the absolute opposite of yours. I've built companies here that worked with very little prior experience. I've worked with lost of spectacular leaders, made really good money, and seen many things technology and business-wise improve dramatically over time.
It's hard to have a constructive debate about specifics on this thread because your post is essentially a list of negative generalities. But to take your first point, why would you say we don't have a startup ecosystem? I see dozens of startups around me that are bustling, hiring, taking financing, failing, pivoting, growing. Just in my small city we have Arquivei & Monitora who are success stories, and many that have gone through at least one funding round. A new startup center, ONOVOLAB, was set up here this year. There are other examples nationwide. Gosh, Google just opened its own accelerator here after witnessing the success of others' existing programs. It can't be as bleak as you are painting.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but the majority of cases always rules.
There's an entire historical background that explains why most "executives" and founders see programmers, or any employee of any sort, as obedients servs that must compel and be grateful for their jobs.
That "classism" will always be present and act as the strongest force against innovation in that country.
Technology is not a factory and, whenever you try to modularize it in such form, you see mediocre, subpar, results.
There might have some small local companies that are able to challenge the even worse local oligarchs from past generations, but they will never be able to compete at a global level, as you'd expect from a real startup ecosystem.
And if they end up facing an international competitor, they might as well be crushed or acquired by them.
I don't get into a personal attack here, but you may want to experience more in depth some of these places like SF, Israel, Chile, Paris, Berlin to understand these profound cultural differences.
I started my career as a developer, working at Promon on the Tropico R and RA exchanges, and then shifted completely to Linux and open source development, which is when I founded my first companies. I don't really do a lot of real coding any longer, though.
I see the symptoms you describe, of our startups being less globally impactful [1], as a natural consequence of a smaller, more internally focused [2], and less mature ecosystem, but I don't see all the dysfunction you allude to. I have worked with poor leaders and good ones in Brazil and abroad, and I can't say Brazil tends to any of the extremes of the spectrum. Yeah, there's an oligarchy that has a strong effect on the ability for an entrepreneur (or employee) to "make it", but name a country where there isn't one?
I write this mostly for the benefit of this thread, as I don't think you're really approaching this discussion with useful data or an open mind.
[1] although you have Movile, 99Taxis, iFood to serve as counterpoints to that generalization
> Brazil simply has no culture to foster an ecosystem of startups.
Yes. A startups incubator in Brazil had a 'pool of developers': if a startup needed a developer, just enter the pool. Incubator startups had just one busines founder, never a technical founder. The technical things in Brazilian culture are irrelevant (any 'manual work' is, and developer is a manual work in Brazil culture).
> If you're Brazilian and talented, either as an engineer or entrepreneur, get out. Look for jobs remotely, incorporate a company in another country, find a market fit in a healthy economy that selects based on the productivity, efficiency and quality of your work.
Phone calls in isolation are terrible. I've worked as support for both older and newer service providers. For the older provider, calls reached support agents with all the customer's information readily available, and support agents had easy means to invite customers to screen sharing sessions, so they could see what we were looking at and we could discuss it together.
That said, some customers weren't able to share screens (typically because they were working with classified systems), so I acquired the fairly uncommon skill of directing people through a Unix system by speaking commands letter by letter in the NATO phonetic alphabet while navigating through my own example system. That was slow, but it worked, and was necessary given the restrictions.
With my newer service provider, phone support is seen as some sort of extra option in case of emergencies, and is treated more or less as a pager system. Calls come in with no context, we do not have screen sharing, and the experience is generally terrible for both the customer and support agent.
No means of support is inherently bad, but all means of contacting support have their limitations. Good support departments recognize those limitations and address them, so that all avenues of support are effective for either addressing an issue or communicating why it must be handled via another channel if it's not something that can be resolved at the point of contact.
I also manage a support team. Phone calls are indeed not very useful for solving issues, but they are critical for reducing customer anxiety and ensuring that you've understood their problem correctly.
Absolutely - it's the weirdest thing ever that he says this - will he turn down the medal, or just the cash reward - someone who is looking to take your money says something like this.
It's a non-topic really, compensation for winning an award, it's bizarre he plays it up like this.
Let me put forth an alternate theory. Everyone is suggesting this is a scam for more money, which is undoubtedly the most likely explanation. However, I think an alternate explanation is that this may be a larger ploy to try to bait the real Satoshi out of hiding. Get him to say "No, that guy's a poser, it's really me." and while he's out, say "Hey man, what do you think about the blocksize?" This could explain Gavin's participation; pulling out all the stops to try to "save" bitcoin by getting founder-approval for a blocksize bump.
If there is an official narrative establishing a fake satoshi, the real satoshi would be over-joyed because this would basically ensure any further inquiry into his identity would be in the realm of conspiracy theory... leaving media unwilling to touch it.
Even if that were the case, why would it reveal Satoshi? Even if the real Satoshi felt the need to step in, he wouldn't need to reveal himself or open up future communications - just post an anonymous message signed with a known key that states "I am not Craig Wright".
Dave Cutler , legend and father of the NT kernel , who was on the front page of HN yesterday was born in 1942.
He joined Microsoft in 1988 , when he was 46 , to work on the NT kernel. No doubt he had a many brilliant achievements before that , but his greatest work came in his 40s. Something the youth obsessed programmers of today should remember.
Agree! In my opinion your 20's should be for studying and exploring things on a higher level (university, etc.), your 30's for starting building your "systems" and master something so that in your 40's you should be well equipped to do real innovation.
Of course, some people may be faster and some slower..
And of those who was a real inventor or innovator? I'm not talking about business innovation, but real and durable innovations.. After 100+ years of being invented, I still ride my bike every week, but I highly doubt that Amazon as shop, MSDOS, Google as search engine or Facebook will be used in 2200!
But with less monetary potential and more pointless nitpicking.
Also you need to waste a lot of time writing a thesis (I'm talking about the nitty-gritty process of coming up with the words and fighting TeX or worse, MS Word) that essentially is worth the paper it's printed on.
(well at least Campus life is better than sharing a flat with 3 other people with questionable hygiene habits)
Ten people believe if they go to college they will receive six-figure salaries upon graduation. Ten people take out six-figure student loans because hey it's a worthwhile investment. Upon graduating, four people receive six figure salaries.
There's a certain insanity to counting off risk because of something you think will happen. People seem to do it too much.
Sure, it's great if you can pull that off. But for a lot of people expecting they have to be a great success in an early age puts a lot of pressure on them and I think it impedes learning.
The companies that have dominated each new wave of computing have not always been the incumbents. Is building an AI more capital-intensive than Operating Systems or PC hardware? It's feasible that if a powerful AI is created that it will be done on a cloud server by a small team of people.
Your observation is true, your conclusion isn't necessarily. AI is different from other areas of computing in that data matters far more than code does. Current legal practice is that the data is owned by the organization that collected it, which means that to collect data on millions of users to train behavioral models, you need to have millions of users. If you have millions of users, you're probably a pretty big company.
That depends to a large extent on what skill you want your AI to be able to learn.
Many applications from recommender systems, to market analysis to drug discovery probably require large datasets of the sort that can only be collected by a large business.
But if you want to learn control polices for robotic agents that navigate the physical world, driving cars, stocking shelves, etc. then I think the physical world is presenting everyone with approximately the same data set regardless of company size.
My conclusion is that it's feasible, so by definition not necessarily true. An AI could be bootstrapped by scraping data, or using any number of large datasets out there. This isn't to say that large corporation don't have advantages.
Doesn't matter too much. They will invariably get bought out by whoever is waving a large cheque in their face. All the "deep learning" stuff could have easily spun out startups from academia but look at what has happened instead. Its especially rare these days cause all the big powerhouses(Goog/FB/MS/Amazon/Apple) are highly insecure about when they are going to get disrupted overnight. And since they are all sitting on mountains of cash they can afford to throw highly ridiculous amounts at ppl.
There are very few examples where it doesn't happen. I can only think of Torvalds\Linux and Wikipedia.
1) Two of those companies (FB/Goog) could easily have been bought by the megaliths of their time, but their founders' vision and control prevented it. I don't see what is so much different about these times that would prevent a founder from doing the same. Indeed, not so long ago Drew Houston did the same (though it seems the gamble is not so certain to pay off for him)
2. Startup or established company, it doesn't matter so much who does the displacing as much as who is getting displaced: either way, the argument contends that vast swathes of the middle class will be adversely affected.
Good point. I guess the larger pt here is that, it would be nice to see pressure on the megaliths\holdouts to let go of their winner take all inclinations and go more the Torvalds\Jimmy Wales route. So that the advances benefit the many rather than the few.
We don't know what made Jeremy leave the company and how he helped before YC.
If this is a case Jeremy was present at incorporation, he contributed to the product (in some way) and his shares were eventually diluted, this will be similar to Saverin's case.
We have terrible stereotypes around testosterone because of steroid abuse in athletes, but reality paints itself very differently.
https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/this-103yearold-bodybu...
My grandmother underwent medical treatment using Deca Durabolin, a well-known anabolic steroid, and she could walk again after a long time spent in beds and, at best, chairs.