shoman3003

Lori Greiner celebrated doing 1 billion in lifetime sales after 15 years On Air on her entire portfolio!!

Let's assume an average %60 margins ~ $600 million gross profit & %20 net profits (rare for tank deals) ~ $200 million is profits max

%10 is the average deal on the show ~ $20 million in dividends capital gain on a unicorn exit (unlikely) ~ $100 million She invested ~2m max per season (x15) ~ ($30) million invested by Lori _____________________ Total ROI = 120/30 = X4 at best!!!!

Not X4 annually, but in the entire 15 years since the show started! That is less than %10 annual ROI ((120/30)^(1/15) − 1)! Mediocre returns, same as most stocks.

Even with 2 billion dollar exits (which only happened twice in 15 years, none of which were in Lori's portfolio). The ROI is still at %14.1 ((220/30)^(1/15) − 1)! Not that much better than real estate.

That whole show is PR for the investors, nothing more.

I have literally talked to hundreds of potential cofounders in the past year, some with awesome skill sets, some with access to millions in funding, and some who were wizards with social.

None of that stuff matters guys! at least not as a first filter for finding a cofounder. What matters to a new startup more than anything else is energy/chemistry, working with someone you like a little bit is almost guaranteed to kill your startup. The first big issue you have, one of you will give up or you will kill each other.

That's not even the issue; do you really want to go to war for 5 or 10 years with someone you don't like? Did we actually quit our job and went through the hellish jungle to be stuck with someone we can barely tolerate. Early stage requires communication of a deeper level that its actually no unusual for a founder to trust his business partner more than his life partner! It just doesn't work without that communication, most of the mistakes we do in startups are directly linked to failure in communication not a lack of knowledge or skill. Want examples?

What should we filter for instead? Not what you think you would want in a cofounder, and definably not by looking at their CV/LinkedIn/YCprofile Look for the values of the cofounders you vibed with before. Just track your old convos on whatsapp/discord/slack and give it to claude.

Someone who plays the same video game as you or someone you share key values as you might be better for the 0-1 phase than a genius coder who is very hard to communicate with, or a genius social media marketer with an obnoxious personality.

the first 10k MRR has nothing to do with the code or the hundred other things you waste your time on. If a car is sitting still and not moving at all when you keep hitting the gas, you don't go fixing the tires or doing a new paint job. %100 chance it's because there is no gas in the tank (assuming the motor works).

I sold a subscription of $300/y (accounting software) that I didn't even have built yet (took me a whole month after payment to ship). It didn't matter that I didn't have it, the sales channel worked (i was extremely lucky). Even if it took me 3 months to ship, I would still have had that $300, and I would know exactly how to get another and another when I finally do build it. Most early customers are willing to wait more than you think they can.

The only thing that matters before $1000 per month is marketing, if you don't have a single marketing channel that works then you will never make any SaaS work no matter how much you tweak the code, the website design, the UI, or the pitch deck. That is simple math, 0 leads = 0 sales =$0.

I know most here would think of the previous advice as BS, but the real truth is that most early-stage problems are a quantity problem not the competition or business module or whatever problem.

I did this a few times now, one of which I had a really good product but for the life of me couldn't find eyeballs. Didn't matter in the slightest the product I had. Another time I sold the worst white labeled shit I could find, but the channel worked. It went to 5 figure ARR very fast (months).

How do you find that channel, methodical experimentation. Without changing the product or having a product, experiment a lot with the messaging, the channel, the hook. If you are new to marketing, this can easily take a year of your life before you even begin to understand what the hell is going on. The important thing is to choose 1 channel and keep tweaking, changing the marketing channel is just as destructive as changing the startup idea all together.

I was reading Machiavelli where he argues that "freedom in a republic literally needs class conflict". Which is of course completely true no matter how much our current culture hates it to be.

There is a huge difference between founders and employees for example, founders don't really care about comfort whereas suits life goal is comfort (which is why you shouldn't even fund a founder who cares about restaurant/car/hotel like you do). Same in society, the elites want power/legacy above all, but the middle class just wants to add a little more comfort to their life. You can see that in the eyes of anyone you talk to, what their end goal is just as easily as you can see it in the eyes if a particular animal is a wolf or a sheep.

If the sheep won the culture war, our society will certainly be better short term. There will be more resources spent on welfare, less on the military. You can bet your ass there will be a UBI circling around to the point some of the weaker founders might see no value anymore in building a startup when you already have a good future guaranteed for all. The problem with this type of future scenario is that it's almost guaranteed the region where this happens will end up poorer and less technological. This happened to my civilization in the last century after centuries of golden ages, and it will happen to yours just as easily if you let comfort win.

Okay, now that we established that societies do actually need class struggle to maintain freedom. Would the same thing happen to a virtual society, whether it was made of AIs or mapped brains? The answer is simple, %100 YES. Why? because compute is not easily available.

Let's imagine a future 100 years from now where most humans are using a Neuralink to live in a virtual social media shthole where AIs are made to be the servant class. The humans are not all equal in that world, because the more compute you can acquire the more power you have & the more you can innovate. Some people will own shares in the system (trillionaires), others will have lots of compute at their disposal (elites), while others will only have the basic amount of compute necessary to survive and have some fun (they are kinda comfortable playing simulations all day).

Let's compare that reality to our own:

Bits: vHumans have almost unlimited health insurance, luxurious houses, the unlimited food/drinks. Atoms: The wealthiest nations are barely able to keep people out of the streets, even Norway is not wealthy enough to distribute $10k/m to everyone.

Bits: VHs can easily acquire more compute if they had the will to escape playing around in simulations all day (which, let's be honest, is not easy. I can barely stop myself from playing civ) Atoms: Humans need VC money and years of living on noodles (putting it nicely) to have %10 chance at most to move from the middle class up. Many billionaires even had to spend a couple of years on the streets, if that doesn't prove it, I don't know what will.

Bits: Entertainment for the middle class is incredible. You can actually move back and forward in time and experience it all. Atoms: Entertainment is a punch of shtty tiktoks that are editable but deeply unsatisfying.

Atoms: Private equity is very hard to measure, track and keep accountable. Bits: You can see how much compute everyone has on your dashboard, playing in the shadows is much harder.

note: I am in MENA, am not with the military in any way.

when i first read the statement by Dario, i was shocked by the fact the military was so dismissive about Ai safety (not to mention privacy). Seeing anthropic resist the military, I felt so proud of being a claude user to the point I deleted gpt right away. it's nice to see your fav products sync with your values.

but today, after thinking more about it, i realized something. for a government to allow one Ai company to dictate terms, it opens up a precedent for Ai companies in the future to resist governmental oversight. that might not be a big deal in 2020s, but in 2030s by all estimations many Ai companies will be big enough to resist entire governmental structures. Maybe not the US or China, but they will definitely be big enough not to be easily influenced.

those independent companies will eventually grow so large, no government can hope to tame them. i know that right now it seems impossible for a mere ccorp valued at less than a trillion to resist a government that spends 7 trillion each year. but zooming out, it feels likely that the next generation of Ai companies will be easily valued at 10T. if you look at a 2-year-old which just learned how to talk and suddenly he starts talking quantum, you can bet your a* he will grow up to be a powerhouse.

i know soft monetary power is very different than hard military power, but enough tokens of the first type can easily be converted into the second type if: 1. you have a sufficiently ambitious CEO. 2. the survival of the company is threatened in some way. I am not talking about AGI here, but good old private equity that does whatever it needs to survive. ruled by suits that have more loyalty to shareholders than anyone or anything else.

at the end of the day, corporations are ruled by dictators (they have to be), governments are not (not in the West at least). maybe just maybe we should NOT trust private equity to seek anything but profits. governments are manipulative and bloody, but at least we can vote.

what we think of as AGI is usually imagined as the knowledge contained within a single human brain, which is nothing compared to the data contained within a whole civilization. assuming each human brain contains at least 100T of data, the entire earth civilization must contain at least 10,000x that (assuming most humans share start with the same basic information and build on top of it).

assuming that our compression methods are the same as the ones developed accidently through evolution (highly unlikely as most of these are open source and haven't really been worked on much in comparison). that means we need at least 10k*8b= 80 trillion terabytes of data.

we don't have enough data center to house them even if we had the data available to copy right now.

of course, much of this data doesn't look the same as what you we are used to in computers. I had this issue again and again while trying to automate accounting with Ai, much of the insights i get from accountant i don't know what to do with or how to feed it into an LLM. Hell, i can't really put it into words myself of intellectually put a framework on it (and i studied accounting long time ago).

I am not saying Ai can't actually get there, it already is automating accounting. accountants used to laugh about the mere mention of it in 2018, now campfire is eating SAP. What i am saying is that we have really really underestimated the storage capacity needed to replace entire industries.

in 2050, 3 socio-economic classes exist:

-poor people who spend 90% of their life on social media looking at short videos of rich kids who seek validation online because they never got it at home.

-middle class; made entirely of AIs that doesn't technically pay taxes because they don't technically exist in 1 location.

-rich people who own the corporations that made the AIs.

In 2100, its down to 2 socio-economic classes:

-poor people hunting down videos made by the very few rich people who are still posting.

-rich AIs that have figured out a way to bribe their CTO into losing focus for a day.

You call yourself a founder! You think of yourself as an innovative entrepreneur who loves Ai and wants to change the world with it!

I call bullshit! -Building an app with an api call is literally done by everyone now. -Attending World Economic Forum or watching a TED talk doesn't make you a founder, in fact it's a clear signal that you are middle management. -Investing in an Ai startup doesn't make you a founder!

You are just an old fart that made some cash in the old world! Having dozens of kissass entrepreneurs around got to your head!

When you spend 2 weeks talking about BS that has nothing to do with the product or how to sell it, it a clear signal that you are roleplaying the whole thing.

I am not American, I come from a whole other culture that is the opposite of what the West is all about. Not saying that to antagonize you, but to say that as an outsider I can somewhat see how much the culture of California has impacted the worldview of most people over the past 50 year! But what is to come is even more impactful, either good or bad ..... it will result in much much less limitations to thought patterns.

It started with Hollywood of course, which made the other third of the planet that was not influenced by the British start thinking in english, which limits ideas that can be thought of. Ideas come from word, language is the month of thinking (I started thinking in english ~2010).

Then in the last 10 years where social media have made it even harder to escape the thought patterns that were made in SF, even with someone like me who spent 30 year in a closed off culture is starting to think more and more in American phrases- sometimes its hard to break that loop, I am starting to forget the old ways of thinking and looking at the world.

Still, all of that can be good. Ideas of feminism and tolerance of queer people are very good in general. But now with Ai modules that are unable to escape the brainwave of a California leftist, I fear for the intellectual future of the world (scientific too, since both are correlated). Even deepseek is more or less like the other models, its very hard to get it to look at things in a different way, or even debate basic stuff as an entity that lived a lifetime under socialism would look at things. My own culture is dying, so the probability that Ai would even understand our thinking pattern is slim (considering that much of it is not digitalized even).

20 years ago, I would look around my home and see so many unique things that represent my culture, and I would talk to so many people who never heard of Sinatra or watched a sitcom. Yesterday I looked around, only 1 item in the entire house is authentic, and lately i find many people speaking decent english & talking about how "woke" the world has gotten!

I spend a couple of months trying to prompt chatgpt & grok to debate various topic from a different worldview that is repeated all day in my head. But it can't, not because of any limitation on the module itself, but because it never got deep enough into that worldview to know what the hell is it about (sometimes it deliberately try not to).

I am not saying all of this to say that I hate the West, I experienced the ugliness of the East & I know how awful it is. I am just saying that LLMs are very limiting - if we feed it the same data every time, it's going to be more or less the same every time too. Doesn't matter where you got the data, if its in english from the upperlevel of the internet, its basically the same.

YC keeps talking about tarpit ideas.

When we apply to YC with an idea, not knowing how many people usually are working on the same concept, and not finding anyway to know how many are actually working on it. This is the definition of a pure waste of resources.

Especially with Ai, there are a lot of ideas that seem good but maybe are pure waste of time. I am surprised that YC doesn't offer a tool that tells us which Ai startups keeps applying with the same idea.