Alex Danco

Because a startup scene needs a fucking scene. Having exactly one darling company in each sector is recipe for the classic yet seemingly every time unavoidable "too precious to fail" failure mode. It's the same thing that always happens in Europe when we're trying to mimic something from the other side of the pond, we do it too late, too small, too fancy. Here's a nice, detailed, insightful essay (?) on the Canadian tech scene, but of course blindly replacing Toronto with Berlin (or at least the CN tower with the Fernsehturm) and the results are the same. https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-wo…

Saw this on a YC thread a while back, but I keep witnessing examples of it every couple weeks: https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/26/everything-is-amazing-but-nothing-is-… Everything is amazing but nothing is ours.

Another great article that focuses on cooking-as-a-service with some data on how cooking-as-a-service aka takeout/delivery is becoming more routine https://alexdanco.com/2019/05/09/cooking-as-a-service/

It's just hilarious that there's one dude who is the lightning rod for right-wing hatred. Like, it's one dude! It's so unclear what he does that is so menacing to the right: there's seemingly a fact free desperation to have some big bad rich guy on the left's side doing so much. Because the right has 99% of the big bad evil dudes. Manhattan Institute is one of dozens of identical (ok not every pit has a king cobra FedSoc Leonard Leo) billionaire funded pits of world burning vipers. The E1 Global Elite class aka the barbarians (https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-cl… are not the richest people by being liberal or nice or progressive. They're where they are because they are right wing people who (in right wing style) don't give half a fig about anyone else or much besides their bottom line and power. I find it so beyond pathetic that George Soros is parroted around as some incredible omni-present mastermind of the left. But the right's favorite tactic is projection, is the classic "Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it" "Paint one's self as being the defender of the very thing you are aiming to destroy." Neither of these has any respect for reality or facts: they are what the right radically embraces: flooding the zone with shit. Not respecting reality. Sowing confusion. It's just so pathetic that such a mild mannered decent dude as Soros is the best cope ya'll could come up with for a boogeyman: quaking in your…

> User profiles including bio, location, photo avatar, and chronological post listings Please (and this goes to anyone trying to do similar work in the "social" space[1]): make sure that users have the ability to turn off post indexing if they desire (at least for people they haven't approved to "follow" them). The ability to pore over and leer at every other comment that any given person has made that day (let alone for the last N years) is _not_ something you are given in any ordinary "kitchen-table discussion". It's also not how old-style communication used to work on the Internet (e.g. mailing lists, before everything turned into the show business[2] of self-promotion). For some reason, though, "social" has come to be synonymous with the design trope of here's everything I've said, ordered reverse chronologically for pretty much anyone's perusal, regardless of their relationship with me. I'm convinced that this shift to actor-based indexing rather than the original concern for topic-based indexing has contributed greatly to the toxicity of online discussion. 1. this includes anyone doing anything in the "social coding" space 2. https://alexdanco.com/2020/10/08/making-is-show-business-now/

Europe undervalues their engineers - and it seems like it's some sort of cultural thing that favors management. Their tax structure isn't great either, there's a reason zero billion dollar companies were founded in Europe (with the possible exception of Spotify). There's also the cultural pessimism and ambition being 'uncool' - there's a similar thing in Australia/New Zealand (at least I've heard from immigrant friends that moved from there). The 'tallest poppy gets chopped down' basically the opposite of the American idiom 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease'. Even outside of Europe places like Toronto don't operate with the right investment mindset to actually create wealth: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-wo… American optimism and ambition, really valuing engineers, generous equity and culture are a big part of this. Companies outside of America have been losing talent because they've been fucking this up, I expect things to get worse for them as geography is even less of an issue for working for American companies than it already is. Devon is basically making this point, but the title is confusing. It's not the US companies that will lose the monopoly on talent, it's the US geography. The US companies will increase their monopoly.

This is similar to a previous HN thread [1] about a post about paper called the "information theory of individuality" [2] that talked about life as the ability to "cohere information forward in time." There is another related idea I stumbled on called the "constructal law," [3] which seems related. Where I think they are related to the question of what life can be defined as is that you could express this constructal force in terms of that information theory idea by summarizing it with a slight extension - as a bounded system is living based on its ability to dynamically cohere information forward in time. The limits of this constructal theory will be defined in using information theory terms. When we discover stuff in the universe and ask, "is/was this life?" there might be some criteria in these ideas in terms of asking, does this thing take feedback from its environment and produce coherent information? Or, is this thing a source of neg-entropy in its environment? If we look at life as a temporary, dynamic whorl of neg-entropy, it might yield some useful criteria. Half-baked, but measuring information-in, information-out could tell us whether something other than classical physics is processing it. It suggests we could figure out whether something was created by life as well, since the internet is not "alive," but it is evidence of life. Sorting things based on whether it is evidence of life, seems testable. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825048 [2]…

> We pitched various "traditional" VCs. The overwhelming feedback we got was that nobody doubted our team, the product, or the model. The problem was that the returns weren't big enough. Sahil @ Gumroad has talked about this in good detail. The VC idea that "yes, your business/idea is/will be profitable but you shouldn't waste your time making money when you could be working on changing the world" The "changing the world" business will also hopefully be profitable and make money down the road but they are looking for outsized returns from a market disrupting unicorn. -- Regarding the "new VCs" concept. Alex Danco and others have discussed this and the funding model ceases to be VC when it is low-risk, medium-reward. It's possible that many areas of tech are maturing to a point where VC will no longer be the optimal funding model, outside of high innovation specialties. As the industry matures, there are many businesses that might provide stable returns and have a risk profile that is different from that of the unicorn VC-startup. These businesses might be better served by debt funding and a debt-based investment vehicle/product might attract more investors and allow for greater de-centralization of tech funding. Linking Alex's blog post below instead of rambling in this comment. https://alexdanco.com/2020/02/07/debt-is-coming/

Most of your problems sound like they stemmed from VC. Similar story. It's a good, and hard, lesson. Two things one should not touch when it comes to building healthy companies in 2020: crypto and equity sales to VC. They're going to become fossils soon anyhow [1]. Read Rework by Basecamp. Read The Beginning of Infinity by Deutch. Read the Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Hamming. Watch some Bret Victor talks. Ignore the negative memes about tech. They're all wrong, the rules get re-written every 10 years, and that is going to decrease in duration, not increase. You might be the person needed to re-write them. Release your code. Teach. Share. If you can, bootstrap. Give more than you take. Don't hire or work with assholes. Grow slowly. Don't over-lever yourself. Make something people not just want, but love. Know thyself. Don't outsource your thinking, build the thing only you can build. If you are not working on the most important problem in your field, why not? Most importantly, know that the future is bright and that our best days are not only ahead of us, but always will be. [1] https://alexdanco.com/2020/02/07/debt-is-coming/

Also summarised in https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-cl…

> Why does that feel naive to you, though? The 3 ladders. People on the sociopaths (Elites) ladder think of everyone else – the clueless (educated gentry) and economic losers (labour) – as naive. The clueless ladder comes off as most naive. Labour knows they're losing and focuses on their own thing. Sociopaths know they're winning and focus on power accumulation. The clueless don't notice any of this and focus on bettering the world or whatever. https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-cl…

In the case of compressed air, actual work is being done to make it... compressed air. With water, it is still very very cheap relative to the value it provides. Why isn't water 20% of the GDP of the world? Isn't it that important? (https://alexdanco.com/2015/11/23/ways-to-think-about-water/, never read this essay btw, read several of Alex's other essays though. I'm assuming the essay talks about the importance of water)

I'm using Feedly. Checking it once a couple of weeks and happy about my flow. Here are the blogs that I follow: - https://jvns.ca/atom.xml - http://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml - https://blog.kowalczyk.info/atom.xml - https://ashfurrow.com/feed.xml - https://sneak.berlin/feed.xml - https://sookocheff.com/index.xml - https://www.hanselman.com/blog/feed/rss - https://zachholman.com/atom.xml - https://www.wezm.net/v2/rss.xml - https://alexdanco.com/feed/ - https://tyler.io/feed/ - https://tylertringas.com/feed/

Of course these types of articles were bound to come out, but part of why Karikó and others like her are successful is because they did not get showered with funds and success. The grit is part of the recipe. It reminds me of Alex Danco's Scene discussions (https://alexdanco.com/2021/03/19/how-scenes-work-with-jim-oshaughnessy…

anemic growth Twitter may primarily be a text-based medium and for that reason it appeals to people who are more textually and informationally oriented. This idea isn't original to me: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes, https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/17/the-audio-revolution/. Maybe there's much more growth in it: or maybe that's the nature of the company and product.

I found this blog post from January pretty enlightening: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-wo… Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25742623

An interesting thought on peer reviews: https://alexdanco.com/2020/05/28/lets-just-get-rid-of-peer-review/

That is blamed for some of the problems with tech in Canada and anecdotally, the government money drives a lot of strange behaviour. https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-wo…

This article demonstrates the Michael Scott Theory of Social Class: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-cl… In short, they write "posturetalk" over reporting news. This is why these articles are written this way. It is not to inform, it is to peacock.

I think you can replace EU with "the rest of the world". In Asia, we are also jealous of Silicon Valley. Obligatory article: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-wo…

“Making is show business now” https://alexdanco.com/2020/10/08/making-is-show-business-now/

For more background on what we're doing and what recurring revenue financing can mean to companies trying to grow without diluting their equity, check out Alex Danco's interview with Harry Hurst, one of our founders -- https://alexdanco.com/2020/07/28/its-not-debt-its-better-an-interview-… For a little more explanation of why we give stock rather than option grants, see Harry's twitter post and some of the replies https://twitter.com/harryhurst/status/1270562546206912514 . We're much more interested in keeping the company small and rewarding employees than screwing around with options deadlines. If you're interested in learning more but aren't sure you want to formally apply, please email me: peter @ pipe.com

Here is a far better written intro to Rene Girard [0], the article linked is worst kind of overwritten academic verbiage with nothing substantive to say, almost incoherent. [0] https://alexdanco.com/2019/04/28/secrets-about-people-a-short-and-dang…

This one? https://alexdanco.com/2020/06/14/never-hertz-to-ask/

Interesting to contrast between the postmodern condemnation of aristocracy as fundamentally immoral and the Girardian view of aristocracy as a necessary safeguard to prevent memetic violence in society. > Lasting peace and harmony inherently requires differentiation. A stable society is a differentiated one. https://alexdanco.com/2019/04/28/secrets-about-people-a-short-and-dang…

This post from Alex Danco contains a similar but much more opinionated and falsifiable set of predictions: https://alexdanco.com/2019/12/17/ten-predictions-for-the-2020s/

From working in adjacent companies and doing marketing I can guess what the objections were to that: 1. It specifically mentions another company -> this often feels like a jerk move or from a branding standpoint something that diminishes your product. There's another front page HN article right now that leads with this: https://alexdanco.com/2019/09/07/positional-scarcity/ 2. It mentions nothing from the actual product/features which makes it hard to learn from the tests. 3. Some honest diversity questions with choosing that stock art guy as the face of the company. A tech company I worked at found out that we could get leads about 15% cheaper off of Facebook ads if we targeted only men and excluded women from the audience. We made the deliberate choice to use the less optimized combined male + female audience because it felt so ethically wrong to do otherwise.

Relevant essay for the uninitiated: https://alexdanco.com/2019/05/30/google-chrome-the-perfect-antitrust-v…

+1. I've also wondered about this for a long time, especially as someone who wears a lot of fleece products. This blog post (https://alexdanco.com/2019/12/17/ten-predictions-for-the-2020s/) describes it well. Quoting: > At some point in the 2020s ... we're going to learn that some sort of chemical or microscopic thing that’s inside everything, all around us, actually has some horrible health effect we never knew about before. My pick for what it’ll be? Microplastics – particularly the microplastics inside clothing, like athleisure. > I have no idea what kind of health hazard it’ll pose, but it’ll be one that takes a long time to develop, and where childhood exposure gets linked in a study to some awful condition that happens to you later. It could be that all these cheap, fast-fashion clothes are secretly off-gassing some volatile organic compound that we breathe in and gives us cancer later, or maybe it could be something like physical micro plastic particles getting on our hands, and then into our stomach when we eat, and then it gets linked to some digestive disorder or intolerance, or maybe it kills our gut bacteria, or I dunno. Couldn't agree more. (The rest of his 10 Predictions for 2020 missed the most important one...)

I wrote a post with my predictions here https://medium.com/swlh/9-predictions-for-2020-2029-555312fc69fc?sourc… TLDR 1. Federated Learning will unlock value from previously inaccessible sensitive data. 2. Deepfakes will impact democracy and bring about a need for publisher certified content. 3. Nationalism will rise around the world, the internet will splinter. 4. eSports will take a huge chunk of attention and advertising dollars from sports. 5. Blockchain will get adoption in enterprise. Mainstream adoption will struggle until there is a key custody solutions that everyone can use. 6. Self driving cars will open up new business models. Regulations will be the main barrier to adoption. 7. Welfare systems will get strained. 8. Digital currencies and negative interest rates will open pandoras box. 9. Search will get reimagined. I also enjoyed these posts https://avc.com/2020/01/what-will-happen-in-the-2020s/ https://continuations.com/post/189997132065/an-agenda-for-the-2020s-in… https://alexdanco.com/2019/12/17/ten-predictions-for-the-2020s/