Initialized Capital
medium.com/initialized-capital · Company blog · on HN since 2016
The venture firm Initialized Capital publishes posts on startups, AI policy, manufacturing and technical benchmarks, such as TensorFlow GPU costs.
What HN saysHN links its TensorFlow GPU benchmark, which a Paperspace co-founder cited for cost versus AWS. Commenters also cite its post on engineers and public discourse.
30HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
33stories submitted
954story points
1 year agolast shared
2016people per year2026
Most-shared posts
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- 2Benchmarking Tensorflow Performance and Cost Across Different GPU Options4 people · 6 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 3Zero Lives Remaining (Alexis Ohanian)3 people · 12 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Fascism and the Historical Irony of Facebook’s “Fake News” Problem2 people · 19 points · first shared 2016 · 8 comments on HN
- 5Taking care of your health while running a YC startup2 people · 17 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 6Charging for our product originally hurt but ultimately saved our startup1 people · 271 points · first shared 2017 · 20 comments on HN
- 7How ‘Critical User Journeys’ can help a product take off1 people · 194 points · first shared 2017 · 34 comments on HN
- 8Public Policy Implications of AI1 people · 84 points · first shared 2016 · 19 comments on HN
- 9How Lever (YC S12) Got to 50–50 Women and Men1 people · 76 points · first shared 2017 · 209 comments on HN
- 10Building and Running a Geographically Distributed Engineering Team1 people · 54 points · first shared 2018 · 35 comments on HN
- 11Instacart’s Lead Product Designer on Creating a Design System1 people · 35 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
- 12Work-Life. Balance: America Needs Paid Family Leave. Fathers Need to Use It1 people · 22 points · first shared 2019 · 5 comments on HN
- 13Benchmarking Tensorflow Performance on Next Generation GPUs1 people · 9 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 14Initialized Fund V1 people · 9 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 15Why Caltrain Matters1 people · 7 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
mikekchar · 2017-08-21
I'm lazy today, so I just grabbed this article which describes office space in the bay area for startups [0]. Their talking all the way up to about $70 per square foot. Peopleware says 100 sq ft per person, so that's up to about $700 per month per employee (or $8400).
I honestly don't think that's crazy money, but you also have to plan for growth. This makes things a lot harder. If you think you are going to grow from 4 developers to 20 in the next couple of years, then you need to make sure you have access to space. Moving offices is usually traumatic, so it's a cost you need to balance.
TBH, I've only ever experienced that much space once in my career. Normally I've had about 60 sq ft and I've had much less in some jobs. My experience is that the extra space is definitely worth it. There shouldn't even be a question about it.
I think the problem is more that it is hard for the people-with-purchasing-power to understand that productivity in knowledge workers can very dramatically. Spending $10K per year on working conditions can easily save you $100K in salary (given current SV salaries) -- you can go with a lower head count and achieve the same amount of work.
But it's not just that. I'm a big proponent of small head count. The communication overhead for large teams can be crippling. When you look at trying to increase production by improving code quality -- it's practically impossible with large teams. If you never speak to half your team mates, there is…
kn0thing · 2018-04-11
I wrote about this Guilded update for the Initialized blog, because I'm so enamored with this product that probably would have saved me from needing to learn a lot of HTML two decades ago. It did serve me well, though... but I'd have rather been playing Q2CTF
https://medium.com/initialized-capital/if-guilded-had-existed-20-years…
elil17 · 2017-05-29
Except his build is 4x faster: https://medium.com/initialized-capital/benchmarking-tensorflow-perform…
dkobran · 2017-05-04
Hi there, Paperspace Co-founder here. There's an in depth write-up here: https://medium.com/initialized-capital/benchmarking-tensorflow-perform… We're about about a quarter of the cost of AWS. Moreover, the K80 GPU on AWS/GCP is very old and NVIDIA has made a ton of optimizations with the new Pascal architecture which we offer. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
dluan · 2016-11-24
"In any case, we can’t pretend that engineers are not legislators of public discourse anymore."
https://medium.com/initialized-capital/fascism-and-the-historical-iron…
scarface_74 · 2025-05-09
> After launch, MobileMe was widely panned, full of embarrassing bugs. Jobs gathered employees in an Apple auditorium and asked them, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” And when his team started to answer, Job snapped, saying, “Why the F doesn’t it do that?” He spent the next hour berating the group, saying they had tarnished Apple’s reputation and that they should all hate each other for having let each other down. He then fired the head of the team and replaced him on the spot. Steve wasn’t happy at all. He clearly felt very deep shame and took it out on his team”
https://medium.com/initialized-capital/how-founders-must-channel-shame…
Can you imagine “Apple Intelligence” being this bad under Jobs?
Contrast that with Cook…
“where can we put more ad units that make the product worse”
“Let’s ignore Phil Schiller’s advice, the judge’s court order and make the experience of paying outside of the App Store as shitty as possible”.
“Let’s keep our base model Macs at 8GB for over a decade to save a little money and get people to pay for upgrades”
I really hate Tim Cook.