Hacker News: giansegato

New comment by giansegato in "VC Fund gives money back, says startup market too weak"

giansegato — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 15:36:16 +0000

Important detail is that they're both divesting from later stage deals, and doubling down on early stage ones

New comment by giansegato in "Ask HN: Did you personal website help you get hired? Tell about it"

giansegato — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 14:13:20 +0000

higher ROI than anything else I've ever done for my career, by a long shot

with my website [1] I found investors, I was contacted by a highly sought after silicon valley startup, moved to the US and got my visa sponsored, I even found friends here to get my network going and a professional network much more significant than anything I could ever have on linkedin

the only downside is that writing on your blog takes a long time to become clearly worth it (read: years), so most people don't stick to it and never find out -- do it!

[1] https://giansegato.com/essays

New comment by giansegato in "Y Combinator is predicated on startups that require low capitalization"

giansegato — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 02:11:47 +0000

I don't think there's anything about YC inherently misaligned with the next startup era — in fact, they're adapting their model accordingly, hedging their bets + investing in harder tech with higher capex and longer feedback loops. It's gonna take a while to see the new strategy play out, much longer than before in fact. That said, agreed with the general point that the model is changing and the old playbook is not working anymore. I published 5000 words last month that try to analyze this trend within an economics framework: https://giansegato.com/essays/dawn-new-startup-era

The dawn of a new startup era

giansegato — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 13:26:39 +0000

Article URL: https://giansegato.com/essays/dawn-new-startup-era

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41445542

Points: 17

# Comments: 7

New comment by giansegato in "VCs aren’t your friends"

giansegato — Thu, 16 May 2024 14:30:24 +0000

VC management fees are typically 2%/y. if a VC fund has $100 million in committed capital, the annual management fees would generally be between $2 million and $2.5 million. it's a lot of money.

New comment by giansegato in "California says restaurants must bake all of their add-on fees into menu prices"

giansegato — Fri, 10 May 2024 13:40:23 +0000

that's not true. you have it written explicitly in the final check. you just don't have to do the mental gymnastics of figuring out how much you'll pay before ordering, which is absolutely absurd

New comment by giansegato in "US opens probe into 130k Ford vehicles over hands-free tech"

giansegato — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:11:19 +0000

I don't understand the general tenor and sentiment of the comments here. I've taken dozens of self-driving cars rides in SF in the last few months. They were magical, and _they work_.

It blows my mind that the general defeatist tone is "it can't be done", while it's literally happening right now. It took a bajillion dollars and decades of work, but we're past the tipping point now.

Sure, regulation must happen, it's not like a chat bot where screwing up is worst case scenario being canceled for a week. Lives are on the line. But outright "it's impossible and must be stopped" is literally against progress.

New comment by giansegato in "25% of US/Canada trade depends on a single privately owned bridge"

giansegato — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 15:30:56 +0000

that's correct. most beaches in Italy are privately held, with decades-long contracts

it's a huge scandal and yet very hard to solve because of the same dynamics of the bridge above: special interests, and hideous lobbying

New comment by giansegato in "Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)"

giansegato — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:08:02 +0000

Uhm. I don't know. At my company, we're living on Slack (it's remote). There are only few tactical meetings. Coordination happen async on Slack. Worked out pretty well so far, we ship tons of stuff continuously. I agree with some other comments here: how much signal to noise ratio you get out of Slack mostly boils down to the people

A Chat with Aaron Swartz (2007)

giansegato — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 08:21:17 +0000

Article URL: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387763

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Why ed-tech startups don't scale

giansegato — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 11:11:00 +0000

Article URL: https://giansegato.com/essays/why-edtech-startups-dont-scale

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33864062

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by giansegato in "Show HN: Have fun betting virtual (not real) money on predictions from HN users"

giansegato — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 08:50:17 +0000

even if it was, everyone would benefit from the information (it being public)

Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale

giansegato — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 11:15:48 +0000

Article URL: https://giansegato.com/essays/why-edtech-startups-dont-scale

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33691299

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by giansegato in "Replit's in-browser coding AI"

giansegato — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 17:24:57 +0000

yep, true! however, the devil is in the details. from what i've been told, the big challenge was latency: they worked a lot to bring the latency down to acceptable levels - essentially to be usable in a cloud IDE

iirc the team managed to bring it to a lever an order of magnitude lower than off-the-shelf models

New comment by giansegato in "Replit's in-browser coding AI"

giansegato — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 15:41:06 +0000

replit employee here. the team who built this is very small (less than a dozen, including non-eng roles for the go to market), and went from idea to general availability in 8 weeks

A Word of Caution to AngelList LPs

giansegato — Sun, 23 Oct 2022 15:46:12 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/unpopular-vc/a-word-of-caution-to-angellist-lps-d1ad41574bc5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33307813

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

New comment by giansegato in "An account was suspended"

giansegato — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 13:59:44 +0000

I know reasonably well some ex FB people from the early days (early 2010s, well before IPO). They explicitly defined FB as a 'utility' - based on how users react during outages and usage patterns.

I think that your definition is not only spot on, but actually what social media platforms themselves interpret their role.

New comment by giansegato in "On Adobe acquiring Figma"

giansegato — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 07:06:46 +0000

Why would they even want that? They paid 15% of their market cap (30 considering the drop) for a new shiny toy, and now they would just… cash it? Doesn't make any sense, their incentive is to keep it great and working. Whether they can is a completely different matter.

When I got back my Instagram account by sending Facebook a letter

giansegato — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 10:37:04 +0000

Article URL: https://giansegato.com/essays/got-back-instagram-account-facebook-letter

Hacker News: giansegato

New comment by giansegato in "VC Fund gives money back, says startup market too weak"

New comment by giansegato in "Ask HN: Did you personal website help you get hired? Tell about it"

New comment by giansegato in "Y Combinator is predicated on startups that require low capitalization"

The dawn of a new startup era

New comment by giansegato in "VCs aren’t your friends"

New comment by giansegato in "California says restaurants must bake all of their add-on fees into menu prices"

New comment by giansegato in "US opens probe into 130k Ford vehicles over hands-free tech"

New comment by giansegato in "25% of US/Canada trade depends on a single privately owned bridge"

New comment by giansegato in "Slack is the opposite of organizational memory (2018)"

A Chat with Aaron Swartz (2007)

Why ed-tech startups don't scale

New comment by giansegato in "Show HN: Have fun betting virtual (not real) money on predictions from HN users"

Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale

New comment by giansegato in "Replit's in-browser coding AI"

New comment by giansegato in "Replit's in-browser coding AI"

A Word of Caution to AngelList LPs

New comment by giansegato in "An account was suspended"

New comment by giansegato in "On Adobe acquiring Figma"

When I got back my Instagram account by sending Facebook a letter

Replit – 100 Days of Code