I'm a coder in my 30s now. But when I was a coder in my 20s, FWIW almost all the wealthy (male) investors I interacted with were not degrading towards myself and my peers FWIW. And the ones that were tended to be in their 20s or early 30s.

+1, the most insulting people I've met were the young "entrepreneur" types, not older/accomplished/actually wealthy people.

The older and accomplished ones have nothing to prove and have been that way long enough that they've had a chance to grow out of old habits.

i am in my 30s now and in my 20s they were super nice to me. its just that in retrospect i see how that was a tactic to exploit me. and to be very clear i benefited from my relationships with them quite a bit! but a spade is a spade and luck had a lot to do with my exits. if i hadn't been so lucky they would have just exploited me without there being ends to justify the means

> they were super nice to me. its just that in retrospect i see how that was a tactic to exploit me

Omg. Then what isn’t exploitative?! There’s always a bit of a selfish motive in developing partnerships or friendships even.

This is next level victimization.

In this thread: HN fails to understand flattery, a behavior that features heavily in popular culture with a clear record in literature dating back 3,000+ years, and a heavily-covered topic in early childhood education since time immemorial.

What part of flattery did they fail to understand?

Also, it's survivorship bias, to a degree. Being nice is just as much tool as being smart, and you can wield it with intent that is just as malicious. Truly successful people have to wield many tools successfully, it's only natural that one of the easiest to master is commonly used.

You never know what people's intent is, and you should assume the best until proven otherwise, but like you say, a spade is a spade, and being nice is useful to the people being nice.

Thanks for your reflections, certainly it's important to have in mind that VC's are innit for the money, which makes the world spin

To be fair, OP said degrading yourself, not that they degrade you.

I wasn't trying to imply that Musk would do any degrading. He does however expect the employees to do it themselves, given the working hour expectations and minimal consideration for stability he's given Twitter's employees.

I say this as someone who sees nothing wrong with cranking out 60+ hour weeks if that's your thing.

And Gordon Gecko type characters are already pretty rare to begin with, especially in the Bay Area.

Gordon Gekko type behavior is pretty rare around the Bay Area in public. You'd be shocked to see how some top financiers and executives act in private among peers who can (supposedly) be trusted. The mask really comes off, especially after a few drinks and some recreational pharmaceuticals.

It's a big club, and you ain't in it.

Some degree of greediness, and other unattractive characteristics, displayed in private is to be expected in even the most virtuous figures.

What is unusual however are those who are consistently sleazy.

Nobody intelligent spends their time hanging out or working with likely backstabbers, if they have any other choice.

Which is why I feel confident in my assertion, even though I haven't personally inspected every private club and office in the region.

No one knows how high interest rates will go. Interest rates are approximately the floor of what a very low risk return on capital looks like, especially for an average citizen. If they approach 7% and stay there as some think is possible, I would expect stocks to keep selling off, especially if public co revenues don't continue to grow rapidly as the economic "slowdown" continues (not worth arguing exactly what constitutes a recession).

Whether a given investment is highest return option for your investment does not change with interest rate. So it does not matter how high interest rates will go.

One thing you might be looking at, though, is if high interest rates somehow affect a given business. If a business relies on being able to get a lot of debt readily and cheaply they might be worse option than one that does not.

Think he meant that they protect the consumer

Yea definitely, it's a bit in his standup

100% - I'm not sure why others are so dismissive. It's not that technically difficult, and FB has a reputation for being creepy. If only I could figure out how to get random one night stands out of my "People you may know" list...

I disagree that any specific advice will help an individual marketer...I think the biggest issue is that the economics of acquisition on social (factoring in internet marketing budgets and customer LTV) doesn't work well for brands that aren't already operating at significant scale. Otherwise, Teespring would be a billion dollar company by now ;)

My guess is that social marketing works ok for brands that have a strong competitive position AND healthy margins.

Healthy margins and product appeal moreso than competitive position.

Teesprings product offering is far too broad to benefit specific targeting which really just leads to low user intent, which leads to huge acquisition costs. No one gets excited for tshirts.

Products outside of these hugely saturated markets do amazingly well if you know what you're doing.

I don't work at Dropbox, but I believe it's ignored by design. Fewer users would upgrade their storage to the paid plans.

I hadn't even considered that TBH.

What % cost savings are customers seeing?

We're seeing a lot of random VMs people are scheduling to shut off. From jenkins and other CI stuff to servers running things like Tableau.

Typically these people are turning these VMs off during non-working hours so they're saving about half the cost of those VMs.

Although we're trying to stress that we save lots of time vs writing automation scripts.

Not really, artistic talent has historically relinquished all IP rights. Incubators are more like a tax to get involved in the VC ecosystem, if anything.