Best of Twitter - Week of August 23, 2021 [2/2]
bestoftwitter.substack.com
Best of Twitter - Week of August 23, 2021 [2/2]
Y Combinator valuations are up from 1 year ago. Rest of seed market will prob follow
This YC batch:
Pre-revenue in non hot market: ~$15m (was $8m)
2nd time founder and pre-traction: ~$20m (was $12m)
$30k+/month/revenue or hot market: $25m+ (was $15m)
“Any thoughts?”
I think the best companies are undervalued by a lot and the distribution of valuations is catching up to a better estimate of the prior probability of success than it has previously been at.
Investing in YC companies was free alpha for years; that’s silly.
There were a number of funds started which got excess returns by a) getting a seat at Demo Day and b) get a check into as many companies as possible.
Which, fine, but should not last forever as a viable strategy or capitalism is doing it wrong.
^ thread
nice policy you got there, be a real shame if someone tried to implement it at the average bureaucrat's level of competence
Paul Volcker’s autobiography opens with a section about how his dad was the unelected technocratic town manager of Teaneck, and powerful enough to overrule the (elected) mayor. And then:
We asked the question, what is a Ginkgo worth?
One of the largest biotech IPOs (via a SPAC) ever for Ginkgo Bioworks, a synbio company with fantastic messaging but not much revenue.
and a thread disagreeing:
THREAD
Got DM's asking about @antonioregalado's Ginkgo/ $DNA/ $SRNG piece
One mentioned Antonio "collects many expert notes but sometimes chops the full story down to a minimalist Raymond Carver* short story"
True here?
*Had to Google "Raymond Carver"
To be clear, it's just returning what it thinks a smart AI chatbot would say. It's not pre-programmed to in anyway avoid questions about Xinjiang. Starting from scratch gives different answers.
It's nonetheless... interesting that GPT-3 thought to dodge the question at all.
^ thread
Great suggestion from @tangotiger, news reports and such should refer to things like the infrastructure bill in terms of $ per adult. It's very hard to have an intuitive understanding of how much $1 trillion is, but $X000 per adult is instantly understandable
^ e.g. $2 trillion / 328 million people is approximately $6000 per person. Or $500/month for a year in basic income for every citizen…………………………………….
Futurists make grand predictions based on technologies that don't exist. But 2050 is only as far in the future as 1992 is in the past! So what will the world look like in 2050 if we resist the urge to "science-fiction-ize" the future?
I wrote an essay about an extremely interesting theory of the obesity epidemic that I came across. Read a history of fad diets, how croissants can help you lose weight, and details about squirrel hibernation and mania you never knew you needed to know:
^ lol
Quarantined section
^ thread
