151–160 of 251 posts
I also like the fact that you have been very upfront on what you deemed advantages. Most articles, you can see that the writer is trying to elevate themselves by stretching the challenges as similar to heroic tales.
More power on your startup which is a noble one - extending the ultimate friendship between humans and dogs.
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I don't think you actually would. A large portion (probably the majority) of American adults could extend their lifespan by 5 years by making simple lifestyle changes. They opt not to.
The second and third sentence of this do not support the first. It's true that a lot of people (all over the world) make lifestyle choices which probably shorten their lifespan. Although I think you're understating the simplicity of losing significant weight / quitting smoking / drinking less, all of which are things which are notoriously difficult. It does not follow that those people wouldn't notice an additional f…
Extending lifespan is less useful than extending the healthy/active part of the lifespan. Like reading the fine print on the side of the packaging or the bottom of the contract, you need to pay attention to the details. This is why lifestyle changes tend to be more important than pills which treat conditions that used to kill our parents or grandparents, the former usually increase the odds you will still be walking around and taking care of yourself in your late 80s while the latter might just mean that you add five years to the amount of time that some nursing home will drain your estate while you are bed-ridden in some warehouse for the elderly.
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It's not just a VC thing. There is a greater delta if you didn't grow up in this particular US culture. As a German (15+ years in the US) formerly in SF now in Seattle I see big discrepancies in what I perceive as genuine feedback from coworkers or the general public compared to what I'd expect back in Germany. Of course VCs go even farther to keep all doors open. That to me is more of the same I observe from most fo…
Reminds my previous job as a PM, where I had to deal with many nationalities. Germans were always: Yes/No, this is good/this is crap instead of 'well, you know,it depends,and it could be improved, considering everything it's not too bad'.
It's a bit tiring having to praise things you don't believe in to provide honest feedback. In German culture the strong separation between work persona (with a shared mission on behalf of the company / shareholders / customers) and personal life makes it pretty easy to be straightforward at work. People don't define themselves by their job unlike in the US (or certainly SF) where one of the first questions may be "what do you do (for work)?".
From my perspective US colleagues overcommit (say yes to too many things) but don't ask enough detailed question to design solutions that can be of high quality. I'm not surprised you'll find Germans frequently saying that something is crap :D Germans tend to be cautious upfront, asking many questions (to understand scope and to mitigate risks). This often seems unnecessary to the visionary leaders, but a tactician will understand the importance for execution. Nothing wrong with saying "No, we can't do that. But if we reduce the scope, or change this or that we could deliver something."
In the end there are many cultural differences that are subtle but profound. Invisible to either side and usually expressed as what appear to be individuality / personality differences. It takes a lot of experience to understand which elements must be attributed to culture.
>It’s a VC’s job to keep the door open. Many were ‘blown away’, then passed before the second meeting. This is normal. I'm sometimes working with US-Americans and not being US-American myself, I feel like this is also a US-cultural thing? In important meetings with US stakeholders I struggle to read the room because everything is always 'awesome' and 'amazing', there's rarely upfront criticism. Honest feedback has to…
Yep. I'm from the US grew up in the Valley but lived in the UK for a startup for a short while. It's both a byproduct of career hierarchal corporate obedience and social success façade (see also: modern campus culture of Ivy Leagues and Pac12s). It's absolutely awful for mental health or getting things done. More practically, it's a problem when people try so hard to be liked that they throw away respect by being too…
Despite the sex-baiting in the title, really good article with tons of actionable, non-obvious advice! I like that the founder/writer is so technically oriented, she clearly strategizes & structures her thoughts very well and I think that probably helped her with such an amazing deal (well, it looks amazing, given her starting point - though I don’t know how much of her company she gave up for that...)
> Despite the sex-baiting in the title, You've done the very thing you're complaining about, guaranteeing a flamewar. That breaks the site guidelines. Please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I heavily prioritized male investors. Every time a female investor converted, I asked them to help me find male investors. Does the above statement seem bigoted?
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"Given how you can “game” your pitches - from the VCs perspective isn’t this bad? Wouldn’t that mean potentially bad companies could “con” you into funding them?" It's pretty similar to gaming job interviews. But in my experience, VCs are very good at reading between the lines, to the point that they sometimes understand the pitch better than the person making it. I don't see anything here as gaming it though. Some V…
To a large extent investing is about pattern-matching. You are basically looking at the same situations day-in, day-out for years. You see what works, try to fit it in a box, etc. This is kind of a doubled-edged sword situation though. After a certain point, you just start blocking situations out mentally. You try to take shortcuts by just looking for X. You don't react when the world starts changing. If you are in a…
I wouldn't say it's pattern matching. That works great for stocks and established companies, but with "moonshots", you're looking for things that have not existed before. Everyone looks for the next Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, Musk, whatever, but the pattern is there is little pattern.
>Loyal is developing drugs to extend dog lifespan and healthspan. Wow this is a huge undertaking. I wish you luck and I don't mean that sarcastically! If you can do that to a dog, it seems trivial to extend to humans. Have any drugs or supplements extended dog lifespan in the literature? Rapamycin I guess?
It's extremely expensive and complex to try to do this for humans, due to huge regulatory and ethical costs. So solving the problem for dogs first might be a clever way round much of that!
>Loyal is developing drugs to extend dog lifespan and healthspan. Wow this is a huge undertaking. I wish you luck and I don't mean that sarcastically! If you can do that to a dog, it seems trivial to extend to humans. Have any drugs or supplements extended dog lifespan in the literature? Rapamycin I guess?
"Trivial" might be underselling it. Increasing a dog's lifespan by 5 years is massively noticeable. I've never seen a 20-year old dog. Adding 5 to a human's health is beneficial but isn't nearly as noticeable. This is ignoring the magnitude of differences between dogs and humans. They're mammals, sure... I can't recall just how many "successful trial on rats" stories have we gotten on HN that have to be tempered by r…