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Three of our worst VC stories

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Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#151

Post by weitendorf »

lrvick wrote: post #116
Frannky wrote: post #115

I started a new company with my cofounder 6 months ago. We focused on what people wanted, built a manual solution then automated it. We have 60% margins and a system ready to scale. We are thinking of avoiding investments. I am not sure if we are in a new moment in time where investments are something people do because of what used to be the best to do. And I am not saying avoid blitzscaling but do it without externa…

Buy a few GPUs so you can skip the Claude subscription, and never have to worry about rate limits, privacy, or refusals. Will pay for itself with a small team in a few months. I mostly work on custom from scratch Linux operating systems and packages across dozens of languages. I do 100% of my AI work today using two AMD r9700 pro GPUs on a 10yo pc I pulled out of an old arcade machine. AI subscriptions only make sens…

It’s not cheaper to run Claude in your own GPUs rather than the $200/mo for certain workloads. For a large portion of what I work on, the bottleneck is my time, not tokens. You certainly could throw more tokens at it but if you need it to work a certain way for certain reasons, and your plan/goals are beyond the scope of what the top-capability models can do, then throwing them at the problem just bogs you down in extra cruft or reviews/iteration that you could more effectively do being the primary driver of the work.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#152

Post by jaggederest »

youngtaff wrote: post #125
jaggederest wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as someone who briefly had to interact with Akamai, the deficiencies in their product are not even close to subtle.

And yet Akamai is profitable… whereas Cloudflare is not…

They'll never see any of my money...

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#153

Post by nailer »

dang wrote: post #143
nailer wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN users can't read Twitter threads that way This doesn’t seem correct. I can view all of these without a Twitter login. Compare this with nytimes, where a login is required but we still always post the canonical URL per the guideline. > Plus this helps to reduce offtopic complaints in threads. That can be a fixed with moderation and bans.

That's why I said "threads". As far as I understand it, logged-out users can see the initial tweet at a link, but not the replies. > That can be a fixed with moderation and bans. That is an excessive view of what can be done with hard power!

That’s still inconsistent with the NYTimes is handled - people paste non login links as comments if they’re wanted - and makes the links less useful for people that do have Twitter accounts.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#154

Post by Frannky »

weitendorf wrote: post #150
Frannky wrote: post #115

I started a new company with my cofounder 6 months ago. We focused on what people wanted, built a manual solution then automated it. We have 60% margins and a system ready to scale. We are thinking of avoiding investments. I am not sure if we are in a new moment in time where investments are something people do because of what used to be the best to do. And I am not saying avoid blitzscaling but do it without externa…

This is what I’ve been doing. I’m not even against external funding, I just see it as instrumental to the ultimate goal of building a sustainable business. Venture capital is basically a super high interest loan so it’s only something you want to take when and where it can be effectively deployed. Most other founders/business owners and investors I know don’t see that as a controversial statement (that it makes no se…

Thanks for sharing this. This is the same as what I am thinking. I still see the gravitational pull of doing what seems like the supposed thing to do, but it makes sense to do what the model in our mind suggests makes the most sense, especially when reality is rapidly evolving and historical information may be outdated.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#155

Post by Frannky »

throw1234567891 wrote: post #131
momojo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long has this been your daily driver? How has this setup worked for you compared to enterprise models? Which models?

You are not shipping all your intellectual property to a third party. There’s nothing more valuable than that.

Yeah, the point was mostly that you can offload a lot of stuff to AI + code — stuff that before you would have needed people for.

Obviously, it becomes better to have local models running on your own hardware — that will be best. I don't think we are there yet, though. Software, yes. If you tweak Pi and DeepSeek Pro, you can get Claude-code-level stuff. You'd still need to buy the hardware, though. Not cheap. Eventually, it will get very cheap.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#156

Post by dang »

nailer wrote: post #153
dang wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I said "threads". As far as I understand it, logged-out users can see the initial tweet at a link, but not the replies. > That can be a fixed with moderation and bans. That is an excessive view of what can be done with hard power!

That’s still inconsistent with the NYTimes is handled - people paste non login links as comments if they’re wanted - and makes the links less useful for people that do have Twitter accounts.

I don't see any inconsistency. Users are asked to submit the original source as the top link. Workaround/archive URLs are welcome in the comments. We sometimes put such links in the toptext too. It works the same for any site.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#157

Post by DANmode »

brianwawok wrote: post #98
jwatzman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My prospective co-founders and I were pitching to a VC firm that was, on paper, a really good fit for what we were trying to do. The partner we were pitching to was, 15 years ago, briefly my manager's manager -- some work relationship there, she remembered me and I her, but we didn't work super closely together and it had been a very long time. She had moved on at that company to more big-shot things and ultimately b…

It’s a very fine line between being helpful and a jerk. Same story to someone else may have ended up as a bad Twitter story.

It’s not a fine line, just subjective truth,

and later replies often elucidate the value actually added,

even when people are complaining.

Lean towards helping! Especially if someone shows traits you want in your society!

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#158

Post by DANmode »

bombcar wrote: post #140
CPLX wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people really do thrive on this shit though. They know the rules of the game and want to play it. What they’re really thinking is they’ll be better at the game than their opponents. I mean can you actually imagine the internal monologue of a guy like Sam Altman?

LLMs have more of an internal monologue, and they have none.

Not exactly true:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

They’re even trying to expose some of it as a summary, as part of the anthropomorphization of Claude.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#159

Post by sevenseacat »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #141
tty456 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting he provides quotes for the other stories, but not this one. And still doesn't in the thread. Again, i'm not debating the authenticity, but is it possible he's inferring that based on something not-so-explicit being said? I'd love to see/hear the words that people actually say when I hear stories like "they said they wouldn't [invest/buy/etc] from me because i'm a woman".

When I studied comp sci in the early 00s, a prof just flat out told us in a male-only class that women had no place in comp sci. I'm not at all surprised that shitty men are open about their thoughts on women when they assume that they are talking to people who agree with them.

In 2015, working at a software consultancy. Led a small project, delivered it, client was happy, moved onto the next project, thought nothing more of it.

At the company Christmas party that year (which had clients invited, for reasons I do not know) - that client merrily said to my face "boy, I thought the project was going to fail with a woman in charge, but you sure proved me wrong!"

Apparently I had murder written all over my face, and coworkers who overheard were impressed I didn't deck him.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#160

Post by nailer »

dang wrote: post #156
nailer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s still inconsistent with the NYTimes is handled - people paste non login links as comments if they’re wanted - and makes the links less useful for people that do have Twitter accounts.

I don't see any inconsistency. Users are asked to submit the original source as the top link. Workaround/archive URLs are welcome in the comments. We sometimes put such links in the toptext too. It works the same for any site.

There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to not apply the submission policy to the top text, for the same reason it’s applied to the link.
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