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Three of our worst VC stories

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Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#161

Post by dzonga »

maybe it's the peculiarity of the tech industry to make it seem they're doing something entirely new & different in the world.

how did unproven, fringe ideas get funded before the 1960s ?

you either took a loan, some rich patrons put some money or you were financed by vendor financing. most of these terms were not humiliation rituals. they were built on trust & knowing each other.

the bad & good were funded that way whether merchant expeditions, slavery, colonialism, steam engines.

you didn't have Venture capital. & soon enough venture capital will disappear altogether.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#163

Post by Marciplan »

sharts wrote: post #147
lrvick wrote: post #114

I once had a VC ask to meet my founders and I for his morning breakfast at a run down diner in texas. So we fly out from Florida pitch deck in hand, and meet him at his booth. We pull out the deck, he says "Do not need that. How many paying customers do you have?" Given we were at MVP stage and were running a public sentiment analysis driven social media search engine using our published academic AI work (15 years ag…

Why is that mean? It seems prudent for any investor to invest based on real metrics. What’s probably dumb is that none of those questions/concerns were brought up ahead of time (by either side).

well they could’ve pre-ement that

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#164

Post by dang »

nailer wrote: post #160
dang wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The toptext is often used for archive links which allow users to read otherwise-paywalled articles.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#165

Post by [deleted] »

Frannky wrote: post #155
throw1234567891 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Eventua…

[deleted]

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#166

Post by lrvick »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #139
lrvick wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 2 months. I have mostly used the Qwen series, and currently running Qwen3.6 27B for programming and debugging and Qwen3.6 35B for speed and research. Both punch way way above their weight and replaced Qwen3.5 122B for me. Qwen 3.6 27B even is, for my workloads, preferable over Big Pickle (GLM-4.6) which is the only large third party model I have used extensively for reference and comparison as it is free and re…

Do you have a write up available on your build? A friend is looking for a similar solution where they can offer an API/service for internal use.

Not really much to write up.

Insert 2-4 $1200 r9700 GPUs in a Linux 7.0.0+ machine with 64GB+ of DDR4-5 memory, fire up llama.cpp, and connect with any OpenAI compatible tools.

A free public anonymous LLM like BigPickle can easily set up the software for you if in doubt.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#167

Post by lrvick »

sharts wrote: post #146
lrvick wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do the self hosted models compare in terms of foundational ones? Say comparing to opus 4.8 1M, etc?

Qwen3.6 27b is ~10% worse than Opus 4.6 to be fair (though at a fraction of the size), but in exchange you get to run offline with complete privacy, no rate limiting, no refusals from any task, be it malware research or otherwise. Also my favorite reason: controlling the means of production.

Those are all well worth being a month behind frontier models.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#168

Post by lrvick »

weitendorf wrote: post #151
lrvick wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

Sure, you can keep paying $200/mo to Anthropic forever, and accept heavy censorship on the types of tasks you can do (e.g. malware research), accept no privacy, and accept rate limiting and the requirement of internet access at all times.

Or buy $2400 of GPU today to get you something close to get you within 10% of Opus 4.6 on coding benchmarks, that pays for itself in 1 year, AND you can work with private code and data offline as you like with no censorship or restrictions.

The value proposition of Anthropic is comically bad to anyone that understands how to insert PCI-E cards into a motherboard and install linux.

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#169

Post by youngtaff »

c2h5oh wrote: post #122
camel_gopher wrote: post #17

Next up, one of our worst CEO stories

A CEO got entire 20 man dev team into boardroom and asked everyone to voice any concerns about technical debt, bad development practices, anti patterns as well as project management issues. The 4 people who spoke up were all fired on the same day 3 or 4 weeks later. 7 more quit shortly after - as soon as they got any decent offer. 6 months later about a quarter of the 20 were still with the company.

Which CEO?

Re: Three of our worst VC stories

#170

Post by c2h5oh »

youngtaff wrote: post #169
c2h5oh wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CEO got entire 20 man dev team into boardroom and asked everyone to voice any concerns about technical debt, bad development practices, anti patterns as well as project management issues. The 4 people who spoke up were all fired on the same day 3 or 4 weeks later. 7 more quit shortly after - as soon as they got any decent offer. 6 months later about a quarter of the 20 were still with the company.

Which CEO?

One that got pushed out by investors, which is good enough for me. No need to name and shame beyond that.
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