It would be interesting to see if reducing reporting requirements allows more startups to go public earlier in their journey, hence opening up more opportunities for public to participate in the upside!
I think it’s still fine. I’ve invested a lot into some SPAC’s. I’m good on 1, break even on the other. And I’ll keep holding it, since these companies are still pre-revenue and I hope they 100X.
The overall idea of SPAC’s is not bad, even if Chamath only created them to exit his sh*t investments. There are very few other ways for retail investors to invest in potential 100-1000X companies (which are generally pre-revenue). Of course the flip side, is that most SPAC’s might close down and cause you to lose money. That is the decision for the investor to make, risky opportunities are fine! Sadly chamaths shitty tactics to close out his investments have tainted a completely fine idea.
More directly, SPACs are financially engineered to extract wealth from retail. Every weird interest-rate, guaranteed-floor and private-placement provision is geared for it. We have a crap IPO process, in part due to reporting requirements, so sometimes the gamble works out.
> even if Chamath only created them to exit his sh*t investments. There are very few other ways for retail investors to invest in potential 100-1000X companies
"I have this exciting bag-holding opportunity for you."
Have you tried reaching out privately to those companies you want to invest in? Stock trading doesn't only happen on stock markets, and the rationale for publicly traded companies being so regulated is because they're so easy to invest in.
That’s much harder. If it’s a big private company like OpenAI, you need a minimum 50k investment. For smaller companies, the number is much higher I assume.
Can you really invest only 50k into OpenAI? That seems low to me.
However, some small companies are okay with small investments. You have to negotiate privately, that's just how it is. If it was a simple, uniform process, they'd be on the stock market.
Dude. SPACs are structurally a _terrible_ idea for any non-privileged investor. The sponsors 20-25% comp, the early warrants, etc. All of those costs are taken out of the bag-holder, sorry “investors”, expected value. The entire thing is setup to maximise info asymmetry and perverse incentives for the sponsors at the cost of bag holders. The “shitty tactics” _are why SPACs exist_.
Even so, VRT has gone up 2000% since it SPACC’ed. RKLB was also a SPAC. A SPAC is a just a way to satisfy regulations as a pre-revenue early stage company. Most early stage companies fail, and that’s fine.
If such a company succeeds and still retail investors, don’t get paid back, I would consider that fraudulent, but that’s not the case with SPAC’s. I would like to see SPAC deals be better to investors as opposed to banning them entirely.
Some people argue that the requirements placed on public companies (like mandatory quarterly reporting) add operational overhead that might cause a company to postpone an IPO until they're larger or more established.
In practice, companies like Stripe, OpenAI, etc have stayed private because they've been able to access the cash they need at valuations they're happy with and because no one wants to open their books unless they have to. They aren't staying private because being a public company is hard.
Combining this with a SPAC a startup would be able to have a six month runway as a public company before having to disclose finances. I imagine that would be attractive to some firms.
Weird, why wouldnt this fantastic startup want to report on their performance in a standardized and accountable manner for six months after collecting public money to pay out insiders and “sponsors”?
Surely they wouldnt mind bragging about their fantastic GAAP P&L in their filing docs. Maybe its the pesky quiet period theyre trying to avoid, so they can be even more transparent about finances and equity holders.
I would love help from the community on what the best solution for hiring is.
Sharing a real example I am going through ->
* A single LinkedIn post about a job I was hiring for got me 300+ candidates in a single day. I am sure if I went through the channels, I would have 1000+ candidates for a single role (assuming 1000 in this example).
* There are candidates that I think might be great for the role, who I will do outbound to try to attract them.
* A single interview process would involve at least 4+ people in the process, potentially taking half a day of cumulative eng time away from the company (4 hours).
The current hiring process is massively broken for all parties involved. It's not a good experience for candidates, or for hiring managers, or for the people who volunteer their time to interviews.
Out of the 1000 candidates, either AI, or humans today will pick, say, the top 50 to proceed to the next step (with humans). There's no "perfect" process to do this today, hence it's likely to happen based on past employers/colleges/github contributions etc.
Is there an opportunity for AI interviews for the other 950 people and find the hidden gems of talent who get overlooked today because of the biases above? This can especially help people who would be overlooked by typical ATS filtering mechanisms.
Sure, for instance, if all of them go through an 1 hour AI interview, then you might find a better candidate, at the cost of 1000 man-hours of work. You hire that person, another company opens a position, gets 999 applicants, send them all their own AI interview, and so forth.
How much would better would your hire be considering that you managed to check all 1000 of them, rather than just 50?
Assume that candidate fitness is a number normally distributed around 0 (half of them obviously being negative), that both you and the AI can perfectly pick out the best candidate, and that you picked the 50 to interview completely at random. The average actually seems to be around 40% better? Suprisingly decent. Is that improvement worth 1000 man-hours?
So attempt two here: maybe instead of each company sending candidates through an interview, there should be a common gatekeeper. All working age people take the same 1-hour AI interview, and the glorious overseer assigns them to the position they are best suited for.
(An actual answer here is you assess how important it is to get "the best candidate", and you interview enough people to get a reasonable approximation. The hour cost on your side is what keeps you honest. If wasting candidate time is free on your side, you're going to waste 500 man-hours of work for a 5% better result for you.)
Agree. Your post mirrors surprisingly well with mine of last year [0] - did you, by chance, happened to come across it? I said "you’d likely get approximately the same quality of candidates from a randomly selected 50 out of 5,000". And the main idea I was trying to convey is parallel to yours too: companies, consciously or not, try to find "the best candidate", while using completely inadequate "hiring funnel" approach. If that is their genuine need, they would be better off with "headhunting" approach. And the whole industry, businesses and candidates alike, would be better off if businesses recognize that the difference between "best" and "second best", or even "third best" is not meaningful (outside of C-suite) and not worth exponentially higher spend.
- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271736 (believe it or not, em-dashes are all mine, even though I regret now putting my original draft through LLM - even if it was for grammar-check only)
Don’t interview the 950. If you want to see if there are any diamonds in the rough, put it in your ‘no thanks’ email that if the want to make another case as to why you all should talk, then they should reply to that email or email you directly, or something.
All you need to do is hire someone who is hungry and has potential. That’s most people. So riffle through the resumes to find anyone who shows any kind of spark or humanity. Pick the five of those. Hire one of those five.
I was going off the footnote of "Image input is set at 560 tokens or $0.067 per image" but 560 * 2 / 1_000_000 is indeed $0.0011 so I have no idea where the $0.067 came from. Fixed, and this is why I typically don't read docs without coffee.
This isn’t a great look for OpenAI, but acquisitions fall through all the time.
The issue isn’t an acquisition not working out, it’s that the founding/exec team felt it appropriate to arrange their own exits and abandon their team before even communicating that their “successful exit” wasn’t actually happening.
Congratulations @vvyoer! We are active paid users of https://www.unscreen.com/ for video background removal. Do you have plans to add support for video background removal anytime soon?
Eliot here, I work with Vincent on PhotoRoom. Our current focus is shipping an incredible app on the web and on mobile, but we'll tackle video very soon!
