Comment by jgord

Comment by jgord 2 days ago

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I think we're in for a new multi-decade round of 'eating the world' .. and Im going to annoy everyone by suggesting that the microkernel of this new megascale world-changing engine of growth is actually the tiny garage startup using Machine Learning / Reinforcement Learning to tackle some previously too-hard problem in engineering/logistics/robotics/medicine/industry.

We are in a boom and bust and boom ... the current moment rhymes with 1993 of the internet boom - lots of hype, lots of big money .. but also something new and useful is emerging.

Its happening faster this time around ... BUT I do see a capital-to-startup impedance mismatch problem - imo, we need smaller, faster, standardized early pre-seed rounds : to build the future we need angels to take 10 x 30k bets, not 2 x 150k bets.

We actually dont need to wait for AGI to achieve an incredible creation of wealth and improve our lives .. we can just _apply_ the tech that already exists in raw form today. The resulting growth will override a plateauing Moores Law, and use all those largely dormant many-cores on todays CPU/GPU/NPU hybrid chips.

Its the best of times and the worst of times - geopolitical and economic malaise coinciding with a Cambrian explosion of new technology.

I dont think most VCs have the background to recognize this new kind of startup .. but tech-founders who had an exit payout will be well placed to go fly fishing for them - Im hoping these people will step in and Angel invest, to build the future they see on the horizon.

franktankbank 2 days ago

We don't live in a digital world and dont eat bits for sustenance. Go get a real job. Rikesh can keep your LDAP up to date for 1 gallon of water a day and a bag of flour.

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paulddraper 2 days ago

Angel investing is a chumps game

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  • bartread 2 days ago

    I get the sense that the financial motivations - such as they are - may only be part of it; perhaps only a very small part of it.

    I’d bet a lot of people do it for the status, because they want to be able to describe themselves as investors.

    Whether or not that makes them chumps to people who actually do make real money as investors doesn’t matter so much because they aren’t the target audience for the status message.

    Less cynically, there’s also a motivation, at least amongst some, to help people building startups.

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  • blitzar 2 days ago

    I enjoy seeing geniuses who hit winning lottery tickets first go lose it all reinvesting in the lottery.

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    • rapind 2 days ago

      But I was sure I'd get rich off of Trump Coin!

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  • ghaff 2 days ago

    I know someone who, at least over the last decade of so, says that he would have done far better just putting money in a NASDAQ index than doing angel investing.

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    • hylaride 2 days ago

      Over the last decade, that squares out. In the 1990s and then after the 2K crash, funding companies was easier as there was less competition. Now anybody investing in any AI venture is going to be competing with a bazillion other people trying the same thing. There is less room for error or experimentation and it becomes far more of a luck game - and it was still largely a luck game then.

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    • [removed] 2 days ago
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  • jgord 2 days ago

    fair enough .. how do we fund the next generation of tech development ?

    Governments giving money as science grants ?

    Are you against all VC investment in startups ?

    Philanthropy donations ?

    or.. would millionaires be the people starting new startups and doing science research to scratch their own itch ?

    I guess the history of science and tech has examples of all of the above.

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    • rapind 2 days ago

      > Governments giving money as science grants ?

      I think there's a place for government to invest and incentivise startups for sure, but man do you ever need to watch it like an eagle or it will quickly devolve into malignant opportunism on the tax payers dime.

      As an example, up here in Canada, we have the Scientific research and experimental development (SR&ED) tax incentives program. Basically a significant business tax reduction that any company could get (including those that shouldn't), but it required a ceremony / lengthy and annoying process that was quickly outsourced for a percentage of the gains. So now we have businesses who's sole purpose is to get SR&ED for your startup.

      So SR&ED is now mandatory for Canadian tech businesses since it saves you 30-50% in tax. We're talking big boys like Shopify too.

      Implementation really really matters, and you need to constantly review these things for abuses or they quickly devolve into a transfer of wealth.

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      • jgord a day ago

        yeah.. Ive noticed a kind of anti-pattern - governments funding various startup programs, which end up being totally useless to _actual_ startups, but great plays for the next level investors [ eg. the real estate investor who rents out the "accelerator space" ]

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    • ryandrake 2 days ago

      My hope is that the actual next generation of tech development isn't going to be VC and hype-cycle funded. I hope that we will go back to bootstrapped smart people making actual things that people actually want, rather than VCs breathlessly hyping stuff like fake money and plagiarism machines that nobody wants.

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      • jgord a day ago

        > making actual things ..

        ahh, am trying to do that - largely self-funded RnD over 4 years -

        Also trying to wake people up about the scope for ML to be applied to real engineering problems / processes ..

        We hear of applied-RL/ML examples at the elite end, such as taming fusion plasma, weather prediction on a desktop, solving protein structure from DNA sequence etc..

        Yet there are vast applications such as training robot hands to sort refuse for recycling, optimal heat flow in industrial processes, silicon chip layout, 2D photos to 3D models ...

        My own startup domain is detecting geometry in pointclouds .. which is currently a lot of repetitive manual labor done for the construction industry.

        It is frustrating talking to VCs .. because they really dont believe there is any other AI than LLMs.

        My guess is the only people who will fund this kind of useful tech are post-exit technical founders.

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    • paulddraper 2 days ago

      > Are you against all VC investment in startups ?

      No.

      Nor am I against angel investing. Except that I (personally) would never do it.

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