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mircea_popescu: (nothing, but people keep going on about the success it denotes or something)
mircea_popescu: i've been in "every mainstream media" like they say. whatever the fuck that's worth.
mircea_popescu: or a bunch of hungry chinese "courtiers" doing exactly the same, pre-british invasion
mircea_popescu: you have already seen the floor. a bunch of hungry people in ugly cheap suits moving flimsy paper around, with stamp ink shortages, as in moscow 1985
mircea_popescu: just about par for the course for "government helped you"
mircea_popescu: post-tsa, a dollar is worth ten cents, and same exact airship is worth... ten million.
mircea_popescu: pre-tsa a dollar was worth a dollar, and an airship capable of taking a few hundred people across the atlantic was worth a coupla hundred million dollars.
mircea_popescu: what the everloving fuck are they smoking over in the socialist republic of cambridge
mircea_popescu: "implying mastery of people seems both inappropriate and ill-founded" ?!
mircea_popescu: was mostly curious if she translated on the sly some previous ru text
mircea_popescu: the douche thinks this can be successful, in any sense. i rest.
mircea_popescu: infoDev. We could list countless press and media coverage from all around the world. But here is what we could not do: we simply failed in creating a scalable business!"
mircea_popescu: defined by having investors believe in your team, your business, and your product, we successfully raised capital from the top super angel and angel investor in Silicon Valley. We are the first company from Vietnam that got accepted to the most prestigious accelerator program in the world. From 90 countries around the world, our Whiteboard app won No. 1 in the Dragon’s Den Pitching Competition by the World Bank’s
mircea_popescu: "If success is defined by creating awesome products, we created apps that have been downloaded 15 million times across iOS, Android, and the Mac App Store. If success is defined by people using the product, we still have over a quarter of a million users actively using our apps around the world. If success is defined by making money for the business, we put in our bank account $1 million in total revenue. If success is
mircea_popescu: ascii_field if that were it the 50 times would take 1 minute.
mircea_popescu: i mean don't get me wrong, it's a theory, but that's about it.
mircea_popescu: i saw it but i'm not persuaded it explains anything. what, exactly, someone can't just walk into the dc copy the server ?
mircea_popescu: oh look at that, from back in the days ben_vulpes wasn't too ashamed of random mishap to show up in b-a ? :D
mircea_popescu: you can't run a bar by giving out free drinks. you CAN however, and if you have any sense you DO run a bar by giving away free tits.
mircea_popescu: ascii_field it just happens to be a very good loss leader. you know how casinos will give you free drinks for as long as you're playing ?
mircea_popescu: there isn't really that much difference. all this mentally deranged "we are changing the world" third reiteration of the quaker/puritan insanities tries hard and in selected idiots manages to cover up the simple fact that every situation where "our saviour the entrepreneur created value" can always be described in terms of "this leech is arbitraging the roof against the wall, either wayy we'll end up under rubble."
mircea_popescu: just another example of "revolutionized the world" being the worst outcome for the world.
mircea_popescu: otherwise your brain becomes a "phd castle to be manned by 9k phds"
mircea_popescu: "i intend to one day be a singer" is not how you get the fucking job. WHERE HAVE YOU SUNG BEFORE BITCH. that is it, that is all.
mircea_popescu: never ask people as to their intentions. nobody cares, least of all themselves.
mircea_popescu: ut PAST behaviour: When was the last time they cooked something new? Do they dislike takeaway food? Do they feel bad about food wastage/spoilage? If so, what are they doing to minimize it? If nothing, it’s not a problem waiting for a solution."
mircea_popescu: "You must never, ever, pitch the product to the customer and ask for their feedback. Instead, the conversation serves the purpose of ascertaining whether the lack of recipe diversity and frustration with takeaway food or ready meals is a big enough problem for which I offer a solution that they would pay for. To reach this conclusion, don’t ask about their future intentions (“would you buy this?”), but do ask abo
mircea_popescu: i don't like the idea because i send the girls. picking good stuff is complex. but yes, if they could be trusted to do something other than the usual anglosphere "this is how supermarket gets rid of all the imminetly-rotten junk", then yeah.
mircea_popescu: a random two immigrant illegal stand here, will take orders. and walk them over.
mircea_popescu: now, doing this efficiently, effectually and at scale is way beyond the intellectual wherewithal of argentines, but nevertheless, the need is there.
mircea_popescu: i mean... you can order magazines delivered by the little magazine stand. or flowers. ANY store, you walk in, you want delivery, they'll fucking deliver.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: There never was a need for a service like ours in the UK in the segment that we picked (urban professionals, couples without kids or with one baby max). << ironically, the need does exist. argentina does one thing right, and that is they are FANATIC with deliveries. you can have ANYTHING delivered. i don't mean, walk into supermarket, order two pellets of mineral water and have the supermarket deliver it - you can do t
mircea_popescu: and at this juncture i'd like to inquire with the esteemed audience whether they'd allocate the "not as terrible as medium average" to the datapoint that he had 10's of k's of pounds to blow on this (ie, rich is not as stupid as poor, ceteris paribus) or to the fact that he's british (ie, pureblood is not as stupid as mongrels, ceteris paribus).
☟︎ mircea_popescu: of radioactive fumes emanating from commercial kitchen equipment, all be zombified and eat patrons’ brains, yes, in that case I might be tempted to purchase a trial product from you. Once. Then I’ll take a risk with the zombies.”
mircea_popescu: However, we committed the big mistake of presenting people with the idea and asking them if they liked it and would buy it. And when people said yes, WE thought they meant “launch it and I will buy”. In reality, they meant “I’m not entirely excluding the possibility that one day, when Ocado trucks run out of gas, supermarket doors get blocked by red-hot lava and restaurant waiters will, due to a mysterious leak
mircea_popescu: This will be the number one lesson I will never forget and the absolute key to understanding Dinnr’s failure — we were not solving anyone’s problem. I should have found that out in my initial market research, especially in my 1–1 interviews.
mircea_popescu: uh this has never happened. who the fuck is he talking about ?
mircea_popescu: "Now, with the distance of a few months, it sounds positively crazy to run a “business” like this. But of course, one sticks to the guns because one has set out to make things happen and one has an obligation to investors. And then there’s the adage of “a winner never quits”, tales of entrepreneur legends who lost all their money, got abandoned by family and friends, were so hungry that they ate cardboard, on
mircea_popescu: superstore. After 15 months of operations, we had approximately one order per day, generating on average £26 in revenue and supposedly 30% in gross margin, but given the low volumes, we were losing money on every order."
mircea_popescu: "In those days, I spent 9 hours a day, 6 days a week, sitting in a cold warehouse in West Acton, hot air blowers creating 25 degree bubbles around parts of my body in an otherwise 14–15 degree room. The large industrial fridges were empty. Long gone were the days I pre-stocked ingredients for faster order fulfillment. Now, when an order would come through, I would jump on my bike and buy fresh ingredients at a nearby
mircea_popescu: why the fuck would you not include pepper. i mean, leave aside all the other idiocies involved, why the FUCK would you not include the very few items that are already prepackaged for this and have been for 50 years.
mircea_popescu: Background: Dinnr was an ad-hoc, same day ingredient delivery service. Select a recipe on our website, and we deliver everything you need to cook that recipe at home, all the items pre-measured with printed instructions. All you need at home is oil, salt and pepper and a reasonably equipped kitchen.)
mircea_popescu: "what do you mean the great equations don't apply to me ?! what, i'm like, not good enough to matter in this sense ?!?!?!"
mircea_popescu: never has math been so cruelly raped as it has been since the web 2,0 made these shits fashionable (lesswrong, medium, tedtalks, the "webayesian" approach to pseudoscience and so forth).
mircea_popescu: jesus that article. the amount of navelgrazing these nitwits will engage in baffles me.
mircea_popescu: at any rate, the notion that people are actively interested in oppressing his dumb ass so that their world isn't littered with the byproducts of a trillion adam zerners running around does not even begin to occur.
mircea_popescu: something like "why wouldn't mom go turn tricks for an hour each weekend, it only costs her an hour's worth of tricks, like 50 bucks or so, and she could buy me WoW from the proceeds, at a value to me of OVER NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS!11". supposedly this is how it worked with that dumb whore of Adam Zerner's mother. shame on you mrs zerner, really. being ugly is no excuse to fuck drunks. behold the unfortunate results in
mircea_popescu:
https://archive.is/u5LjB << the butttears piece in question (obviously what he links is his own verbiage, because what, we can't all be mp ?! why the hell not!). his idea is that people are assholes because they don't front what [appears to him as] a small cost to them in order to get him [what appears to him as] a larger benefit.
mircea_popescu: Feb 279 min read << ahahaha a 10 minute read on the fucking clock is 279 minutes according to what the fuck is this ? us college reading comprehension data ?
mircea_popescu: he even has an explanatory link on "selfish"! how endearing.
mircea_popescu: And I when I asked people from my high school to answer questions and spread the word a bit, I thought that a bunch of them would have respect for what I’m doing and want to help out. Almost no one did, which I found to be quite selfish of them. I don’t think my initial expectations were too unreasonable given what I had known, but my beliefs have since been updated."
mircea_popescu: decent chance that they’d think, “Oh cool, look at this kid trying to start a startup, good for him! Hm, he’s actually trying to do something that would be pretty useful. Let me check it out.”
mircea_popescu: "I overestimated peoples’ desire to help someone starting a startup and trying to do something good. This will probably sound naive, but I don’t think it is. I thought that people would have some sort of respect for what I’m doing and want to help out. For example, the high school guidance counselors I tried to contact, maybe the default is for them to operate in a bureaucratic way, but I had thought there was a
mircea_popescu: "I spent 2 weeks cold calling college counselors saying, “Hey I’ve got free student reviews of Ivy League schools. Check it out, let me know what you think, and sign up here if you want to be notified when I get more schools.” Almost all of them ignored me."
mircea_popescu: "things like finance, marketing, strategy, economics, design, technology etc.". ytou know, just like neuroscience is all about "things like neurons, axons, mielin etc", just so entrepreneurtardism is an unstructured soup of nothing in particular.
mircea_popescu: great, now you can be a neuroscience relationship expert!
mircea_popescu: Throughout sophomore year I read all I could about startups, and about things like finance, marketing, strategy, economics, design, technology etc. The following summer I started learning some HTML, CSS, JS and PHP, but didn’t make much progress (I also started a very early version of the website that I’m writing this post about)."