173300+ entries in 0.052s
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)."
mircea_popescu: and using it to do something good would be a better way of pursuing my goals of doing something important”.
mircea_popescu: My sophomore year of college I was a neuroscience major and my plan was to unlock the secrets of the mind and universe. Then I realized that the path of grad school, professor, grants, and incremental research wouldn’t be a great way to pursue this goal. At the same time, I read Paul Graham’s essay on How to Start a Startup. I felt a strong sense of “I could do this!” and “making a lot of money from a startup
mircea_popescu: and still EVERYTHING is on medium. medium.com, home of the new retard. are you the sort of guy who learns that "you charge not for how much work it is for you, but for how much the service is worth" in your twenties ? are you ready to start your entrepreneurtardism with 2 week's ruby cramming ? are you a "content generator" with delusions of humanity ? MEDIUM IS WHERE ALL THE OTHER SIMILAR SCUM FOUND A HOME!
mircea_popescu: "Unfortunately we do not have the resources to fend off a large company like Twitter to maintain our mark which we believe whole heartedly is rightfully ours. Therefore, we have decided to shut down Twitpic."
mircea_popescu: and more patients are obtained through what, the power of prayer ?
mircea_popescu: "I realized that many of the true money-making businesses in healthcare really aren’t about optimizing delivery of primary care. This is a longer discussion but I realized, essentially, that we had no customers because no one was really interested in the model we were pitching. Doctors want more patients, not an efficient office."
mircea_popescu: "Product: Bitshuva What I didn’t understand was, you charge not for how much work it is for you. You charge how much the service is worth."
mircea_popescu: it really galls these fucktards, the notion that there exists something that's not for them.
mircea_popescu: don't ever hire one of those schmucks, it's as good as signing a blank confession.
mircea_popescu: "Greebel, who worked at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP and served as lead outside counsel to Retrophin from 2012 to 2014, helped Shkreli in several schemes, prosecutors said." <<< the principal utility of Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP being to provide the US Dept of Inquisition with false witnesses for its numerous prosecutions.
mircea_popescu: that the schmuck was dumb enough to actually reside within reach...
mircea_popescu: punkman the fraud consisting of you know, "being-not-usg".
mircea_popescu: nubbins` no, it's only common in the more stupid lands.
mircea_popescu: this will also add a 0.7-.8 expense on the s.nsa books, but hey, whatchagonnado.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: in other news, asciilifeform : i comissioned a server with 128gb (ecc) ram, on the understanding that they'll upgrade it to 256gb just as soon as they can get the sticks in the dc. will be passing you the coords later today, so phuctor can live again.
mircea_popescu: then spent 2 more weeks of creating the initial version of ratemyspeech.co."
mircea_popescu: But around July I just couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted a product. A real one. Not just a mockup. So what did I do? Instead of fully focusing on finding a CTO, or looking for other ways to get somebody creating the product, I decided to learn how to code and do it myself. Coding was on my bucket list anyhow, so I figured, this is the best opportunity to make it happen. So I took a 2 week crash course in Rails, and
mircea_popescu: "As a consequence of #2, we didn’t have a CTO who dedicated enough time to our product. For some months, we got away with a slideware, then with mockups and paper prototypes. For a while it was even fun. It felt like we are doing the proper thing, follwing the Lean Startup way of quickly building something (that is crappy), learning from it (unfortunately, many times not the proper thing) and adjusting (after a while
mircea_popescu: "Today. Eventually, we ended up leaving hardware and IoT as a sector and decided to work in the content sector (which we understand better)."
mircea_popescu: "here are the top 5 mistakes we made in Lumos and what we learnt from them. Mistake 1: We were neither experts nor target users of the product that we were building." << sigh.
mircea_popescu: "We built like crazy. That’s the thing about us engineers; if you give us something interesting to build, we will forget everything else and just build. Our first prototype, which automated lights, was ready in 45 days. The second prototype, which could automate lights, fans, ACs and water heaters was out in another month. This is really fast according to hardware standards." << i wish i could disagree.
mircea_popescu: and i feel it's a peety you folks manage to find 2k calories' worth of roadkill each day.
mircea_popescu: "Let me back-track a few months to give you some background. In July, we started building smart internet connected switches that learn from user behavior and automate all the electronic appliances in a home. We felt that it’s a pity that our search results and news feed are personalized to us but our homes, where we spend most of our time, are not."
mircea_popescu: "We had never used the existing home automation products in our homes. We were not experts in the IoT sector. When you have new at something, you give yourself the famous Dunning Kruger Pass on your decisions."
mircea_popescu: "However, our growth rate did not meet our expectations, and the service does not scale as we would have expected to." aka "trying to leech of bitcoin while doing the usual fiat bullshit doesn't work."
☟︎ mircea_popescu: "Brawker lets you order anything with #bitcoins and save up to 20% anywhere online."
mircea_popescu: Everything was going good. But we always had one issue. We never had enough money in our bank. and This became the cause of our death. We ran out of money."
mircea_popescu: see, when i say white westerners aspire to be dead, this is very pointedly, very exactly what i mean.