173600+ entries in 0.053s
mircea_popescu: so while the girls tried to expedite a TWELVE PERSON QUEUE at the SINGLE OPEN COUNTER in what the argentinian fucktards fraudulently misrepresent as a local instantiation of a usian chain
mircea_popescu: little does me know that the thing is a starbucks. little does me care, either. assistence is in disbelief over the wonder. mp in starbucks!
mircea_popescu: incidentally, funny scene yest : /me turns a corner, openms door and goes in. because me is thirsty and place looks like a diner or soemthing.
mircea_popescu: me. i should be. these fucktards who imagine the world exists like their stupid mother, just waiting for them to squeeze a tit a little are fine.
mircea_popescu: no you don't understand, they were going to sit themselves down in the middle of someone else's field and charge a toll!
mircea_popescu: "the only apple app that celebrates women as items in trade"
mircea_popescu: the notion that "uppity ustard talking out of line" is correctly represented as "fellow human taking on too much risk" is a core example of this problem, actually. what, we're all sitting at a table in mutual equality deciding how much to put down on red ? gtfo, you're not even allowed in the parking lot.
mircea_popescu: "3) Overconfidence. Some of us are too confident about our abilities, and this causes us to take greater risks in our daily lives." << mno. some of you are overfed and underexposed to risk of violent death. that makes you be stupid, it's got nothing to do with "risk taking" bs. it has everything to do with erroneously positioning oneself in relation to the outside world and the great things in it.
mircea_popescu: where the fuck do they hire those actuaries that work for 50 cents an hour ?
mircea_popescu: So what was it? Did we just pick the wrong videographer? Did we pay too much for what was being offered? Should we have paid more for a more experienced videographer? Or significantly less for someone of equal calibre? Maybe our product just didn’t need a video? I mean, we’re selling women’s clothing and the items themselves are undoubtedly “out there”. Perhaps leveraging word of mouth would have proved just
mircea_popescu: invested in that we may have been better off. In retrospect, however, it was still difficult to say whether it would have saved us from our subsequent mistakes).
mircea_popescu: "The outcome? Based on subsequent actuarial, statistical, and financial analyses, we concluded that not a single dollar spent on videography amounted to a single dollar in revenue generated by those investments. In other words, every dollar we spent on videography and on models was, economically speaking, a complete and utter deadweight loss (photography actually proved to be very effective early on, and should we have
mircea_popescu: talk to the derps that spent 200mn and nobody ever heard of them.
mircea_popescu: "After $4000 spent, there was NO way, in light of the supposed attention to detail and effort we put into our videography, that this could not generate some kind of a media buzz, and in return, contribute to revenue growth…" << loller.
mircea_popescu: i don't mean what they're currently wearing, i mean all the underwear they ever used.
mircea_popescu: these are the people that can't be bothered to notice posters that cost more than their underwear.
mircea_popescu: $50 a model, that's about what random internet ho gets for a titshot, and they still bitch about being face shy
mircea_popescu: check it out, the guy spent way too much money. s.mg blew up more than that on online advertising for eulora mostly to give me material to write derisively abot "the industry" of online advertising.
mircea_popescu: • $Another 50 per model for the 10 models in our videos."
mircea_popescu: • $500 for promotional clothing for the models in our videos.
mircea_popescu: • $1000 on a conceptual promotional video for our brand.
mircea_popescu: " We spent way too much money. I’ll tell you exactly how much we spent:
mircea_popescu: incredibly enough, it STILL didn't work! yet nobody can ever tell him why! because IT WAS WHITENED!!! ha-ha!
mircea_popescu: it not only made it impossible to immediately notice that people suck, but it also made it unobvious to gatekeepers that this is a dumb idea.
mircea_popescu: check it out asciilifeform someone decided to solve the problem of ugc by adding... WHITENING!
☟︎ mircea_popescu: the fundamental problem here being that if your "mathematical simulations inspired by words" actually produce stuff people want to wear, then you don't need it to be an app, just build a factory ; on the other hand, if people have to design themselves, then you have the same old problem of UGC : people suck.
mircea_popescu: "UDesign™ allowed everyday people to generate their own uniquely beautiful patterns for made-to-order clothing and accessories, using mathematical simulations inspired by Complexity science and Chaos theory."
mircea_popescu: i wonder what will i be taking in my travels for the waitresses and secretaries. tp and jeans like before ? batteries, maybe ?
☟︎ mircea_popescu: vocational school, it's true, but a damn sight better than the whole rest of 'em nevertheless.
mircea_popescu: "Unfortunately, having failed to execute on our original vision, we recently made the decision to wind down the company."
mircea_popescu: also, apparently all the douchy "entrepreneurs" and serial failurerists are on medium.
mircea_popescu: Our ongoing plan was to monetize Circa News through the building of a strategy we had spent a long time developing but unfortunately we were unable to close a significant investment prior to becoming resource constrained."
mircea_popescu: but hey... im sure they never said nigger and so how bad could it have been! out there!
mircea_popescu: gotta love "out there". it's almost as good as "self-aware citizen of the nubbins"
mircea_popescu: Better had one of the best consumer user experiences out there but that isn’t enough. "
mircea_popescu: this'd be an epic car theft ring, really. "kicstarter decentralized on demand carbon conscious valet service!"
mircea_popescu: in the immortal words of seinfeld, "i give some guy the keys to my car because he's wearing a vest"
mircea_popescu: ay but it was just not working. Our model was no longer valid and were forced to cease operations in the city on September 7th."
mircea_popescu: We started VATLER during the summer of 2014 as an on-demand valet service in San Francisco … We received a phone call from the police department telling us that our permits had not been granted and they gave us a warning because we were operating illegally in most of our locations…In 2 weeks, we lost major accounts and 30% of our revenue streams without any perspective of growth. We tried to make some restaurants p
mircea_popescu: this is like, fundamental abdication from humanity. these people aspire to be bugs.
mircea_popescu: any mention of "i suck as a manager" eerily absent. "i don't suck as a manager - i gave all the people who had no responsibility in the matter all the data about what a shit job i was doing. this means i wasn't doing a shit job! this is also how i went through school - i told my parents about all the Cs i got! this is actually better than getting As!"
mircea_popescu: Each member of our now pared-down team knew exactly how much runway the company had remaining, the status of our strategic talks, and the acknowledged long odds we faced as a going concern. To their credit, they remained focused, productive and on-task until our final day — a remarkable expression of dedication to the mission and to each other. Sadly, and in spite of the achievements, we simply ran out of time and ca
mircea_popescu: "oh, we were going to change the world on someone else's dime. what do you mean "wut" ?!?!?! WE ARE GENIUZ!"
mircea_popescu: We had a user acquisition problem, and the best route involved a competitor…The best acquisition method I saw was tapping into an existing network of people who had filed 1099s: like Intuit’s hundreds of millions of tax returns, many with 1099 income. Unfortunately, Intuit released an identical competing product to us. It’s not ideal when your best user acquisition strategy is partnering with a company who has a
mircea_popescu: Escribano said that the company’s main problem was user engagement and retention. “In every marketplace you have the chicken-and-egg problem with buyers and sellers. We tried to capture them both organically and via paid marketing, but it wasn’t enough. Getting sellers was somewhat easy, but buyers much more complicated”
mircea_popescu: Steering the ship — handling all of the engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and retailing, even when you’re taking 90 percent of the subsequent profits — was ultimately too expensive of a proposition, especially in comparison to other, less-handholding-oriented start-ups. “The reason why Kickstarter makes a ton of money is they don’t have to do anything besides put up a website,” Kaufman notes.
mircea_popescu: ” and its unnamed acquirer a “no-show”. Adds Graj: “They backed out leaving us with a huge legal bill both for Dine In and myself personally, a huge debt to note holders, and no VCs to turn to. A hard lesson to learn and one I’ll be taking into my next venture.”
mircea_popescu: “We knew acquisition was the best course of action,” says [Evan] Graj. That eventually led to Dine In being approached in February by a major Internet company active in the online food space, and it’s my understanding that by April — and significant legal fees later — a sale had been agreed. Then at the eleventh hour the deal unexpectedly fell through, leaving the restaurant delivery startup “high and dry
mircea_popescu: alternative and private, seriously ? what, like your wife & daughter ? why are they chained in my closed then, if they're this private an' alternative ?
mircea_popescu: but anyway, there's going to be A LOT of busting kneecaps of uppity ustard "capitalists" who imagine they actually get to have a say and whatnot.
mircea_popescu: nobody in china ever saw their faces before the day they were locked in a hut and burned alive, but hey. THEY thought they were part of the conversation.
mircea_popescu: this is a little like being a chinese diplomat reviewing the records of this obscure tribe, meanwhile crushed, that apparently thought it had sent lots and lots of ambassadors, expeditions, generals, so forth.
mircea_popescu: all the things nobody heard of from all the people nobody heard of.
mircea_popescu: o-founders said they saw “little chance” that they would be able to generate revenue, pivot their product or secure additional funding."
mircea_popescu: In the email, co-founders Karthik Balasubramanian and Brian Moyer stated their belief that the movement of investor interest away from consumer-facing applications for the technology was also a factor. Balasubramanian and Moyer wrote: ”While investment and activity continues to occur it is focused on private and alternate chains rather than bitcoin or other public chains where Bonafide operates.” As a result, the c
mircea_popescu: epic. "i am exactly who i wanted to be : a failure. unfortunately, this also means i die now. so long!"
☟︎ mircea_popescu: We achieved what we set out to do, even if the final result didn’t end up with us becoming the next Buzzfeed. We never wanted to be the next Buzzfeed. We always wanted to be who we were, Pixable. And it was working. Unfortunately, circumstances [despite reaching 9.4M active users and 58M monthly video views] … made it difficult to raise money and continue on."
mircea_popescu: btw asciilifeform the same iac/spamcorp owns the princetown review, your favourite!
☟︎ mircea_popescu: ah, as per intel they actually bought okcupid for 50mn, so prolly should shed some zeros.
mircea_popescu: of only practical interest here, remember that for every $1000 added to your 401k, you can expect to buy about a cent;s worth of turkey at some point down the road.
mircea_popescu: numbers are probably not exact, but they are certainly & guaranteedly closer to reality than the bizarro view where "apple has 1 dollar means apple has 1 dollar".