December 7 2023
- Tucker episode feedback was great
- Ivy League antisemitism hearings
- Harvard has abysmal record on free speech (see FIRE survey results)
- Victim groups vs oppressor groups
- Donors were OK to donate to universities when they didn’t realize whether they were in the oppressor or victim group
- What if other ethnic groups were targeted?
- Can be traced back to when USNews and World Report started ranking schools - these schools started chasing asset management - learning became secondary
- Mission of these universities has been lost
- Color blindness is now considered racism
- Was the civil rights movement’s basic tenet
- TBD if these leaders will get fired
- Kids and parents have to decide whether they want to go to these schools
- State of the economy
- Only in the US is feeling tied to politics but not reality
- Are wages keeping up with inflation?
- If there is a quarter point interest rate cut, $1T out of $5.7T sitting in money market accounts will become active
- SaaS
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Lots more startups shutting down
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Seems SaaS ARR is going up
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Seems Software Recession has ended?
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But Spotify just did layoffs?
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- Friedberg is Ohalo CEO
- Very excited about it
- Read a paper and contacted Judd about it and they brainstormed and started the company
- Gene editing
- Dearth of great leadership talent in the valley
- Hard problems require a lot of money - you want to entrust that money into someone who has proven themselves - those people have a lot of options because they have done a good job
- If there’s a lot of free money, you have fragmented talent - instead of concentrated talent at a bigger company
- Google Gemini
- Google has the most data on earth
- Can everyone inside the company get together to go in the same direction
- There will be lots of foundational models and their cost will go to zero
- Who will make money - infra and apps
- Adobe Figma acquisition is stalled
- UK CMA
- Merger was announced over 15 months ago - regulators taking too long - what are they doing? Businesses deserve better turnaround times
- US - DOJ, EU, UK - CMA
- How can 1 country hold up a deal?
- This pertains to the whole startup ecosystem
- They are making a novel argument
- Figma and Adobe are different - former creates code for websites but latter creates marketing collateral
- They can just block any deal based on their bogus argument on that these companies might compete in the future
- This is gonna have a chilling effect on the startup ecosystem
- CMA document is 460 pages!!!
- Speculating nonsense (their assessment of probability of future competition is bogus - precogs crap)
- Punishing companies’ SWOT analysis as acknowledgement of being a bad actor
- UK GDP is $3T, EU is $16T, US = $20-$25T
- Smallest market is creating biggest problems for the merger
- This fundamentally hurts UK productivity in the long term
- How can companies not get a reasonable SLA
- In order to have a healthy startup ecosystem, we need exits - if you’re an acquirer or a target and you know it will take 15+ months and the standard to vet it is arbitrary then there will be less risk capital that goes into this
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