7 times since 1998, we had a fall of more than 25% on Index level.

The min and max time period b/w 2 subsequent falls was 16 months & 45 months.

If you can not digest the fall of 25-40% once every 3-5 years, you shouldn't own stocks. Prepare for the worse & invest for the best

1/ Thread: "A Silicon Valley Ponzi Scheme"

Thanks to @chamath for laying this out in Social Capital's 2018 annual letter.

I've always appreciated his outspokenness.

2/ The hardest thing for most startups today is the path to market: first finding product-market fit & a way to reach customers, then building a ruthless machine to acquire, monetize & retain them.

3/ Because of this, when the VC industry invests capital into fast growing startups today, the plurality (if not majority) of invested capital will go into user acquisition and ad spending, for better or worse— usually worse.

4/ Todays massive venture-backed advertising, sales, and user acquisition playbook has morphed into one that champions growth at any cost.

This is creating a big bill that will soon come due...

5/ Ad impressions and click-throughs are bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention.

👇 Thread. New deck getting published this week: "Consumer startups are awesome, and here's what I'm looking to invest in at Andreessen Horowitz." If you want to read it, subscribe to my newsletter here: https://t.co/262t8eh0wf

1/ A lot of new consumer technologies have been introduced to US households in the last 100 years. But it's taken many of them - like the telephone - more than 50 years to get to the majority of the US. Why is that?

2/ We had to literally teach people how to use phone. Which end goes to your mouth, which goes to your ear. Say "hello" when people call. The motivation of consumers to talk to their friends has always been there, but we had to teach the behavior

3/ If you compare phones to the latest technologies, there's been a huge shift. Things are being picked up much faster.

4/ Even while there's been all this innovation recently, physically speaking, we are still the same human beings from 100,000 years ago.

Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ

The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.

Life is crazy. Today is a good day to stop and reflect

10 simple questions that CHANGED my life

(startup life, personal life)

Here they are:

Q: Can you really control that?

Smart people know what they can and cannot control

If you're living in the past, you're nostalgic
If you're living in the future, you're anxious
If you're living in the present, you're at peace

Q: Did you start today with a victory?

Starting every day with a victory sets you up to win

I don't care what it is:

- Make your bed
- Make a wonderful coffee
- Hug your wife or children

No such thing as a small win. It's a win!

You'll win more, if you start winning early

Q: What are you optimizing for?

#MFSA
1. Money
2. Freedom
3. Stability
4. Ability

The world rewards those who are focused

Perfectly prioritize

Are you being optimistic?

Guaranteed: more luck when you're optimistic