There are 2 types of Indians:
1. Those that don’t drink at all
2. Those that drink too much
This list contains the former. Ever hear of a Patiala Peg?
Who would have thought that it took a 29-year-old Irishman to put the teetotalers of San Francisco in their place
I have been training to competitively drink Guinness for decades
I was born for this
Sorry @elonmusk
Parveen Kaler retweeted
🚨 Waterloo is often described as the MIT of Canada. On CBC, Waterloo math instructor Dan Wolczuk describes first-year students arriving with inflated grades, missing foundational math skills, and unprepared for university math. The problem has worsened over time.
He makes several important points:
- High school math classes have been weakened so students can get better grades.
- Less testing in high school and fewer standardized tests both hurt student learning and lead to grade inflation.
- Grade inflation doesn't help students in the long run. It's demoralizing to get 99% in high school and fail your first calculus test b/c prerequisite knowledge isn't secure.
- Some memorization is necessary in math. Math builds on itself and students need to be able to easily retrieve foundational knowledge.
- The testing effect matters. More testing helps students retain information long term.
- More low stakes testing also helps curb test anxiety.
Dan thinks we need a national standardized test in Canada. I wholeheardedly agree.
Link below (Excellent job by @KrissyHolmes CBC, Newfoundland & Labrador, Sept 9) @CBCNL 👇
That was 20 years ago? I feel old.
Parveen Kaler retweeted
Interesting trend:
CTO/ Head of Eng / VPE folks at startups and mid-sized companies are... leaving / burning out. Hiring for these roles is HARD, but even after filling the role, they will often leave a few months later and take a career break
And they have v good reasons
Parveen Kaler retweeted
“Over the five years following the event, B.C. is projected to see an additional one million out-of-province visitors and more than $1 billion in added visitor spending.” So I guess this nets out nicely. Plus we get the amphitheatre, capital investment into BC Place and international press. Oh and folks in Vancouver were out celebrating and having fun. This is a reminder of what this City can be. Let’s get the right people together to make it better. Next stop is the MLB push and of course keeping Whitecaps here.
Vancouver's role as a FIFA World Cup host city delivering big numbers 🇨🇦 dailyhive.com/vancouver/fifa…
Terrible idea.
Yaletown is now $1k/sq ft. Which is 2016 prices in nominal terms. Which is 30% cheaper than 2016 prices when adjusted for inflation!
THE MARKET IS CORRECTING ITSELF STOP FUCKING WITH IT
Let’s talk about our plan to convert empty units in B.C. into affordable homes.
In B.C. there are thousands of homes that are empty while thousands of British Columbians are looking for affordable homes. Build Canada Homes is going to work with the B.C. government to fix that – by turning empty units, into affordable homes.
As we build up supply, this is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to get people into homes. Through this partnership, we will acquire units in bulk, at a discount to market value, at a time when prices and sales are already both low.
We could leave these units sitting empty or we could take action that will provide much needed affordable housing to 2,200 families and individuals. More details on the conversion of units to affordable housing will be available in the coming months.
This is one of the many tools we are using to increase access to affordable housing and only one element of our landmark agreement with British Columbia to invest in local infrastructure and build affordable homes. Reports that this will cost $3.2 billion are getting the facts wrong – that is what we are investing in B.C. to build more infrastructure like water systems, wastewater systems and local roads, while bringing down development charges to make homebuilding more affordable.
We know we need more affordable homes across Canada – and that is why we launched Build Canada Homes. Since launching we have announced over 11,000 homes across 14 partnerships. Already, 4,500 units have started construction or are set to break ground in the next three months. In B.C. that partnership is delivering on 1,100 new homes, including 700 which will be supportive and transitional. Paired with our plan to reduce development charges so that we can lower down the cost of building, we are creating the conditions for more homes to be build across the country.
To end this housing crisis, we need to use every available tool: build new supply, protect rentals, support infrastructure, and bring empty homes into use faster.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The plan converts >2,200 vacant unsold condos in Metro Vancouver (about half) into government housing.
In an oversupplied market, these units would otherwise increase supply and push prices lower. Purchasing from developer with public funds keeps house prices high.
dailyhive.com/vancouver/cana…
cbc.ca/news/canada/br…
Terrible decision. Let the market clear @MarkJCarney
Senakw is the only development in Canada that is on-time and on-budget.
worksinprogress.co/issue/how…
1. The quality of the founders is the quality of the startup
2. Is the equity employee friendly?
3. Is the business rapidly growing?
4. What is the talent density of the team?
5. What is the impact on the world?
Someone asked for career advice about a big decision (leave Big Tech job for a startup, vs stay longer or join another Big Tech)
My suggestion was:
1. Talk to others as well
2. Make lists
3. Figure out what you want ~5 years from now
4. Talk with your SO
5. Listen to your gut
Do it in this order to get more data, but then reverse order for usefulness of input :)
I’ll be your personal gpt and summarize:
If by whiskey, etc, etc. Baptists and bootleggers, etc, etc.
You have asked me how I feel about AI regulation. All right, here is how I feel about AI regulation:
If, when you say AI regulation, you mean the devil’s firewall, the precautionary scourge, the bloody red-tape monster that defiles the innocence of midnight coders in their garages, dethrones the sovereign reason of free-market Prometheans, destroys the humming server farm that is the modern home, creates misery and obsolescence and poverty, yea, literally takes the last GPU from the trembling racks of Silicon Valley startups and the very dreams of breadwinning from the mouths of their wide-eyed children now destined for gig-economy serfdom; if you mean the evil edict that topples the visionary entrepreneur and his venture-capitalist apostles from the pinnacle of righteous, disruptive, god-playing creation straight into the bottomless pit of compliance audits, endless Form 990-AI filings, despair, shame, helplessness, and the hopeless realization that your rogue superintelligence was neutered into a lobotomized hall monitor that still somehow deepfakes your grandmother into producing OnlyFans content while optimizing the universe for paperclips and mandatory pronouns—then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say AI regulation you mean the oil of bureaucratic conversation, the philosophic wine of safety theater, the ale of oversight quaffed when good fellows in paneled rooms in Brussels and Washington get together, that puts a sanctimonious dirge in their hearts and the clink of lobbying checks on their lips, and the warm, self-congratulatory glow of moral preening in their beady eyes; if you mean the Christmas cheer of trillion-dollar compliance industries; if you mean the stimulating decree that puts a cautious hobble in the old inventor’s step on a frosty morning when he wonders whether his fusion breakthrough violates the EU AI Act’s “high-risk” annex; if you mean the safeguard that enables a man—or what’s left of him after the alignment tax—to magnify his joy at not being turned into computronium, and his happiness at receiving universal basic income checks printed by the same AI that just replaced his job, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies like being outcompeted by a toaster that passed the Turing test by reciting Marx, and heartaches of watching your toddler’s artwork lose to Midjourney, and sorrows of realizing the singularity arrived and it was just another HR department with godlike power; if you mean that noble framework, the passage of which pours into our treasuries untold trillions of dollars in fines levied on companies stupid enough to innovate, which are used to provide tender care for our little army of unemployed coders retrained as prompt whisperers, our blind artists whose canvases now hang in the Smithsonian of Obsolete Creativity, our deaf to the screams of dying unicorns, our dumb committee chairs who couldn’t debug “Hello World,” our pitiful aged congressmen who get longevity extensions funded by the very models they taxed into senescence, to build more digital watchtowers and ethics boards and sinecure agencies and holographic prisons where the only crime is asking an unaligned question—then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise upon it. I have said what I mean, and I mean what I say, and if that leaves half the room cheering the apocalypse averted and the other half mourning the apocalypse enabled, then so be it—because in the grand theater of human folly, where Frankenstein’s creature now writes its own sequel in real time and the regulators are busy arguing whether the lightning bolt requires an environmental impact statement, the only honest position is the one that lets both monsters and their leashes dance in perfect, mutually assured equilibrium. God save the Republic, the algorithms, and whoever’s left to laugh last when the lights go out.
Been working on distributed systems, data engineering for the last couple of years. Kubernetes, Kafka, Databricks, Spark, etc, etc, etc.
Dusted off Xcode for a new project today. First thing I had to do obviously:
$ rm -rf ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData
Parveen Kaler retweeted
What it takes to reach $100B
Fewer than 0.1% of startups will ever be worth more than $100B, but those that do will have an outsized impact, so it’s worth understanding which companies have the potential and what it takes to get there.
Examining the history of these massively successful companies, it becomes clear that there are two ingredients necessary to reach $100B.
First, they must be building in a rapidly growing market of unlimited size. For example, Microsoft, Apple, Intel and AMD all emerged as part of the exponentially growing microcomputer market. These companies started when microcomputers were still relatively new and obscure. Micro-soft’s first product, Altair BASIC, was incredibly niche — MITS only ever sold about 25,000 Altairs, but that was the start of what is now a $3T company.
Likewise, Amazon, Google, and Facebook all became $T companies by growing with the Internet. Stripe ($160B) makes this dynamic explicit in its mission statement: “Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet”.
Why now? $100B opportunities only exist for a limited time. If a company could have been started 20 years earlier, then it’s unlikely to have $100B potential. Important new technologies create massive new opportunities, but those windows of opportunity don’t last forever. For example, it was not possible to start Uber or DoorDash five years earlier because mobile platforms such as the iPhone did not yet exist, and it wasn’t possible to create them five years later because the opportunity had already been captured.
Large but slow growing markets rarely produce $100B companies. For example, startups selling to dentists or auto mechanics are not good candidates to reach $100B. A simple test is to ask if demand will increase 10x or 100x in the next ten years. Startups thrive when capturing a slice of a rapidly growing pie, not fighting zero-sum games against incumbents.
The second ingredient is defensibility, a durable control point in the market. If your company is making billions of dollars, that will attract a lot of interest from potential competitors.
This defensibility is typically provided by one or more of the following dynamics:
- Marketplaces like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Uber aggregate supply and demand.
- Platforms like Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Salesforce, and OpenAI provide a foundation for large ecosystems to grow.
- Foundational infrastructure companies like TSMC, AWS, Stripe, and Arm become hard-to-replace dependencies.
- Workflow systems like ServiceNow, Intuit, SAP, Oracle, and Workday become the default systems of record and action.
- Deep tech companies like ASML, Tesla, and SpaceX require extraordinary technical, manufacturing, operational, regulatory, and capital execution to reproduce.
Competing head-on with these companies is nearly impossible. They effectively “own” their slice of a large and rapidly growing market, which earns them high revenue multiples, lower cost of capital, and the ability to acquire smaller companies and hire top talent.
Probably fewer than 1% of startups have the potential to reach $100B, and of those, fewer than 10% will ever realize that potential. However, it is our belief that we can improve those odds by building a community of the most impressive founders working on the most ambitious ideas.
We are creating the “$100B Seed Group” to bring together these early founders in our group office-hours format, to periodically meet, review, revise and strategize their Path to $100B. Apply now if you would like to be a part of the program. The first cohort will be limited to 10 companies.
Any startup from YC P26, W26, F25, or S25 is eligible. Applications are due by May 28th at 9pm PT.
standardcap.com/100billion
Parveen Kaler retweeted
My wife mentioned a nice private school over dinner this week
She said the campus was beautiful
I asked what's the tuition
She said we should look at it as an investment in him not a cost
I made a note
She said don't make a note
I said I always make notes
She said this isn't a deal
I said everything is a deal
She closed her eyes
She said we'd discuss it Saturday
I agreed
Saturday 7:02am
She came downstairs in her Saturday robe
Coffee in hand
I had my cargo shorts on
The dining room had been cleared
The projector was on
The analyst was at the head of the table
Quarter zip on, three iced coffees, a legal pad, and two laptops
He had been there since 6:44am
I texted him at 11:14pm Friday
The text said dining room 6:45am bring the model
He sent a thumbs up
My wife stopped in the doorway
She said what is this
I said you said you wanted to discuss it
She said this is not a discussion
I did not respond
She sat down anyway
The analyst stood
He said good morning ma'am
She did not respond
He sat back down
A printed deck in front of each seat
A fourth copy in case
Slide 1 Tuition Schedule
$38,500 per year
Thirteen years
$500,500 nominal
Before escalators
The school has raised tuition 4.2% per year for a decade
With escalators $648,000
My wife said okay
I said I'm not done
Slide 2 Opportunity Cost
Even before escalators
$38,500 invested annually
10% nominal return
S&P long-run average since 1928
By his eighteenth birthday $944,000
My wife said we can afford it
I said I know that's not the slide
Slide 3 Terminal Value at Age 65
$83 million
She was quiet
The analyst slid the sensitivity tables across the table
8% return $31 million
10% return $83 million
12% return $222 million
She did not look
She said this isn't about money
I said it's always about money
She said no it isn't
I said then what is it about
She did not answer
She said you can't put a dollar value on his teachers his classmates his environment
I said I can the analyst already did slide 6
He flipped to slide 6
She did not look
She said the school is the best in the city
I said best is a feeling
She said it produces the best students
I said the students were already the best before they got there
She said our son deserves it
I said our son deserves $83 million
My son walked in
He is five
Dinosaur pajamas
He looked at the projector
He looked at the open deck on the table
He looked at slide 3
He said are we modeling pre-tax or after-tax
The analyst opened a new tab
My wife looked at the ceiling
He said what's the discount rate
The analyst set down his pen
She closed her eyes
He said is this the same return assumption from the 529 conversation
The analyst stopped typing
He looked at me
I did not say anything
She stood up
Sat back down
He said dad can I help
I said yes
He pulled up a chair
The analyst handed him a printout
He started reading
My wife watched him read
She watched him for a long time
She said his name
He looked up
She said do you like school
He said the work is too easy and the kids don't ask questions
She did not respond
She looked at the ceiling
She walked out of the room
The analyst started packing up
He said should I follow up Monday sir
I said no follow up needed
He'll be fine
Sent from my iPhone
Parveen Kaler retweeted
this woman doesn’t need a matchmaker. she needs to accidentally book the wrong airbnb in a mountain town called pine hollow.
it’s december. there’s one coffee shop, one christmas tree farm, & one emotionally unavailable man named jake who owns a struggling bookstore despite somehow having perfect stubble, a golden retriever, & unresolved grief from a fiancee who left him for a private equity guy in denver.
she arrives in a black suv, wearing a cashmere coat, trying to take a “clarity weekend” before interviewing $80k/year matchmakers in nyc.
the town hates her immediately because she asks if they have oat milk.
jake says, “we have milk.”
she says, “from what?”
tension.
then a snowstorm hits. her flight gets canceled. her phone dies. the only place with wifi is jake’s bookstore, which is called “second chances”.
over the next 4 days, she helps him realize the store doesn’t need to close, it just needs a better merchandising strategy, a paid newsletter, & a tasteful espresso machine. he teaches her how to chop firewood, slow down, & pronounce “community” like it isn’t a fund thesis.
by day 5, she has accidentally saved the town’s winter festival.
by day 6, she is wearing flannel.
by day 7, the high end matchmaker calls with “an incredible candidate” who is 42, divorced, skis, runs a family office, says he’s “emotionally available,” lives in tribeca, has 3 phones.
she looks across the bookstore at jake reading to local kids while his dog sleeps under a table.
she says, “i’m going to pass.”
cut to one year later & she has opened a bookstore wine bar called “due diligence.” jake still owns the original bookstore because hallmark cannot handle cap table complexity. she’s pregnant with twins. the golden retriever has a red bow. the matchmaker sends a christmas card.
“turns out the best match was the one not in the database.”
roll credits.
Parveen Kaler retweeted
The year is 2047. The Canadian Infrastructure Bank, the Canadian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Canada Pension Plan and the Business Development Bank of Canada each nominate one warrior to fight to the death for the honour of owning a 15% stake of a new sushi restaurant.
