The average series D is 50-100M. This is 2.3B.

I'm wondering if AI coding companies almost NEED to be this capital heavy to pay for the massive LLM costs.

Being this capital heavy also "justifies" their valuations. New shares issued in each funding round are typically around 10% of total shares, so to get to a valuation of $30B you have to raise something around $3B

Of course you could also just spend your money wisely and not do another funding round, but then how are people supposed to know how much you are worth? And how are investors supposed to know they made a great investment?

They propably burn something in the order of 50M-100M per month in LLM API costs for models like Sonnet 4.5. So the answer would be: Yes.

Would you make the same argument for smoking?

I think we’re in a world so dominated by the attention economy and things optimized to hook us in that it’s hard to just say “I quit”.

My take having grown up in Germany: Germany has risen to one of the world's top economies with products known for precision manufacturing, exacting standards and a general assumption that "We do things the right way".

So Germans became convinced they know the exactly correct way to do things because that's how they became the top of the world. So now that things are getting worse (economy, housing etc.), many Germans are convinced they just need a bit more of the exactly correct way to do things.

The same perfectionist mindset that lets you manufacture some of the world's best physical products is the mindset that makes it impossible for the government to use the internet.

I really have great admirations for the German(ic?) people. They have much the same mindset as neighbours such as the Nordics. Perfectionists, quality standards in all they do, doing things "the right way" as you mentioned. Maybe an "autistic" mindset when it comes to work.

The difference from the Nordics is that Germans have had the determination to go all the way with things, which means that for almost any great invention in the world there's always a German behind it.

But when it comes to the social cohesion, I always thought that the Germans had to fake it like the Nordics do, or like people in the Soviet Union did. But more and more I start to realize it's not the case. Germans actually support their government and support the European Union (in Nordic countries you can't find 1 in 1000 people who supports the EU), and support the official ideologies in their country. Is this the case, or am I encountering Germans online in isolated spaces?

> The difference from the Nordics is that Germans have had the determination to go all the way with things, which means that for almost any great invention in the world there's always a German behind it.

That difference is also one of 80m+ people vs. a few million for the Nordics.

> But when it comes to the social cohesion, I always thought that the Germans had to fake it like the Nordics do, or like people in the Soviet Union did. But more and more I start to realize it's not the case. Germans actually support their government and support the European Union (in Nordic countries you can't find 1 in 1000 people who supports the EU), and support the official ideologies in their country. Is this the case, or am I encountering Germans online in isolated spaces?

Germans are indeed an incredibly obedient people. Even Vladimir Lenin once said "You couldn't start the revolution in Germany because there's a sign on front of the palace that says you can't step on the lawn."

I think Germany has extreme risk aversion as a result of two world wars and being extremely invested in a status quo that put them on top. Now Germany believes they can "just one more law" themselves back to the top.

Re: EU—Germany is a massive driver and biggest contributor to the EU. A lot of the EU's bureaucracy is a German-driven mindset which assumes everything will be good if you just pass one more law.

Big country and many options and all that, but at least with regards to EU support I would say yes, the majority of Germans supports the EU. I would say some regions more than others.

I think it is understood that the EU could be better and is a child of many compromises, but if you want to make it better you have to say what and crucially how. Until then, why not be happy with what you have, for once.

The question is to what degree that matters - if this power applies anywhere you can access ChatGPT (which is anything with a web browser), do you actually need to control the hardware?

I thought this was an interesting article that gets a few things wrong. Obviously, shipping AI-coded stuff to prod will introduce security risks.

But I also think it's important to define what level of security is actually needed for some of these apps. Obviously if you're shipping a product to thousands of enterprise customers, security needs to be tight.

But I would equate it similar to food safety: Many common practices in home kitchens would get you fired immediately in a restaurant.

But home kitchens serve very few people, store less food and store it for less time. They also have fewer people working on them.

I think the same is true for websites and apps.

There's something to be said for the security your type of project needs vs. perfect security.

When I worked at IBM as a mainframe programmer in the 90's, the first lesson we were taught is, "There is no such thing as computer security, only the appearance of computer security. Usually, that is enough."

This true at the processor level because any "security" relies on the outcome of a single branch instruction in machine code. If all your security passed, we branch to the "let me in" code. If not, not. No matter how complicated your security is, it will all come down to a single branch instruction and a programmer who can affect the outcome of that branch will bypass any restrictions you put in place.

This is a fundamental truism of computer science, and the software we worked on at IBM did things like run ATMs. When was the last time you heard of someone hacking one of those to spit out bills? Usually, the appearance of computer security is enough.

That's true. Plus the question of how much security you actually need. I've interacted with many, many websites and apps that were horribly insecure (e.g. a hotel checkin tool that stored passport scans in a public firebase bucket...).

In the vast majority of cases, this doesn't actually matter (the passport thing of course is pretty bad). If someone found a vulnerability in a vibe-coded event calendar and hacked into it to change the timing of trivia at your local sports bar... who cares?

It's like home security. If you're not rich, famous or extremely unpopular, you should definitely lock your doors, but you probably don't need armed guards.

I think this article is well-intentioned, but misses a few things:

-Nir Eyal is also the author of "Hooked" which is about building habit-forming products, i.e. he's an architect of the exact things that make it harder to pay attention.

When challenged about this, he typically suggests tips and tricks to use less tech, but never admits the products themselves are the problem.

-I think much of this needs to start with company culture. We need to start setting cultural values that enshrine the importance of deep work.

I don't think there's a convincing one but I think it's pretty obvious, no?

-These days, people are pretty unlikely to pay just to have a blog when there are tons of free alternatives

-Blogging itself has experienced massive decline with social media & short-form video

-Even if they did want to pivot into a more contemporary model, migrating a stack that old and with that many dependencies would be extremely difficult

Of course it'd be nice to preserve, but I imagine the business was on life support and mainly supported by holdovers and with close to zero new customers.

At some point, you need to close down.

I wonder how much the death of advertising on the open web has to do with it.

I mean, it's funny how things are going. Google, Twitter and even Facebook started with really open websites, but then started closing off more and more of "their" portion of the web. And now their dream has paid off: the open web is more or less gone.

And the winner is (or might very well be) Tiktok and ChatGPT.

Well done, guys. Brilliant strategy. Perhaps you should get a big bonus this year.

I think everyone criticizing this is comparing it to the wrong thing. Many ambitious students:

-graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates.

-join other people's startups where they work crazy hours

-work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school

Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation.

It's not like YC is saying you either do an internship with free lunches, corporate yoga classes and kombucha on tap or you dive into the trenches of being a YC founder.

Yes, this is an excellent point.

No it isn't. I, and many I know, would never trade away 100+ hours at a namebrand investment bank/PE firm/consulting firm to work 100+ hours at a startup. It's not what I would recommend nor is it what many people I know would recommend, some of whom are billionaires. The constant advice is to always work at the best possible opportunity the first few years of your career, then step into entrepreneurship. You'll then have an idea of things actually work in the world. And I say this as someone who went the other way around (startup first before working in corporate).

I'm sorry but only at my most very dedicated periods of work did I work 100 hour weeks, and that was like 3 or 4 weeks tops. I highly doubt that anyone sustains a 100 hour work week for much longer. Eighty hour work weeks? Sure, that is doable, but sleeping at the job site because you are pulling a 100 hour work week is just not sustainable.

Rules changed in 2003, but until then medical residency programs routinely had doctors working 100+ hours a week or longer. In 2003 a cap of 80 hours a week was instituted along with a maximum of 24 hours in any given period, but programs found various loopholes around that cap which still had doctors working close to 100 hours a week. So further restrictions were placed so that over any 4 week period there's a hard cap of 320 hours, no exceptions.

At any rate, for most of the HN crowd who work a fairly routine IT or an office job, 80+ hours sustained for months and months might seem impossible, but join the military, work on a ship, work on a farm, work the oil fields, work in investment banking, work in a film crew which threatened to go on strike in 2021 for having 98 hour work weeks for months on end... and you find that while it's not common, it certainly happens in various fields.

Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week? It's the cognitive load that I find difficult to believe about these numbers, not the

At one point I was also working crazy hours at a fast food shop. But that was only possible because I could "zone out" and just pour the customer's coffee and make sandwiches. Writing code for that long would have been impossible.

Obviously not every moment of every hour in a residents day is deep clinical thinking with high cognitive load, but we’re definitely not “zoning out” when making medical decisions. Patient statuses change very quickly and very often in the hospital, and every problem should be re-evaluated like it is a fresh concern. Decisions can be made quicker with more experience but you’re expected to be “on” all the time. Plus, lots of things contribute to cognitive load outside sheer medical decisions - social work, dispo issues, patient preferences, etc. Luckily my residency is closer to 60-70 hours a week but 100 is still common.

Remember - the 80 hour a week limit is not a max limit. It is the max hours per week AVERAGED OVER 4 weeks. You can easily work 100 hours this week if you do 60 the next.

> Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week?

Residencies? Yeah. The guy who came up with the US' system for medical residency was high on cocaine pretty much constantly and expected everyone to perform at his level.

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/a-day-in-th...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted

>. In 2003 a cap of 80 hours a week was instituted

Oh you sweet summer child, was instituted on paper

Here's how it actually works. "Mark down the hours you worked this week. Oh. And if it's over 80 of course we'll run into big problems for violating this rule and your residency will lose credentials which is bad for you.. also we'll know it was you"

People who work 90, 100, 110, 120 hours (gets hard north of 130), guess how many hours they put? 80 if they're feeling nice, 81 if they want to make a point. Even today.

I'm sure prisoners in labour camps work more than that. And the death toll for patients cured by overworked doctors is not insignificant.

This is performance - the human brain doesn’t work like this.

I've frequently had points in my career where this is just life. It comes down to planning when you do which tasks. I'm absolutely not at peak decision making capacity, but sometimes you aren't making decisions, just executing on work that takes time.

You may have a family but how much time are you spending with them.

You know yourself but I think it's extremely unhealthy advice to give to people and usually hides a lot of inefficiency and misused hours.

Constraints breed creativity and efficiency. Do more with less and all that.

Have you done the exercise of "how can I produce the same value output in 80% of the time". The exact percentage doesn't matter, just doing the exercise to improve efficiency and have a more balanced approach. That also gives you space for actual crunch time whereas you seem to work in a perpetual state of crunch.

Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

Again, what you're doing might work for you but I'm trying to offer a slightly more nuanced take than what I consider it to be the "constant crunch" mode.

Busy doesn't mean value.

> Have you done the exercise of "how can I produce the same value output in 80% of the time". The exact percentage doesn't matter, just doing the exercise to improve efficiency and have a more balanced approach. That also gives you space for actual crunch time whereas you seem to work in a perpetual state of crunch.

My cofounder and I do this usually about twice a month where we sit down and purposefully think about this at a macro and micro level.

> Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

It's real! My health is not being taken care of, but that is the "pick 3" axis that I'm compromising on in the short term.

> Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

I think this is not the right way to think about it. People have different preferences. The difference between having 4m in the bank and 8m in the bank at the end of my career is very marginal to me. I would much rather put myself in the position to work towards a tail event.

And somehow you seem to be defending it. Even though there is statistically a better return just working in a bank as a Java dev in a second tier city.

This is absolutely untrue. We pay ourselves and all of our employees competitive salaries.

See you paying them at least $335K in cash seeing that an average enterprise dev can make $140K working 40 hours a week and you want them to work 2.4x as many hours?

I thought the S-Curve piece was interesting, but not complete. It's definitely true that Europe, Japan etc. are experiencing slowing wealth growth, but this specific visual makes it seem like once a society is wealthy, you're absorbed into a list of wealthy countries and that's it.

Meanwhile, many countries have gone from some of the world's most prosperous to countries people want to emigrate from (Argentina, Venezuela come to mind).

the S-curve doesn't end there.

> Meanwhile, many countries have gone from some of the world's most prosperous to countries people want to emigrate from (Argentina, Venezuela come to mind).

This is oft-repeated misinformation.

Latin American countries experienced massive growth in the early 20th century and large incomes from grain export. That income was distributed in a very unequal manner. And back in the day there were no reliable statistics of the huge segment of the population living in complete poverty, both in urban shanty towns with no census to speak of, nor the masses of agrarian workers living in systems not too dissimilar to slavery. Every economist who has dealt with the issue has mentioned frequently that economic time series extended that far back are mostly extrapolation and speculation, and much of it is not particularly rigorous in its methods.

It's not even that. It's management that sounds good vs. management that sounds bad.