This letter is clearly written with dumb, naive retail investors in mind. Anyone familiar with Palantir’s history knows that their first headquarters was a building they took over from Facebook. The two companies are intertwined in many, many ways.
That is honestly my take away from this letter. Who, knowing anything about Palantir, reads this and is willing to trust anything they provide or give them your money? I know that S1's tend to be aspirational and the most positive/flattering framing possible but...this is just flat out an alternate reality. Anyone willing to build this level of false narrative about the history of a company is not one I would trust to deliver a true narrative about earnings or financial status.
Why has it become such an SEO driven BS filled website if the owner doesn't care about the financials? Why can't he pay people to curate the answers and generally drive up the quality?
Can we go ahead and coin this the as 'The Yahoo Answers Effect' because it seems they are following in the exact same fashion. High quality question and answers, that slowly (and rapidly) devolves into SEO spam and useless commentary.
I’m guessing they’re referring to the fact that the CEO is very wealthy [1] and has self-funded the company, and suggesting that he’s not as concerned with the financials.
It's not self-funded by D'Angelo. Quora has raised several hundred million dollars, the overwhelming share of that from traditional venture capital firms.
They also don't have the luxury of treating it like a hobby business, which is why they've been focused on quantity over quality for years now. They have to scale up the concept massively or find another business.
In contrast WikiHow is an example of a successful knowledge service that is operated with more of a focus on quality and less on quantity. They're not owned by venture capital firms and don't have to seek an exit or try to force growth at any cost. It's a route Quora could have taken if it weren't for the VC firms, now they have no choice. Their former competitor, eHow, took the paid spam content route and got destroyed for it.
About half the answers devolve into a sales pitch after a lengthy and confusing intro that seems to be written for SEO purposes only. The answers tend to be of substantially lower quality than what you'd see on SO too.
Yahoo Answers might be similar, sure, but that's not a positive comparison.
There are two criticisms here: one is that Quora is a bad business, and only operates because its CEO funds it, and second is that it is a bad source of information. The first is definitely an unanswered question at this point: revenue is low but the site has a vast amount of evergreen content which ranks highly on Google -- they have a ton of traffic but it's not clear to what extent they can monetize it.
The second is a matter of opinion, and whether you're looking at the average content or the best content. There is great content on Quora but the average question/answer is of course absolute dogshit.
What do they look like! How do they function? How did they retool to make them so quickly? How do they compare to normal ventilators? What’s the UI on their control panels?
This sounds like a fairy tale to me, with the governor covering for Elon. But maybe they did, in fact, retool in 48 hours and deliver a working product.
How is this some sort of prescient statement? There have been movies made about this exact issue for decades. On a societal level, it is a bug marked WONTFIX similar to preparing for asteroid impact, the next Big One in SF (come on guys, we arent prepared for it), the next volcano, large scale terrorist attack using chemical weapons, and so on.
It seems nobody has a memory to remember that Microsoft hobbled local governments attempts to build and use open source software instead of paying their tax. In a way, you’re basically thanking Bill Gates for redistributing a small fraction of the money he’s stolen from global governments through the Microsoft monopoly.
If you think this is a conspiracy theory go talk to IT staff who worked in the German government in the late 90s.
“How is this some sort of prescient statement? There have been movies made about this exact issue for decades. On a societal level, it is a bug marked WONTFIX similar to preparing for asteroid impact, the next Big One in SF (come on guys, we arent prepared for it), the next volcano, large scale terrorist attack using chemical weapons, and so on.”
Exactly. A lot of people know the risks but we are not willing to pay for preparedness.
I know it seems unfair to hold Bill Gates forever unable to atone for those business practices, and I applaud him for what he is doing now. However, I still think microsoft was a net loss to society.
Point losses don't make sense because it's percentages that matter. The other metrics you mentioned do suggest this is of course a noteworthy market crash, but whether that becomes a recession or is anything to seriously worry about long run is a different question.
"The S&P 500 fell by 7.7%, blowing through the first circuit-breaker level that it tripped minutes after trading opened for the day. The S&P 500 is on pace for its worst day since December 1, 2008, when stocks fell by just over 9%.
It is superficially "asinine" because it is so narrow. However, the DJIA, S&P, Russell, etc all track/correlate each other.
> Look at any other index instead.
Or better yet, inlay the graphs of DJIA, S&P, Russell, Nasdaq, etc on the same chart for comparison. You'll see that the graphs all look similar. Meaning they all go up and down at around the same times.
It would seem that the broader indexes would better reflect the market as a whole. But in the real world, DJIA does good enough a job as the S&P, Russel, etc for a bird's eye view of the market.
Indeed. S&P 500 is still not even below of what it was in the end of 2018 after the last major instability. Partly thanks to this, 2019 was a marvelous year with stocks gaining almost 40% during a single calendar year.
My reading is we're in a normal correction that has been exacerbated by COVID and last night's massive fall (-30%) in oil price.
Hah not a crash? Well it kinda is, and if it keeps going further down it will definitely cause a recession. The oil price drop was a huge punch in the gut, and I wonder what happens to US oil production if it stays this low for longer. Or well any oil production that can't compete with these prices.
Almost nobody is drilling new oil wells, they stopped last year sometime. Almost nobody because there are still investors keeping one skeleton crew running just so they have expertise for when the oil price recovers.
Once a well is drilled the cost to drill the well is a sunk cost. You keep pumping oil if the cost to run the pumps is less than the price you get. Most people with oil are large enough to shut down some wells to keep the price up a bit - they harm their own profit in the short term though and still need to sell enough oil to break even.
Nobody being willing to make large cuts is different from nobody making cuts. The US is not a member of OPEC, nor are several other oil producing countries: they don't follow OPEC but may still reduce output.
There is rumor OPEC isn't cutting production because they believe they can undercut their competitors and put them out of business - I don't think that is their motivation, but it is something that can't be ignored.
There’s a VC firm that already uses this model with their billion-dollar investments. It’s called Benchmark. Several of their former portfolio company founders can tell you all about how it’s worked out for them.
Until the richest YouTuber isn’t an adolescent set up to prey on his peers with unboxing videos, these measures are all half-hearted attempts at keeping the cash flowing. More regulation is probably needed.
you say this like all cartoons growing up weren't giant ads. Almost every cartoon of my generation was created by a toy company. He-Man, GI Joe, Transformers, etc.
I dunno, unboxing videos often satisfy (part of) the urge that made me want to get the thing in the first place. It's like the psychology finding that telling people about your goals makes you less motivated to achieve them. Part of my motivation to buy the thing was to get the experience of unboxing it; now I feel like I've already gotten that.
