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11 person startup made up of 4 engineers and 7 chiefs of staff
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Varun Arora
3.2K posts
Varun Arora
@itsvarora
engineer, explorer, occasional investor
NYC Katılım Mart 2014
1.6K Takip Edilen1.1K Takipçiler
@minnesota_jen @AlecStapp Many of those countries of origin are or were socialist
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@AlecStapp Why didn’t they do that in their country of origin?
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This new research on US unicorn startups is really interesting.
Some key facts from the report:
1. Immigrants founded or cofounded 455 of America’s 775 privately held billion-dollar startups, equal to 59% of all US unicorns.
2. 66% of all US unicorns were founded or cofounded by immigrants or the children of immigrants.
3. 79% of US unicorns have either an immigrant founder or an immigrant in a key leadership role.
4. The 455 immigrant-founded US unicorns have a combined valuation of $5 trillion.
5. That $5 trillion valuation is larger than the total stock-market value of companies listed in all but 7 countries.
6. Including immigrant-founded unicorns that went public since 2016 pushes the total value above $5.8 trillion.
7. The number of immigrant-founded US unicorns rose from 50 in 2018 to 455 in 2026.
8. 24% of US unicorns have a founder who first came to America as an international student.
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@AlmostMedia Except this is what happens when anyone tries to give back nowadays
x.com/micsolana/stat…
Mike Solana@micsolana
a little over a decade ago lucas offered to gift this museum to san francisco, and the presidio trust turned it down because the design was too jarring or some such silly shit. the people responsible forgotten, the damage permanent.
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I’m basically a nobody from a poor hippie family but my mother repeated “noblesse oblige”
If you have had any sort of success you are obliged to give back to the community that enabled your good fortune.
We need to return to this for the mediocre with success
Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth)@antoniogm
Theologians have wrestled with the theodicy problem for centuries: why do bad things happen to good people (e.g. Job in the Bible)? They’ve also wrestled with why good happens to the evil (Psalm 73). But what nobody has explored is: what if extraordinary good fortune happens to the mediocre? I suspect it just wasn’t possible before technology; nobody in ancient Mesopotamia happened to be employee 73 at ZigguratAI and made out like a king just hanging around doing their job for four years. Such an outcome would require hereditary monarchy or extremes of cunning and daring, either zero merit or extremes of it. A modicum of merit alone never won big. Now that person, employee whatever at an AI company, must either rationalize such success against detractors too ready to mock the fortunate’s dumb luck, or simply retire into private life puzzled at the fluke, like the soldier who sees his buddy’s head blown off in combat and wonders why he made it.
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Knicks game tonight, Ramp just launched Stack, and it's 80 degrees out in Flatiron and MSP is buzzing
NYC is so back
Eric Glyman@eglyman
Introducing Stack. The AI operating system that lets accounting firms take on more clients without hiring. Learns your firm's process, runs the close, posts the journals. Fully auditable. We’re living through the biggest shift in accounting since the spreadsheet.
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Ok but why does @Cloudflare merch go so hard
Abril@abrilzucchi
new york tech week is the fashion week for people who build agents
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@dystopi_a @AlexGodofsky It used to not apply to the GitHub one but sadly that’s no longer the case
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@AlexGodofsky I love how "Copilot is trash tier" can refer to literally any of the Copilots
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The funniest part of this is that Copilot is trash tier so every time they name a new thing Copilot everyone assumes it sucks too.
Trung Phan@TrungTPhan
Friendly reminder that Microsoft has ~80 products or tools with the name “Copilot”. Tey Bannerman counted them up: “there are now Copilots inside Copilots, Copilots for other Copilots, and a physical Copilot key on your keyboard for summoning them.”
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The observable reality on the ground was that the downtown core was completely dead.
Of course the reality is that even in a remote-first world the Bay Area would continue to produce an outsized share of the world’s important startups, but it was absolutely not consensus that SF in-person work would come roaring back in the way that it has.
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Lot of people dunking on Keith- yes he was wrong/I was right but the dunks miss the sentiment at the time, which was:
San Francisco is over.
Ppl told me I was an idiot to stay in “Detroit 2.0”
At the time, I would say ~1/3rd of people were on Keiths side of the bet.
Keith Rabois@rabois
@pitdesi will take the bet that no SF based company founded after March 2020 until today that raised VC capital will exit above $10b.
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@theistinthought @wildstar33 @ggraham It's simply not true in any suburban town in the northeast either. Unless you want to walk alongside a 4+ lane road with no sidewalk and risk death.
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@wildstar33 @ggraham Yeah, most of America is not Texas
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Question to the ‘walkable city’ advocates who hate cars:
If you go to the grocery store and have eight bags (or even four bags) of groceries, how do you get them home? You push around a little cart or something? Sounds bad.
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@JungleJorge2 @AlwaysSunnyNYC @IWillNeverDieUS @TheJeffreyNYC @Kalshi 100%. Would have been cool to see a case study of a small business using a complex derivative to meaningfully reduce risk
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@AlwaysSunnyNYC @IWillNeverDieUS @TheJeffreyNYC @Kalshi Correct. And I do agree. A better PR / case study would be something not available on sportsbooks. Just IMO
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NYC bar: free drinks if the Knicks win Game 1 at @TheJeffreyNYC
Their hedge: a $5K position on @Kalshi
Prediction markets as a small business tool is interesting. Large companies have had access to these hedges through their banks for years. In a world of market volatility and scarce goods, I would expect more small businesses to use tools like this.
Yueqi Yang@Yueqi_Yang
Kalshi's first example of a small business using it as hedging tool is The Jeffrey, an NYC bar that's promising free drinks to all customers if New York Knicks wins NBA Finals Game 1 on Wednesday
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TIL New York Knickerbockers
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@NYCMayor
Today, I signed an Executive Order temporarily repealing bedtimes in the City of New York so that kids of all ages can watch our team in the NBA Finals. As Mayor, you’re forced to make many difficult decisions. This was not one of them. Go Knicks.
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@tarush_agarwal_ They absolutely do not for the vast, vast majority of Google users. I have to scroll 5 page lengths to see it, and my account is already significantly more personalized towards startups than most.
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Fun fact - they do outrank monaco on SEO
Yana Welinder@yanabana
Marketing 101: Never name your startup after a geographic location. You will never outrank a country in SEO. No matter how many tiny planes you fly over San Francisco.
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New York enacted pension reforms for new employees in 2012, Kathy Hochul just scaled them back.
The new benefits can now never be undone because that would be against the NY constitution.
Hochul can make noises about abundance, but Blue State governance has failed.
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Unfortunate truth is that people fall into one of two reductive camps with their opinions on LoC mattering. Either they believe it’s completely irrelevant (wrong, and encourages ‘promo packet’ engineering like at Google) or they believe it’s the only thing that matters and Goodheart their orgs to death as a result.
100% agree with you although agentic coding making it slightly less correlated.
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@schrockn A slightly controversial opinion I have is that value has a decent correlation with LoC though Goodhart’s law applies
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My opinion on tokenmaxxing is companies shouldn’t mandate/constrain any tools at all and then evaluate software developers by output / (salary + token use)
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Varun Arora retweetledi
I ordered one pancake in America. The waitress wrote it down and said, "one short stack."
Short. I am a small and humble man. A short stack sounded perfect for me. I waited with a calm heart.
She returned carrying three pancakes, each the size of my face, stacked into a tower, with a block of butter on top sliding down the sides like slow lava.
This was the short one. I did not dare ask what the tall one looked like. Some knowledge a man is not ready for.
I ate for forty minutes. I was not full. I was afraid. The tower did not shrink. I am fairly sure it was growing back faster than I could eat it.
I had to surrender. I left half. In Japan, leaving food is a deep shame. So I leaned in close and apologized to the pancakes directly, in a low voice, one by one.
The waitress asked if I wanted a box. I did not know food could be taken into custody. I declined. I did not want it following me home.
In America, is the short stack truly the small one?
I need time to prepare my spirit before I ever face the tall one.
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@realsteelbrain @GoChainGo @bernhardsson Why can’t we just make them go up to 40mph and then they can drive anywhere in the city in car lanes?
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@GoChainGo @bernhardsson What do you have against these vehicles?
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I personally don’t care but these vehicles must be some sort of weird classification loophole right? The pedals seem basically fake (provide about 0.01% of the energy) and they go everywhere on streets and sidewalks.
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@MarkInvicta @rwlesq Criminal liability for poor stewardship of spending would solve this
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Something that is increasingly becoming a pillar of my political thinking is that, when the government is buying something, it should act like a consumer and focus on getting the best product/service for the best price.
This doesn't mean always buying the cheapest thing - sometimes you have to pay extra for quality - but it does mean that if you are paying extra, you should be doing so because it is actually necessary to get what you need out of the purchase or project. However, prevailing wage requirements, minority owned business requirements, buy local requirements, requirements that the contractor provide day care or health insurance, or whatever, have all got to go. Those are just about the government paying more than it has to.
Maybe there was once an argument that the government should try to shape labor or social policy or whatever through its expenditures, but it has clearly shown that it can't be trusted to do this. Come back when NYC isn't paying 10x what a peer city in Europe or Asia pays for a mile of subway track, and we can talk.
Alec Stapp@AlecStapp
Insane story from NYC:
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@rak_garg @pitdesi There's an Apple TV show I watched starring Seth Rogen, where every time he sees an electric scooter in LA he kicks it over. That includes after riding one himself, just because he thinks it's funny.
Naturally in Season 2 this habit expands to every delivery robot he sees.
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@itsvarora @pitdesi More likely that we end up building a new land bridge from Oakland to San Francisco from all the luds throwing the robots into the Bay than actually having functioning city robots in any big American city
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relevant:
In India everything is delivered to your door in <10 mins, & speed changes behavior
You can start cooking a meal and then buy ingredients that you need.
Have a party and order drinks and mixers after people show up
No backup toothpaste
You barely need a fridge
Etc.
Joe Weisenthal@TheStalwart
I said this to @citrini last night, but in the future, will we really need storage? I take a ton of photos of my kids, and they are on my phone and in a cloud. But in the future, won't I just tell a model "generate a photo from my son's 7th birthday" and it'll be just as good?
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@pitdesi Given the general dysfunction of American cities, IMO this is very unlikely
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I think we’re ~5 years away from this in cities in the US.
We need abundant robots to serve us.
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