[HN Gopher] Sequoia Productive Capital
___________________________________________________________________
Sequoia Productive Capital
Author : Amorymeltzer
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-10-27 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| jger15 wrote:
| "That leaves the question of crypto..."
| capableweb wrote:
| Full quote (+ bonus paragraph), since you somehow wanted to
| refer to something but exactly what is unclear, as you didn't
| actually write anything...
|
| > That leaves the question of crypto; given its oppositional
| nature to the current paradigm -- decentralization, encryption,
| and ownership -- it is clearly something completely new;
| moreover, the capital chasing returns in crypto is clearly
| financial capital, not production capital.
|
| > That suggests that crypto will continue to exist in a bit of
| a parallel universe, which makes sense; it already has its own
| currencies, after all. That is another way of saying I think
| that crypto is still very early in its lifecycle; 2017 wasn't
| the big crash, nor will the next one be -- remember that tech
| had its own internal boom-and-bust cycles in the three decades
| between the introduction of the Intel processor and the Dotcom
| bubble. Nor is this a bearish take: those three decades were
| exceptionally profitable for everyone involved -- including
| Sequoia, which was founded in 1972. Perhaps its successor, the
| one that shifts to providing productive capital for crypto
| companies decades from now, has already been born.
| [deleted]
| naveen99 wrote:
| private equity should get a boost if public companies are going
| to be forced mark to market for billionaires.
| villasv wrote:
| TL;DR venture capital is becoming regular capital because tech
| companies keep growing fast well after the IPO; "the next big
| thing" is not coming on the short term, just more techy companies
| surfing VC money and more growth for tech companies; the current
| cycle is not yet ripe for disruption.
| orky56 wrote:
| The traditional model of plant for 5 years and harvest for 5
| years is dying/dead. Seed investments are getting larger and
| bleeding into Series A. Companies are staying private for
| longer. Liquidation events can be pushed further out without
| compromising growth. Sequoia Productive Capital makes the 10
| year cycle less important. This allows Sequoia to focus on
| sourcing deals and reallocating capital accordingly to deliver
| results, which they have been consistent enough to keep
| acquiring capital from LPs. We are also seeing outsized returns
| on existing investments so sticking around for Series D/E/etc.
| and multiple years post-IPO might be key to get the 50-100+x
| returns.
| [deleted]
| echelon wrote:
| Because the current cycle's incumbents monopolize every tech
| market with value.
|
| FAAMG can staff up a team to clone your product if they think
| you're onto something.
| streetcat1 wrote:
| No they cannot, look at snowflake for example, easily eating
| big query and red shift.
|
| Two things lack in FANNG:
|
| 1) Focus. 2) Politics.
| djyaz1200 wrote:
| Thank you for the TL;DR
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Is anyone else really disappointed where this era ended up?
| Mobile + cloud seems like darkest possible timeline you could
| tell me would exist when I was on my Commodore 64 dialing a BBS.
| I guess I didn't understand the implications of everyone being
| connected and on at all times. It didn't turn out as I planned.
| It all pretty much destroyed my family and friends.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Sure, one can look at the development arches, from tinkerers to
| creators to the masses.
|
| But there's another view, these parallel lines of development.
| For example, computers have had games on them since the start.
|
| So what else is occurring on social media platforms used by
| people on their phones, beside manufactured outrage? Or are
| there games that teach kids some valuable skills instead of
| addicting them to some loop?
|
| For one, one can still organize events with the help of
| Facebook. Real physical gettogethers. I learned a lot of
| English, typing and how to use the mouse from games - and I use
| these skills every day at my work, to a great advantage. Some
| games made you think, at least a little bit. People are still
| discussing and learning on Hacker News. I think in general the
| etiquette is better than ever.
|
| There's entirely new forms of humor - memes. That's awesome.
| There's a theory that humor exists for learning purposes. The
| best jokes have a surprising punchline.
|
| We can look at older media platforms like television. Sure,
| there are talk shows and reality TV filling the ever growing
| number of channels. You see filler with some tubers just
| sitting there talking. Is youtube considered TV? The front page
| of youtube on anonymous mode is complete garbage, probably
| worse than any TV channel ever existing anywhere. There's the
| formulaic Netflix show that feels like it's made to tick some
| boxes. But on the other hand, there's more variety, as there is
| a smaller threshold for publication. I've seen great TV
| material made in Spain, Korea, France, Ireland, Japan, Norway,
| Denmark and China. I think TV is more artsy and multifaceted
| than before, maybe not on average, but there's more of that
| material available.
|
| So I would say things are still evolving. Some fields, where no
| new technical inventions have happened, like fashion, are still
| changing, but they have become cyclical.
| _alex_ wrote:
| I think the dystopia comes more from everything being paid for
| by ads (which demand more detailed metrics and engagement) than
| mobile/cloud.
| FFRefresh wrote:
| Everything isn't paid for by ads. There are many other
| revenue models for businesses outside of ads.
|
| And ads are not the driver of the desire for businesses to
| become more operationally efficient (via measuring more
| things). That drive exists independent of ads.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| The vast majority of services used on the internet by
| everyday people are paid for by ads. If you measure where
| people spend their time online, it is on average almost
| entirely within products supported by ads.
| FFRefresh wrote:
| Likely to be the case within the scope of "consumer
| sites/apps used most frequently by users". But I don't
| think that encapsulates all the technology of 'this era',
| as the OP referenced. I don't think it even encapsulates
| all of the supporting infrastructure that the consumer
| sites/apps lean on to provide their services.
| natdempk wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how mobile and cloud destroyed your family
| and friends?
| beckman466 wrote:
| our digital lives are now lived within black box straight-
| jacketing walled gardens, mediated by undemocratically
| wielded algorithms and protocols.
|
| there is no hardware interoperability, modularity and
| repairability. it's just obfuscated single-use hardware with
| parasitic economic rents through and through.
|
| _" What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech
| companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run
| (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call
| this rent-seeking, and what we're seeing with a lot of tech
| companies is that their telos is little more than "rent-
| seeking as a service". It's basically baked in to their
| business model. Once you've fully developed the technology
| underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery,
| or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people
| who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without
| being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then
| becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic
| activity."_ [1]
|
| > Can you elaborate on how mobile and cloud destroyed your
| family and friends?
|
| 'cloud' SaaSS social media firms are soul-sucking culture-
| destroying black-boxes optimized for 'engagement' - i.e.
| highlighting the worst of humanity (while ignoring the
| magic). it exploits people's insecurities, their shame, their
| grief, their desire to belong. it's one of the most
| destructive homogenizing forces that exist today.
|
| what i want to see is the abolishing of the intellectual
| property system and the abolishing of silicon valley [2].
| what if we had a world wide web that was inherently dedicated
| to lifelong learning and growth for all? universal access to
| our techno-scientific inheritance? all i see today are walls
| instead of bridges. instead we need open protocols and open
| standards from the top to the bottom of the stack.
|
| [1] https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86
|
| [2] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > our digital lives are now lived within black box
| straight-jacketing walled gardens, mediated by
| undemocratically wielded algorithms and protocols.
|
| > all i see today are walls instead of bridges.
|
| Whenever I read these comments I wonder if people are using
| a different Internet than I am, because this isn't my
| experience at all.
|
| I can access whatever I want, discuss whatever I want, and
| interact with whoever I want online. We have a multitude of
| platforms to choose from and I don't even have to pay for
| most of them. Honestly I don't even look at ads because I
| downloaded a free ad-blocker plugin for my free web browser
| and it all just works.
|
| Even my social media is nothing like the dystopian claims I
| see online. I don't use Facebook much, but whenever I open
| the app it's just fun photos and updates from the people I
| want to keep in touch with. I have zero problems with that
| because I enjoy seeing the people around me happy, having
| fun, and succeeding.
|
| I suspect these dystopian viewpoints come less from real-
| world experience and more from bouncing ideas around in
| echo chambers. It seems the people who are most opinionated
| about what social media is or isn't are those with the
| least direct experience in the matter, instead substituting
| hyper-dramatized accounts from news stories, HN comments,
| and agenda-pushing documentaries like "The Social Dilemma".
| There's a certain sense of elitism involved wherein the
| anti-social-media and anti-silicon-valley people feel that
| they are the only ones who see through the facade and
| understand what's really going on.
| SandersAK wrote:
| it's very possible for you to have the experience you're
| describing from a system, and for the system to be
| predatory and extractive.
|
| Just as many people live in nice suburbs and work in
| cities where there's extreme poverty. They get a good
| life, don't often have to contend with the pain and
| suffering of others, and can dismiss those claims as
| exaggeration.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| It is, and it's also possible that some suffering is
| entirely voluntary, like the effects of using Facebook's
| default sort method.
| beckman466 wrote:
| > whenever I open the app it's just fun photos and
| updates from the people I want to keep in touch with. I
| have zero problems with that because I enjoy seeing the
| people around me happy, having fun, and succeeding.
|
| Zuck, is that you? (i'm joking. surely Zuck has better
| things to do than hang out on online forums...)
|
| it's interesting how you engage with only a small portion
| of my comment. it seems you didn't bother clicking
| through to the deeper critiques of the tech industry that
| i referenced (Wendy Liu's _Abolish Silicon Valley_
| Tribune article /essay). you casually dismiss serious in-
| depth critiques of today's system with anecdotal
| information ( _" I can access whatever I want, discuss
| whatever I want"_); also by suggesting that i yearn to
| feel a sense of elitism or be a part of some sort of 'in-
| group'; that i don't have a facebook account, and that i
| live inside of an echo-chamber, all without actually
| engaging with the material and any of the arguments.
|
| would you consider that maybe it is you who is living
| inside the Silicon Valley echo-chamber? your blanket
| statements and straw man arguments are suspiciously echo-
| chamber -like [1]
|
| anyway, hope you're having fun up there on Elysium
|
| [1]
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/08/04/166593/techs-
| end...
| dash2 wrote:
| That's interesting, but "Can you elaborate on how mobile
| and cloud destroyed your family and friends?" If you think
| you can't without violating their privacy, then that's
| fine, of course.
| fossuser wrote:
| It's a problem of technical complexity (and UX) that creates
| incentives around centralization.
|
| I'm hopeful urbit can be a way out of it: https://urbit.org/ I
| think without really thinking of the underlying issues with the
| stack and tackling that directly, other existing attempts at
| federated systems are DOA and won't solve the real problem.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is not mobile + cloud that ended up here. It is lack of
| symmetric fiber to the home connections. People do not have
| upload capacity at home, so there is no choice but to depend on
| large cloud providers. If people had upload capacity, then it
| could have been possible to host your own backup solutions or
| media or personal websites.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I have symmetric gigabit fiber at home, a lot of experience
| managing tech and servers, and absolutely zero desire to host
| important things at my house.
|
| For less than $10/month I can get a cloud server plenty
| powerful for anything I want to host with power and bandwidth
| that are orders of magnitude more reliable than what I can
| get at my home. Plus I don't have to worry about floods,
| fires, or theft causing me to lose all of my data and backups
| stored at home.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If fiber to the home was widespread, then the market for
| people who might buy a self hosted solutions would be big
| enough to be addressable?
|
| Also, it is not an either or scenario. You can still backup
| to a different location in someone else's computers. Fiber
| to the home just gives people the option to not solely
| depend on others' computers.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Agreed, and to add to your comment, the cost of _securely_
| hosting makes it not worthwhile to host at home.
| jasode wrote:
| _> If people had upload capacity, then it could have been
| possible to host your own backup solutions or media or
| personal websites._
|
| But a lot of us techies here have 1 Gbit dl+ul symmetric
| bandwidth and yet most of us would rather put source code on
| Github instead of self-hosting Gitlab at home. Why? Because
| most of us would rather do something else in our lives that's
| more high-priority than babysitting a git server (or self-
| hosted email server, or self-hosted NNTP USENET server
| instead of discussing stuff here on HN, etc).
|
| If (most) techies don't want to self-host, why would it be
| realistic to expect the mass population to self-host media or
| personal websites?
|
| There's another underlying reason other than upload bandwidth
| limitation.
| maccolgan wrote:
| I self-host my own git server, and I imagine many others do
| too. But I also publish all my repositories on GitHub (my
| git server syncs one way to GH) too, you know why? Because
| discovery is entirely fucking broken for self-hosted stuff.
| Nobody would ever fucking see your self-hosted content.
|
| Search engines are broken for code discovery because of
| sheer inaccuracy and SEO spam.
|
| And that aside my git server is IPv6-only.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Perhaps at this very moment in time there is another
| reason, but lack of upload bandwidth is a structural
| reason, a necessary but not sufficient parameter. Without
| that, we cannot move forward.
|
| It is possible for me to envision a past or future where
| 90%+ percent of people have fiber to the home and we would
| have developed hardware and software to be able to route
| around the major cloud providers, including peer to peer
| software and hardware that works like appliances.
|
| We started with computers that only people invested a lot
| of time into understanding could use, and now we have iPads
| and iPhones that people generally cannot break and are much
| simpler and can be swapped out. I do not see why that type
| of future would not be possible if everyone had significant
| upload capacity at home (and having ipv6 and not being
| stuck behind CGNAT).
| FFRefresh wrote:
| I'm very skeptical of this take. I don't think that bandwidth
| is the limiting factor for self-hosting. The limiting factor
| is that it's not easy/convenient enough to setup such a
| system, and most users don't care enough where their files
| sit (or comprehend the potential externalities).
|
| If you thought upload capacity was the limiting factor for
| self-hosting, why wouldn't those same upload capacity
| constraints negatively impact cloud adoption? You still have
| to upload your files to a cloud server.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >If you thought upload capacity was the limiting factor for
| self-hosting, why wouldn't those same upload capacity
| constraints negatively impact cloud adoption? You still
| have to upload your files to a cloud server.
|
| Those uploads are happening at varying speeds at varying
| times of day, as the capacity allows it. And the
| constraints do negatively impact cloud adoption, as
| families that were stuck at home found out trying to have
| multiple video calls and quality is degraded.
|
| There can be more than one limiting factor, but obviously
| bandwidth is a fundamental limiting factor. Without it, you
| are not even going to see companies explore the options of
| selling self hosted solutions, hence we do not even know
| what advancements in easy/convenient self hosted systems
| might have been. What peer to peer capabilities we may have
| had.
|
| Societies with home connections heavily allocated for
| download and minimal upload are just asking to be
| controlled by gatekeepers.
| [deleted]
| alberth wrote:
| Off topic: I know Ben Thompson commands a lot of respect, and I
| use to be a paid newsletter reader of his.
|
| But holy cow, can he use 8x more words to convey his thoughts
| than needed - and he can surely make something simple sound
| extremely complex.
|
| He raises good points but I really wish he would do some major
| editing and simplication in his posts.
| [deleted]
| caust1c wrote:
| I agree and that's the reason I unsubscribed also. I just don't
| have the time!
|
| Although I suspect the reason is that he's got an extremely
| fast turnaround, and doesn't have the additional time to
| distill all those thoughts into shorter articles. He should
| hire some (more?) editors.
| zupa-hu wrote:
| There is the podcast version as well which you can listen to on
| the go or while having your morning coffee. I'm glad it's not
| shorter. :)
| alphadog wrote:
| This is precisely the reason I am no longer a subscriber.
| ayewo wrote:
| Did you switch to a competitor? If so, which one?
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| > ...and he can surely make something simple sound extremely
| complex.
|
| Sadly, I think a lot of people producing content these days see
| this as a feature, not a bug. The more complex and/or
| sophisticated you make something sound, the more insightful it
| must be, and the more intelligent (and therefore valuable) you
| must be as a source of knowledge.
| ayewo wrote:
| Although slightly off-topic, your points are totally valid.
|
| I remember reading something somewhere that said that even
| people whose job it is to digest large amounts of info daily
| would benefit from ideas expressed in a clear and direct way
| versus straight forward ideas that are made to appear complex.
|
| In other words, even highly sophisticated readers will be able
| to read your pieces faster and by extension, consume more of
| your material when you go the extra length to express your
| ideas in clear and familiar language.
|
| What do you now read in its place?
| zelias wrote:
| Can we just skip to the last season in which Zuck begins the
| final stage of his plan to unify all metaverse-enabled human
| conscioussness into the singularity?
| [deleted]
| jliptzin wrote:
| One of the most confusing charts I have ever seen
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-27 23:02 UTC)