Short sellers are built on their reputation, and Hindenburg has a lot of that. Even if you fired the people, you'd keep the name.
That said, it would be wrong to automatically assume that they try to maximize gains; at this point, it's likely most of the team has enough money to retire, and at that point, making even more might not be their primary goal.
And in that same vein it makes sense not to sell because if they ever see another great idea 5-10 years down the line I'd assume they might want to get back together under the same name and publish again. Selling would preclude them from doing that under the same name.
I tried to automate a big chunk of property management (mostly commercial) over the past few years. The main thing I realized is that it's mostly a people business, and AI (or computers generally) are never going to stand over a vendor's shoulder and keep them honest (e.g. make sure they sweep up or don't scuff the walls), or have a difficult conversation about late rent with a tenant, or show up after hours when a pipe breaks, if only to show face with a tenant.
There are definitely workflow and process elements that can be automated. But if wealth management is any indication, there are a lot of people willing to pay a premium for having a person involved. Not sure why real estate would be different.
The wildcard in all this is the NAR court decision. If buyers have to pay for their own representation, that might make them shop around a little more.
I think people are constantly changing their comfort zones when they fall in love with different products.
People definitely would be open to real estate w/ software. Otherwise, by this logic, why do people use Zillow? Why don't they just drive to their local Relator office to ask about local listings? How could you trust an online algorithm to show homes instead of someone describing homes to your face?
We are seeing that the fraction of home buyers that sign with the first buyer the meet is declining - more opportunity for us!
> People definitely would be open to real estate w/ software. Otherwise, by this logic, why do people use Zillow? Why don't they just drive to their local Relator office to ask about local listings? How could you trust an online algorithm to show homes instead of someone describing homes to your face?
Actually why not both? People check Zillow for a ballpark, or end up finding an actual place, and then book a tour through a local agent at Zillow (who might suggest other places too).
Your product seems like a replacement for Zillow, with a conversational touch. I can see a scope for its use, but not sure how it's a moat. The moat here is the database of homes and the local agents network that Zillow uses.
I think these aren't more popular because actually, there are things that genuinely suck about small business ownership. Offhand: stress, uncertainty/having to make payroll, having a significant % of your net worth tied up in a single, undiversified investment that's near-impossible to sell.
Given the choice, I think a normal cash-paying salary job (maybe with bonus) is vastly preferable to most people.
A perspective I've found helpful is to think about a fund as a business, which it is.
Let's assume a hypothetical case of running a $100 million tech investment fund. The first 10-11% of return should go straight to investors (not the manager), for the simple reason that 7-8% is available in the stock market, and unlike the public markets, tech funds are illiquid--unlike investing in SPY, you can't wake up one day and trade out of your interest in a fund like this. You're locked in. That shifts the return expectation upward.
So assuming the manager's cost of equity (what investors demand) is around 10-11%, maybe a great manager can get the return number to 15-16%. That's a pretty good return on the fund but it's only $5 million in absolute gross returns (10->15% on $100 million). Considering the manager might get only 10-20% of this (the rest goes to investors), it's just a lot of work to earn $1 million in performance-based comp, over 2-3 years of active work and perhaps a decade of full fund life. These things are also typically run by teams (several partners) so the returns are split.
The point is that $100 million funds just aren't making their managers rich. The two outcomes of this, which you see over and over, are (1) for managers to try to manage much bigger funds ($500+ million) or (2) big management fees of 2%/year or more, which significantly erode returns.
The net result being, VC is a very hard business that almost always delivers substandard returns to its investors, after long lock-ins with very little liquidity. It's very tough and I'm not surprised to see these guys shutting down.
Exactly, and for someone like myself who hated academia, the internals of Google when I was there (2011-2021) were awful for the same reasons.
It's hard enough to be motivated to work on things in a Big Company. It's even harder when you have to consciously play a game to advertise and promote your success and work -- spending almost as much time doing that as actually doing work. ... and then have others come along and take credit for your work, etc.
I've always despised the higher echelons of academia, the top 1%, the Ivy leagues et. al. for a similar reason.
Success in academia comes to those who pick the right people to work with, pick the right things to work on at the right time and say the right things at the right times to the right people, all to push yourself ahead of others guised under veils and veneers of goodness. Truth, morality and the quest for knowledge be damned.
"Picking" is more than what the word suggests. It involves shutting others out, stealing ideas and actual work, propagandizing, giving out freebies but keeping the kickbacks hidden, buttering people for favors, building and fostering inner circles etc. All this is the politics.
No surprise that the ones who are left and thrive are self driven narcissists and ruthless cold blooded creatures painted in playful colors.
Google is the equivalent of the Ivy league. Hopeless, clueless and on a path to irrelevance fostered by a thousand leeches.
Some argue, the world is better because of what Google produced and hence entitled to such inner workings. Same argument as the Ivy's. That's missing the forest for the trees. The real loss isn't what Google or the Ivys have become, but the opportunity loss comparing to what they could have been, with all their resources, had they not gone down this path. This isn't the only possible outcome in this game.
> Success in academia comes to those who pick the right people to work with, pick the right things to work on at the right time and say the right things at the right times to the right people, all to push yourself ahead of others guised under veils and veneers of goodness. Truth, morality and the quest for knowledge be damned.
Do you have a proposal to repair this? It seems any organizational effort is going to end up in a similar situation, because the people who desire to be at the top are the people willing to do the things required to get there, and that leaves little room for people who just want to pursue 'truth, morality and the quest for knowledge'.
It seems to me that the only solution to resolving this problem is to either (a) rely on a benevolent, genius, moral autocrat; (b) completely purge the leadership regularly; or (c) delegate authority to some future un-corruptible intelligence.
Something new will have to be made. You wont get credit for that effort, no riches, not even a thank you. Fooling around with the puzzle is the only reward and it should be good enough even if it amounts to nothing.
What is even the real question? How should we do politics?
I think this portends a larger culture shift in Silicon Valley tech that, in my opinion, cannot come quickly enough.
Here you've got a guy, 18 years at Google, probably earning somewhere between 500k-1mil per year, probably $5-10 million in his Schwab account without breaking a sweat. With a little blurb at the top of his blog about "How to Leader", feeling the need to explain whether any of this is "fair" or why it's ok that "Google did this to you".
Honestly, as an industry--we need to grow the fuck up. Using the wrong part of speech or talking about what is or isn't "fair" are things I do with my three-year old when she's throwing a tantrum. Not something I expect from an emotionally mature professional in his 40s or 50s who's likely earning a million/year or more. Google is a trillion-dollar, global multinational with shareholders, and a board, and a stock price. If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period.
It's not that I even blame this author--I think this post shows a lot of maturity and self-awareness. It's the broader culture of unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.
I understand the intensity of your position on it in light of that being assumed.
Beyond that, I'm wondering if you have any examples of the `unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.`?
Generally people seem upset by it turning into a post-modern extremist firing: you show up to work one morning, you're locked out of your laptop, you can't badge into the building, you get an email to your personal email address on file, and that's it.
That's bs. There are whole industries that exist 100% because of regulatory capture and systems of control they've set up to protect themselves and are a million times more worthless. Tech is a shining star of people getting paid a lot to just try to figure out new ways of doing things and throwing off more value than any where else in the economy on an off day, and the industry was 1000 times better even with the wastefulness before than it will be if it becomes just some shit corporate world like old style companies.
It's worth mentioning that tech didn't just invent better products. Tech also figured out a way to give them away for free. Tech also figured out how to ensure people of all classes and backgrounds got equal access to superior products for free. Tech furthermore figured out how to ensure it wasn't just the American classes that got free stuff, but that the free better products could be enjoyed by people from all nations.
Maybe there was a time when this wasn't true. I spent a lot of the 2010s working in San Francisco tech jobs. It was quite enjoyable and I just got back from a guy's wedding who I worked with closely 2012-2015. Three different startups, one mine, other two as an employee. All three crashed and burned.
I think there are three possibilities.
One is that tech is somehow different/exceptional and bound to stay that way forever. I doubt it.
The second is that we were always lying to ourselves, it was always just "a job", but we were all young, stupid, and naive. This feels too cynical.
The third, which I feel is most accurate these days, is that tech was different, but now is a more mature industry, and is, as you put it "just some shit corporate world". Maybe there was a time when it was genuinely true that people got "unlimited vacation", that "titles don't matter" and that the CEO ate with the hoi polloi. But I think those days have passed. Everything's different now. The people coming into this industry today are 4.0 GPA high school kids, not misfits tinkering with computers in their basement. Competitive parents no longer feel they have to justify why their kid is going into tech rather than law, finance, or medicine. Salaries have increased 3-5x (!!). Tech influences elections, mints billionaires, and controls many facets of American life.
The problem is that the attitudes haven't kept up. These days, Google, facebook, etc are just standard American megacorps. They are some of the most valuable companies in the world with huge lobbying budgets, and tremendous pressure to deliver shareholder value.
The simple fact is that margins always get compressed as industries mature. Google has been under greater and greater margin pressure over the last decade as Apple demands higher payments to be their default search engine, OpenAI starts to steal share, and more people head directly to Amazon for search results. Google of course is going to blame the pandemic for this, but the actual issue is long-term erosion of margin. It's hard to see how any of this is going to reverse course over time.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I hope my comment wasn't too inflammatory. I just have a strong visceral reaction that something important and beautiful is lost if the west coast computer company that works hard, plays hard, treats their employees like professionals that can act independently and cares a lot about research and craft even at the expense of some reasonable amount of efficiency turns into mostly just a bunch of IBMs or Oracles.
Don't doubt yourself Atreyu. Most news sites aren't aligned with the best interests the tech industry. Tech is a whipping boy that eats its own tail. I must admit I blinked for a few seconds after reading your comment since it's not everyday I get to read an opinion that's firmly pro-tech on the Internet.
For various reasons that are beside the point right now, most companies will degrade over time into a boring standard corporation. What was different about tech was that there were so many young companies that simply hadn't had the time to degrade. Whenever a company got old and shitty enough, it died and got replaced with newer companies.
For whatever reason that stopped happening. Google was founded in 1998 and went IPO in 2004. Facebook was founded in 2004 and had a billion MAU by 2012. It's 2024; we should have had an equally big success by now.
Bit of unsolicited advice. It's very possible you've had a great career as a programmer. But for better or worse, high schools are academic environments where you can't write "elligable" and expect to be taken seriously.
If you aren't willing to correct this, this may not be the path for you.
What a load of BS. You think the former tradesmen that moved into teaching all have perfect spelling? Clearly they have no value and nothing to offer interested kids if they misspell 1 in 100 words.
Keep in mind this has to include downside protection to cover the very real risk of someone initiating a suit in case they screw up (which I'm sure happens from time to time).
I think overall, what a lot of this entire discussion misses is that 90, maybe 99% of transactions are pretty straightforward, but the 1% where things go haywire, might cost 10, even 100x as much in wasted time, money, etc. Real estate brokerage is a regulated professional service which means by law, there's a minimum standard of care owed to anyone who uses these peoples' services. This costs money to provide which ultimately means a lot of the costs of the problem cases end up socialized/spread out, over everyone.
This feels quite unfair if you've got your act together and everything goes smoothly, but it seems hard to know upfront which ones will be the hard cases, or not.
