interesting - what is the confidence interval on this? if you start a balloon in the same spot at the same time does it always end up in the same place? or is there a wide range of where it could be
My (uninformed!) suspicion is that the confidence interval has to be very wide.
I’m worried about things like: the size and weight of the balloon, the altitude of the balloon, and very difficult to predict future changes in wind speed and direction during the course of the balloon’s flight.
In NYC, occupancy of office buildings seems to be stabilizing at 30-40% below pre-COVID levels. However, many of the buildings refinanced during the zero rates period from ~'18-'22.
Going to be interesting to see what happens when that debt rolls off and needs to be refinanced.
Some note-worthy points from Crain's coverage (1).
- Compared to 2019, the average New York office worker is spending $4,661 less on meals, shopping and entertainment near their workplace, the researchers found. That dropoff is the highest of any city included in the study, outpacing Los Angeles ($4,200), Washington, D.C. ($4,051), and Atlanta ($3,938), among others.
- New York workers are spending about 33% fewer days in the office now than in 2019, according to the study. That ranks fifth among the studied cities, with Washington seeing the highest in-office decline, at 37%.
- ....Only 9% of employees in their offices five days a week—unchanged from September 2022.
- That amounts to at least $12.4 billion a year in losses for the city
- estimated 2.7 million people who worked in Manhattan in 2019.
Yeah I "am worried" about NYC. The decrease in office use maps to decrease in "I have to live here because of work" just as the eroding quality of life is decreasing the "I live here because I want to."
So the trend over time will be that folks left in NYC are increasingly poor with no other options, completely eroding the tax base and sending the city into a spiral. I didn't live here in the 70s but I expected something similar.
In the early 2000s-2010s there was an interesting trend of adults moving to the city and raising kids there vs the burbs. I think that's over and done with, everyone with money and energy seems to be moving to the burbs if not to Florida.
> At what point do high wage earners decide enough is enough and move to Florida or Texas?
Middle class people probably get a better deal moving to Florida/Texas. High Net Worth Individuals are too rich for it to matter.
But regular old high income people (LOL) are unlikely to save any money moving to Florida/Texas if they are looking to maintain the same lifestyle.
Nice places in those states have become really expensive, and there are all sorts of other costs that people don’t always look at (like insurance, for example). In Florida, especially, you won’t know what your property taxes are until after you buy the house - except that you know that they’ll be much higher than the current taxes.
I was just talking to someone last night. Their company has apparently figured that they're basically in a post-COVID steady state at this point modulo any incremental hiring they do. So they're basically doing a full worldwide real estate audit to figure out where they need to get to.
I had the understanding that only residential mortgages have fixed rates. Most loans do not have fixed rates, I would have thought that included commercial real estate loans.
do you try to match descriptions to existing products? for example, if there is a item of furniture that is also sold on other sites, will the description be consistent?
it takes descriptions of other similar products into account. it uses a database of product descriptions layered on top of GTP-3 and some interesting prompt engineering.
Definitely a huge pain point raised here. All the solutions today are 100% better than anything offered in a bundle prior (Office). But it becomes an absolute cluster trying to manager, let along the issues w onboarding you raised.
Definitely seems like there needs to be some industry wide consensus around this but id imagine that would be difficult with the current VC model. Incentives are in place to "carve out a niche" and then expand horizontally.
B2B is going to hit the "app overload" problem consumers deal with soon. You just cant reasonably track that many software solutions - even if individually they add value
This is extremely well written and super impressive. I think that as someone with a similar professional / educational background to you, the biggest thing is the Vitamin vs Painkiller. And as you correctly pointed out, the only way to know is to ask the customer to open their wallet from day 1.
Overall, really well written, thoughtful piece that gives a great insight into what it's like being a zero to one founder.
Just from reading this, I have no doubt you're going to be crazy successful. Most startups fail, but most entrepreneurs succeed. You got your first fail out of the way, now go crush it with your next one!
Pretty good summary of what's happened over the past couple months. Will be really interesting to see if new products come out to try and detect AI generated content
Agreed. Related to that, I was just reading that Google claims to now be okay with AI-generated content:
“Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies.”
This is a super important point. I'm a super analytical person and have spreadsheets for most important things in my life. So a real outlier in terms of recording data. And STILL i find it hard to keep up with my manual budgeting app that I have.
Integration is super important and imo, the real opportunity is improving the auto-tagging and sorting functionality. Mint for example is pretty terrible at handling things like venmo or one-off transactions
Super cool concept - as someone who is just learning Python I've found Jupyter to be a great way to code and debug live. But yea it's hard for me to share that with someone as a beginner coder - are you planning on having this be a paid feature?
Mercury will be open source. I plan to create a cloud service for easy deployment. There will be free and paid tier. Mercury is AGPLv3. You can buy commercial friendly license as well.
