Kara Swisher

Soon everyone would be able to invest in private companies before IPO, enabling your everyday normal people to benefit from the crazy growth potential of companies like Uber and Airbnb.

On Recode Decode, talking with Jason Calacanis, Kara Swisher said her children's school already dislikes her because of homework. She tells the kids not to do it. The workplace does not care about those assignments. It cares about teamwork, so she tells them to skip what she called the stupid homework. The same conversation argues that the school day is too rigid for parents who cannot pay for child care, and that a parent should be able to leave a child in a good classroom from early morning until evening. Her point on the assignments was narrower: if the job will never ask, do not give up the evening.

Childcare is exhausting and to better as a society, we need to enable everyone to access great education, even if they cannot afford it.

Dexter Learning is a self-paced school out of Texas that aiming to get private school education affordable enough to the top-70% of people.

If it comes down to Bernie Sanders vs Trump, it would be a very hard choice for a lot of people in Silicon Valley to vote for Bernie, and Bloomberg could be the solution to it.

According to Jason Calacanis, inability to make good money from facts and unbiased reporting has driven journalists to pick sides and to focus on click-bait headlines.

According to Jason Calacanis, Capitalism and entrepreneurship is the best system to run humanity, but people are starting to hate it right now.

The solution to that is for people who have benefited the most from this system to start behaving better to people who have the least. Stop grinding people on the margins and be generous where it matters.

Jason thinks Bezos continuous to grind people for optimization in situations when he does not need to.

Instead of being generous to low-wage employees, he overworks them. Instead of helping out a struggling city, he strings them along, and then still puts Amazon HQ2 in a city that does not need any more support.

If you are the richest man in the world, it might be a good time to stop grinding and to start giving, like the Gates family did when they were at the top of the list.

Jason Calacanis says that lower orbit satellites have the potential to connect another 1-2 billion people to the internet, which would be huge for SpaceX future.

Jason thinks that micro mobility is the future but it does not stand on its own, bikes and scooters are going to become a free/low cost offering from bigger players like Uber, and that's it.

If you give great founders with vision a lot of runaway, they are going to take it.

Jason Calacanis, an early investor into Uber, explains that massive amount of private money enabled Uber to grow rapidly in the early days, ignoring some of the realities at the expense of getting to scale.

Once they IPO'ed, the company had to switch from focus on massive growth, to focus on profitability. It was a big shift, and it will take time to transition.

However, as long as they can differentiate, and people love their product, they will figure out how to adjust their margins to give public markets what they need.

Although Casey does not know how many posts are reported per day, he does know that companies want moderators to take action on at least 250 posts per day. Really high performers will look at around 400 a day.

Facebook believes that American moderators would do a better job with understanding our culture and slang in order to have the necessary context needed to moderate our posts.

Casey thinks that Donald Trump would use another platform to post. Then, a bot would be set up to screenshot the post and upload it to Twitter. It may be somewhat of a positive for Trump to be on Twitter so we know about whatever topics are on his mind-- even if it's talking off the top of his head with no information.

Casey does not know, but he hopes nothing bad will happen to them. He strongly hopes that more attention is brought to this situation. He states how people have an unequivocal right to discuss their workplace conditions. To sue them for discussing their work conditions is a violation of their First Amendment rights.

Facebook wants its platform to be a place where people can talk about whatever. They view this as a political problem by restricting someone's constitutional right to free speech. If they do enforce certain content restrictions, another competing platform may rise and allow the banned content on their site, causing more users to leave Facebook.

Facebook does turn over videos to law enforcements when the contents are breaking the law. The authorities cannot intervene anymore because even if something is sent to the police, a video or post can be reposted.

Moderators have stated that they work in poor conditions that are unfit and unclean. They are not assigned a work space, so they usually have to find a new available area each day, and the work areas are not clean or well-kept.

For most videos, moderators have to watch at least 15 seconds, sometimes 30 seconds. It varies in length, but the video must be watched enough to know which section of the video is problematic. No matter if it's the same video that's been reported before, they must rewatch its contents again, and again, and again. This leads many moderators to burn out, and even to get PTSD as a result.

One example is that a person came forward to Casey and revealed that he was diagnosed with PTSD due to the videos he moderated each day for 8 hours, which included hate speeches and graphic violence. The person also volunteered at an animal shelter, and had to moderate videos of human beings and animals die in the worst way.

Cognizant is a contractor hired by Facebook to moderate content. Facebook may write the policies, but the moderator decides if what’s reported fits the policy. According to a moderator, they were just bodies in seats for the company.

Casey Newton reported that the moderators make about $28,000 a year. The moderators often leave the job with post-traumatic stress caused by the rough working conditions of the job.

Find an idea that is relatively easy to start, but gets more and more courageous as you get going, and something that will be shockingly difficult if it succeeds. Kind of like free soloing El Capitan.

Chamath thinks the next crisis is coming in 3-5 years in the debt markets. When companies start defaulting on their debt, the LPs are going to lose a tremendous amounts of money. When huge loses come in, those LPs are going to start liquidating, starting at hedge funds with easy redemption cycles. It won't be enough because the loses will outpace the bills. At that point the LPs are going to sell their venture investments, and that's when they will start asking hard questions around valuations, and why their money was actually put to play in these worthless companies. This impending crash is why venture capitalists are accelerating their fundraising and investments, raising more and investin

The steeper the growth rate of a company, the more appealing is is as an investment, so as long as the company can keep raising money, early investors are made to look like the geniuses.

This dynamic encourages investors to push the company to raise more and more money, and soon enough, the CEO has no choice but to raise more. No money and the companies goes out of business.

The cycle continues, as the company bleeds cash and gets further and further diluted. Startup employees get screwed holding bags of worthless diluted equity, while the VCs are getting rich off the funds fees.

There is an enormous tax that we've been paying to big tech startups for hosting and advertising our products. Those costs account for roughly 40 cents on every dollar. Layer in the headcount costs, and it becomes nearly impossible for startups to grow, never mind to become profitable and successful. Only the companies who can raise the most and not die end up succeeding in this environment.

Anger is a fantastic motivator for getting from 0 to 1, to catalyze progress. It is never the happy people who are able to make huge leaps forward, in Chamath's experience. At some point, however, it is important to transition from anger to making a positive impact, as most people are motivated by positivity and a sense of being able to make change.

People do not like who they are, so they tear down whoever made it. On Recode Decode, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya tells Kara Swisher he is puzzled that success, and failure, are both treated as something shameful. He says the anger comes from people who dislike themselves and dislike what they see in others. His first step is to fix yourself and get a little happier, not to vilify the success that capitalism produced. He is in the middle of describing his own identity crisis, and he contrasts it with his parents, who he says never had the spare time to feel unhappy in that way.

The society has a responsibility to work on our mental health. We need to start talking about this as a problem, to talk about our issues, be able to share and find support. We need to realize that feelings and emotions are normal and there is an enormous number of people in the world who feel the same way.

A typical company would go through the same stages. A company would start at the "Product market fit" where the goal is to create something people want. It would then move to growth, when the goal is to make sure you can give your product to everyone who wants it. Then eventually when the products line is exhausted, the company will try to get all the revenue it can out of the existing users. In the transition to revenue they do what they are supposed to do for their shareholders, they maximise revenue. The implications of this eventual transition, which are implicitly demanded by the society and the government, are for us to bear.

No, if you were a jerk, then money would just make you into a jerk with more stuff, but that's not the problem. According to Chamath, we have not created a new generation of heroes who can demonstrate a set of values and choices that are worthwhile to live for.

Back in the day people went to Silicon Valley because they wanted to build companies; the offices were run down, and the glamour was none. People were poor, at least to start, but they were all excited about what they were doing. Now every office looks like it came from the Silicon Valley show, but people inside are deeply unhappy.

We have an entire generation of young that grew up in front of their phones, people who don't know how to connect with the real world and how to find happiness. People see the world as they live it, and unhappy people see a world that is overall unhappy.

People in the Silicon Valley are the most unhappy they have ever been, they are the least civilly engaged and the most emotionally detached from their lives; they feel empty. To do something meaningful, even in business, you have to have an emotional spark at some point, and if you are internally preoccupied with your own happiness, or the lack of it, then when you get into the office it becomes really hard to create something truly great.

The ability to be emotionally intimate and authentic with other people is really hard and is a skill that can be trained, if it is not something you know how to do naturally.

A VC's job is to deliver return, for which they take money, hire competent people, and invest to achieve those return. It is not a VC's job to become anyone's slave and to continue working forever. You can retire any time you want.

Not at all. He took a few billion dollars under management and turned it into a few more billion dollars. He promised returns, and he achieved them. He did not promise anyone that he would be doing this forever. He sums it up like this: "You are fucking welcome!"

Unlike many poor people who work hard jobs and don't have time to be unhappy, Chamath, with all his billions, was able to find time to rest and to reflect, and to identify whether he is actually living a successful life.

Smash Notes for the first week of April 2019

- Justin Kan tells the story of how he nearly drowned in the Pacific Ocean while spearfishing with his wife. - Chamath Paliphapitiya tells Kara Swisher that he is not anyone's slave - Austen Allred of Y Combinator shares a story of how he turned a failed startup blog into a huge success - Naval Ravikant explains the difference between money, wealth and social status - DHH, the founder of Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and the author of "Rework" and "It does not have to be crazy at work" explains why years after becoming a millionaire he still shows up for work every day - Tim Romero from Disrupting Japan explains to fellow podcasters what makes a grea