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AI companies need to make a lot of money for the current market state (NVIDIA going to the moon) to make sense. Right now it's far from that. Interview with the current co-CEO of Netflix Lambda School, a scam A tour of Starfactory, with Elon Advantages of incompetent management Ben Kuhn on trust and growing teams Mehran's Steak House: making of Why haven't biologists cured cancer? The occurrence of cancer seems to continue to raise exponentially even in old age, contrary to what was previously thought Using…

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Michael Lewis (author of a recent book on FTX)'s Blind Side Xylitol bad? Demons and Internal Family Systems GLP1 analogues do not cause muscle loss in excess to what one would expect via caloric restriction. And we know that in that case one can avoid that to some extent by a high protein diet + exercise. Cradle (formerly known as Lorentz, a name I deem more based), Laura Deming's new startup working on cryopreservation of tissues Lumina, the probiotics company trying to cure cavities, playing very dirty he…

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Some debate over the merits of Minicircle, the gene therapy startup. It's a case of "in theory, it shouldn't work", with "working" defined in the most damning way: probably not even raising follistatin. The debate over the usefulness of healthcare, Scott and reply from Robin Hanson, followed by reply from Scott and reply from Robin, with some highlights from Scott, which I think contains a good closure to the saga, with Hanson stating what he believes in and Scott agreeing roughly with …

Links (77)

In defense of Academia The Breslow saga Interview with Scott Alexander On Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks An interview with the founder of Cyclarity, a company working on reversing atherosclerosis On East Asian drinking culture The ultimate lab leak debate Why did supersonic airliners fail. Supersonic airliners coming back Casey Handmer on making fuel out of air On David Sinclair, sirtuins, and resveratrol Devon Zuegel, Jan Sramek, and MIke Solana on California Forever A TV show: Three Body Problem A song: Syr…

Docusign's 7000 employees and the iron law of B2B SaaS sales

Docusign has over 7000 employees. Someone on the internet periodically discovers this fact and wonder how could this be! What are those 7000 employees doing? The first part to the "What are they doing" question is "Sales", but that's not the full answer. Per their latest 10K filing, 68% of their workforce is sales, marketing, and customer success so that's ~5000 of those And then 1760 of the workforce, a 24% is engineering, product development and customer operations Leaving sales a…