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For everyone who thinks the Instagram deal was a no-brainer:

- Instagram raised at $500M the day before Zuck offered $1B
- $1B was 25% of FB’s $4B cash on hand
- It was weeks before the FB IPO
- The board wasn’t consulted
- Instagram had no revenue

This was not an easy call!
Let me warp you back to the distant era of 2012...

“Why would Facebook pay $1 billion for a company with no revenue?”

“With Facebook’s public offering...only a few weeks away, spontaneous and improvisational business moves become more curious.”
Jon Stewart’s reaction was typical.

“A billion dollars of money? For a thing that kind of ruins your pictures? The only Instagram worth a billion dollars would be an app that instantly gets you a gram...”
geekwire.com/2012/jon-stewa…
“This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade...Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.”
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3818055
“Can someone please tell me how Instagram's actual content is worth anything?...Seems like mostly a huge waste of cash.” news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817850
“At a market cap of $950M the New York Times is ‘worth’ less than Instagram.”

Actually a good article. Zuck probably regretting that he didn’t buy NYT too back then at that price. Alternate history!
thenextweb.com/insider/2012/0…
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Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
Imagine launching your software company by distributing shrink-wrapped CDs. That might have been a good path 25 years ago, but is no longer the best option.

So too with college.
Personally, I wish I hadn’t done the PhD. It wasted much of my 20s. I learned more material faster after becoming a founder.

One can counterargue that the knowledge to do comp bio wasn’t widely distributed in the 2000s, and I’d agree. But it is today for the resourceful.
In the year 2020, we have (a) incredible new tools for free online education and (b) incredible price increases for in-person lectures.

There’s a lot of inertia here, but something will give. YC, MOOCs, @LambdaSchool are all part of the answer.
Read 4 tweets
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Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
Starting to see economics books that acknowledge cryptocurrency as a landmark in the field.

That’s been true in CS for a while, but Medema is an econ prof at Duke.
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
Crypto has divided academic econ.

Krugman, Shiller, Stiglitz, Merton, Thaler, Fama have criticized it.

Others like Summers, Roth, Hart, Maskin, Pissarides have supported it.

Many economists now getting involved in blockchain startups.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
For a new idea to have a chance it doesn’t need a consensus for it. It just needs to not have too strong a consensus *against* it.
Read 3 tweets
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Balaji S. Srinivasan
@balajis
Synthetic identities are coming.

Software now allows you to generate realistic photos and videos of a person who does not exist.

And if identity politics is the currency of the realm, synthetic identities provide the ability to counterfeit that currency.
Here are some sites to play around with:

1) generated.photos
2) thispersondoesnotexist.com
3) generative.photos

See also the stories on virtual influencers: nytimes.com/2019/06/17/bus…
Faker is a library for populating test databases that could be extended to create a synthetic identity generator.

Output a digital avatar with

- name
- biographical info
- and a function that generates infinite photos, videos, audio, and text
faker.readthedocs.io/en/master/
Read 3 tweets

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Ian Dunt
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Righti ho, back again. Bit more Commons drama, misery, larks, constitutional murder mystery. Kicks off about now and you can follow here parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/91…
Not really a mystery I suppose. We know who did it.
Order paper is here to see what's coming up. Kicks off with education questions. publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cm…
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Christophe Barraud🛢
@C_Barraud
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