Are you making a satirical example about the emptiness of such flippant accusations, or do you actually entertain a serious possibility that GP is on the tesla payroll spreading propaganda on HN?
Recognizing both expenses and revenue over time is part of generally accepted accounting practices (GAAP).
Intuitionistically, it makes total sense that you get a clearer picture of the true state of the finances of Netflix as a going concern if they recognize the costs of a show on their balance sheet over five years when they expect subscribers to still be watching it for the first (or second, or third) time several years on.
Basically, it depends on the size of the company - the numbers reported by Netflix are GAAP. The tricky part is depreciation and amortization v. cash which would create a different outcomes in a cashflow and GAAP.
A company with a positive cashflow and GAAP profitable is in the best spot, followed by a company with a positive cashflow and losing money in GAAP-land, followed by a negative cashflow and positive GAAP-land, followed by a negative cashflow and negative GAAP.
This is they type of figureheadism that I absolutely do not understand and which makes me very nervous about the future of a company.
Great, the boss is in house...now I spend more of my time telling the boss why it isn't fixed yet and less of my time actually fixing it. I'm not saying those things are inherently at odds but they are definitely in tension with each other.
Interesting to see how this post is being sent back to the second page even though it has 43 points in 4 hours. In front are posts with 12 points in 5 hours.
Using proxies for competence is a slippery slope towards misdirection and irrelevance - and as a result, incorrect hiring decisions.
In another thread today, someone mentioned they reject every CV that has two typos or more. It's a proxy, and it is irrelevant for the job.
Once you start going down the path of proxies, you add more and more far removed ones. To keep hiring performance high, resist adding the first proxy. Actually ask questions relevant to past work experience that maps to the actual job. Maybe do work samples.
To circle back to the two questions in the blog post, no interviewer can answer them because they use proxies too far removed.
Think of the resume as a deliverable. This potential employee sent out the deliverable without reviewing it for spelling and grammatical correctness. They almost certainly did not ask someone else to proofread it and suggest corrections.
Would you want to put this person in a position where they may have to deliver binaries, code, or other documents to a customer? Would they ignore or skip steps in your delivery process, too?
Agreed. Work samples are the most predictive form of assessment, you just need to be able to isolate them from other factors such as confidence bias...
i.e. no whiteboard interviews (unless hiring for someone whose job it will be to solve problems on whiteboards in front of strangers in situations that effect their financial security and sense of worth)
Of course, but it’s almost always after a company at least has a product and usually after revenue is funding salaries. Using PG’s phrase, it’s after the company is “default alive.” By that point, the founding risk is pretty low.
A first-time entrepreneur raising capital without a product or revenue is, for all intents and purposes, unique to tech and biotech. The very few exceptions aren’t common enough that an entrepreneur could plan around them.
