two doors down from my shop is an antique bently restorer. he's sold a few, but he still has 5 frames that he's working on. after all the custom panel and interior work and chasing after the few remaining parts available in all kinds of odd international corners he's still quite underwater.
Sucks to be that guy? I'm not sure what your point is. You haven't given enough information to assess much. It's also likely you don't know all the numbers or you'd be working there.
A theory I've proposed that I would love to get scientific evidence for... I would guess that WFH is effectively bimodal. WFH advocates would largely fall into a high performance bucket, and detractors either believe that average employees are low performers and need monitoring or are low performers. This is not social vs anti-social, its wanting to be productive with your time - whether thats the time you spend working, or with family etc.
- WFH for high performers: fewer distractions because you can control your environment, less time wasted on commute, less time on non-work communication, etc. More flexibility, better control of your time and space.
- WFH for poor performers: No oversight so you choose to work less. You control your environment so you can add distractions - Meetings, TV, social media chores, family, leaving to go do stuff.
- Office for high performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control - social conversations, meetings, etc... keeping you from doing work.
- Office for low performers: Constant series of distractions you can't control letting you avoid work without repercussion. Meetings, Social time with coworkers, etc
I would love any scientific evidence for or against this theory. If anyone has any studies or natural experiments I would love to know about them
There are 100% people who are the reverse. It sounds like you're optimizing for heads-down IC time, which I agree is more productive at home.
But for team building—which, in very early stage companies is huge—and quick identification and resolution, in-person can be much better, in my experience. (Not always! Person, team, role, etc. dependent.)
There's a HUGE difference between in-person meetings and over Zoom. Teams in person—again, my experience—can move much faster because you can process social cues, body language, attention right there. There's zero latency.
This isn't to discount the distractions you're talking about, or the trade-offs of commute and cost-of-living to be near an office, etc. Very real.
But saying that high performers are better WFH and potatos are better in-office is not a universal truth.
Team building is management speak and completely unnecessary. Teams will naturally form bonds as they complete work together. Any worker with a life has zero desire to go drink a couple bad drinks and do an escape room with coworkers they barely like to appease a manager that thinks this is going to somehow increase productivity.
Alternatively, I smell a business opportunity, as I know some people that deserve depression and misery, and "pay me to dance near them" could be a thing.
I am not gifted at music but my affinity for it and ability to play music is above-average (not hard, most people just don't ever even try) but if I try to dance, somehow where I think each movement should start or end is entirely wrong, like, to such a degree that it's like I'm trying and wonderfully succeeding at doing it wrong.
Somehow, even with the objective criteria of sensors ensuring I am indeed hitting things when I should be, I can even get pretty damn good at something like Dance Dance Revolution, and feel like I'm moving naturally and smoothly while playing it, yet apparently look like I'm having a seizure even as I'm landing "perfects" across the board.
That's how constitutionally incapable of dance (or, if you prefer, how "white") I am.
Learning how to dance well requires floor-length mirrors and a good coach. Pretty much nobody learns it properly on their own. Even dance champions still take regular coaching.
As for being untalented, all that means is it will take you more time to get good at it.
P.S. What you think you are doing while dancing is not what you are actually doing. That's why a coach is necessary.
So let me get this straight... technical founders are providing limitless access to their IP, and this is supposed to be a positive indicator that they would be a good founder? Thats wild
`cd ~/path/to/your-project && curl -fsSL https://paxel.ycombinator.com/upload.sh | bash` is the command from Paxel's website. So you're literally just piping whatever the hell they want into bash. It's long, lots of comments, and honestly would be time consuming to audit properly.
Supposedly this is what it does from the opening comment
# Paxel upload script
# ===================
#
# What this does (up to 17 steps):
# On your machine
# 1. Check Docker is installed and running
# 2. Sign you in (browser-based device auth)
# 3. Pull or build the Paxel Docker image
#
# Inside the container — file bodies stay local; only aggregate metrics +
# metadata (paths, commit numstat, session events) are uploaded
# 4. Discover projects and sessions (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor)
# 5. Read your git history
# 6. Parse transcripts
# 7. Summarize each session (cloud Haiku via YC proxy)
# 8. Group git commits by session
# 9. Group sessions into multi-day work streams
# 10. Extract steering traces
# 11. Extract decision exchanges (cloud Haiku)
# 12. Redact code before upload (regex pattern redaction)
# 13. Link decisions to outcomes
# 14. Analyze code quality (L1 deterministic)
# 15. Score episodes across 5 axes (cloud Haiku)
# 16. Assemble your report
# 17. Upload redacted summaries + scores to the server
#
# Then: opens your results in the browser
There are many ways to create "sticky" products, even commodity products (e.g. coca cola, starbucks, etc). Network effects are just one.
Regarding Price to Earnings... I'm not sure everyone fully fleshed out the end game for the frontier companies. It appears the pitch is that this current phase is a stepping stone to Artificial General Intelligence or Super Intelligence. I can understand the perspective of investors though... If you can get half of the world on these products at some point you will find something you can sell them even if its not the core product (i.e. loss leader).
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