seeing a lot of confusion around why layoffs are happening at companies with a lot of cash on the balance sheet. at the risk of getting roasted... here's a TLDR, for both public and private companies

in 2020 and 2021 the way to create shareholder value was to grow topline. regardless of the quality of revenue, software revenue was being valued at between 30x-100x run rate
smart investors know that not all revenue is equal... and they know that very few software businesses actually have the characteristics to drive meaningful cash flow at scale
because meaningful cash flow at scale requires a high margin product, high retention, and an ability to upsell and cross sell to drive increasing LTV. once you land, you need to expand share of wallet, continuously. for decades
many software categories fundamentally cannot ever support a company with these characteristics. history tells you this... but we forget!
so people put a lot of money into companies that were growing like this…
with the expectation that if you just grew topline fast enough, it would inevitably become this…
when in reality a lot of these business are destined to look like this
so now that the illusion of the inevitability of cash flows at scale is shattered, investors are looking for proof of operating leverage sooner
which is why layoffs are happening, regardless of the amount of cash on the balance sheet. management needs to prove that adding incremental spend drives marginally more return.

it’s a reset on what it means to be a steward of investor capital
this then trickles down to startups... who are now also being asked to show proof of operating leverage. that is why a startup with hundreds of millions on the balance sheet might be aggressively cutting costs
investors aren’t willing to fund what is now often a bridge to nowhere — you need to show signs that when you get to the other side of that bridge, there’s going to be cash flow
this involves proving more than just “can you build an operating model.” it involves proving your product, your category, and your GTM model
unfortunately, a lot of companies and investors are going to find that they’re in markets that simply do not support the size or profile of business that their investors were underwriting to...
which is when things get really messy. and burying your head in the sand isn't going to help
so, the moral of the story is: it's in everyones best interest to figure out what's on the other side of that bridge ASAP.

and if it's not cash flow, you need to reconstruct the bridge to go elsewhere. free flowing investor capital used to support that bridge. it won't anymore

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॥ॐ॥
अस्य श्री गायत्री ध्यान श्लोक:
(gAyatri dhyAna shlOka)
• This shloka to meditate personified form of वेदमाता गायत्री was given by Bhagwaan Brahma to Sage yAgnavalkya (याज्ञवल्क्य).

• 14th shloka of गायत्री कवचम् which is taken from वशिष्ठ संहिता, goes as follows..


• मुक्ता-विद्रुम-हेम-नील धवलच्छायैर्मुखस्त्रीक्षणै:।
muktA vidruma hEma nIla dhavalachhAyaiH mukhaistrlkShaNaiH.

• युक्तामिन्दुकला-निबद्धमुकुटां तत्वार्थवर्णात्मिकाम्॥
yuktAmindukalA nibaddha makutAm tatvArtha varNAtmikam.

• गायत्रीं वरदाभयाङ्कुश कशां शुभ्रं कपालं गदाम्।
gAyatrIm vardAbhayANkusha kashAm shubhram kapAlam gadAm.

• शंखं चक्रमथारविन्दयुगलं हस्तैर्वहन्ती भजै॥
shankham chakramathArvinda yugalam hastairvahantIm bhajE.

This shloka describes the form of वेदमाता गायत्री.

• It says, "She has five faces which shine with the colours of a Pearl 'मुक्ता', Coral 'विद्रुम', Gold 'हेम्', Sapphire 'नील्', & a Diamond 'धवलम्'.

• These five faces are symbolic of the five primordial elements called पञ्चमहाभूत:' which makes up the entire existence.

• These are the elements of SPACE, FIRE, WIND, EARTH & WATER.

• All these five faces shine with three eyes 'त्रिक्षणै:'.
How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.