Two Lions is a startup studio that's focused on deep tech, vertical ai/ml, and automation tools. We're an entirely Clojure based team and are looking for a founding engineer at our portfolio company Warmer.
> the world is already over-populated, and however hard it is for you to compete with your peers, it'll be even harder for your children
I’m not sure this is true. Most modern economies in the world have a declining birth rate.
My perspective on children has changed recently. We need more people and in the world to solve the problems that we’ve created. We don’t know if life exists outside of the earth and I want living things to thrive, and for that to be the case, I think we need more people.
Two Lions is a startup studio based out of SF. We’re building automation and power tools for the commercial aspects of every startup (sales, marketing, recruiting, and fundraising). All these processes end up with contact management, sourcing, campaign management, pipeline views, and analytics. Team is currently three people (all with backgrounds in engineering). We're looking for a lead engineer.
If you're interested, send an email to michael[at]twolions.co.
I owned a pretty decent amount of crypto back in 2012, but sold all of it and own essentially none now. I think what you’re missing here is that there is actually potential in the space and that there are a decent amount of people trying to solve real problems that exist today.
The two big ones I can think of are payments and ownership.
Payments has always been a difficult part of the web. Multi billion dollar companies have been created around this difficulty. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a native, protocol level way to handle payment?
Similarly, digital ownership is totally fragmented. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way that I could take my digital things with me between different services? I own a number of videos on Amazon, but why can’t I take that ownership right with me to view them on Hulu, or some other service.
> I own a number of videos on Amazon, but why can’t I take that ownership right with me to view them on Hulu, or some other service.
Do you? Terms probably state you bought a license. The incentive is for producers and platforms to silo content to maximize sales. Why would they agree to use a less centralized platform unless forced by law or coordinated market demand?
I probably agree with a chunk of this, but there is a level at which blockchains, specifically smart contract platforms help enormously with interoperability - they force those using them to provide standard, transactionally interoperable APIs to their services. If someone provides a financial service on ethereum for example, then it will have an api that can be used by other services on ethereum. This is a shocking level of interoperability compared to what we had before, where even with government stepping in and making things like OpenBanking mandatory, it's still surprisingly painful for a normal developer to create services that interoperate with their own bank accounts.
> If someone provides a financial service on ethereum for example, then it will have an api that can be used by other services on ethereum.
Not necessarily. You can have a smart contract that's completely controlled by one address, such that you need manual interaction with an external system to interact with the smart contract. You can even avoid transparency by storing information elsewhere, via an oracle. Nothing ensures that somebody providing a financial service on Ethereum will provide anything that could be considered an API.
Other than that, for the same financial service, the same regulations will apply to both the Ethereum and traditional version. If it's legally possible to offer some kind of API on Ethereum and it does bring value, the same could be achieved outside of Ethereum. But IMHO the real reasons for the absence of such APIs are regulations and incentives, for which Ethereum doesn't help.
> IMHO the real reasons for the absence of such APIs are regulations and incentives
Sure, but smart contracts have totally different incentives and costs for creating interoperable services than e.g. mobile apps. I would say that Ethereum does help here.
> Sure, but smart contracts have totally different incentives and costs for creating interoperable services than e.g. mobile apps. I would say that Ethereum does help here.
Why would you say that? For what reasons?
To engage with your comment a bit more, regarding costs, it's very expensive to:
* write secure smart contracts (if possible at all)
* maintain a smart contract infrastructure (transaction fees)
It's very expensive to write secure smart contracts, true, but it's also surprisingly expensive to write secure systems using more traditional technologies too.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by it being expensive to maintain a smart contract infrastructure, because if your application suits it, you can literally deploy your smart contract and forget it, and people can use it into the future without you ever having to pay server costs - i.e. for the person deploying the smart contract it can be much cheaper. To the extent that it would be reasonable to hope people would deploy public infrastructure as smart contracts, even if they wouldn't want to deploy public infrastructure as cloud services. If you're worried about overall costs like transaction fees, it's not at all true that there's no solution in sight for them. There are minority cryptocurrencies now with no transaction fees, and even if you are skeptical about their promises, the largest smart contract ecosystem around (ethereum) has a plausible roadmap for dramatically reducing transaction fees. You can checkout the first few that are deployed here https://l2fees.info/ but significant improvements in this area are still expected over the next few years on ethereum.
The point about the incentives is that if you are asked to create a mobile app for a bank to manage mortgages, it is possible but extremely unlikely that you will put the effort in to make this accessible via API to the users or the rest of the ecosystem who might want to create tools that create visualisations, aggregate data for the user, certify that someone in the real world is prepared to lend them significant amounts of data, etc.
If on the other hand you create a blockchain solution to manage mortgages, it is extremely unlikely that you wouldn't create a reasonable externally accessible API - it's the default way of writing blockchain applications.
> without you ever having to pay server costs - i.e. for the person deploying the smart contract it can be much cheaper
That's just offloading the costs (or passing the costs down to the users), that's not a solution.
> it's the default way of writing blockchain applications
There's no default way of writing smart contracts, where does that come from? I've seen my share of smart contracts (tokens, stablecoins, NFTs) where one single address control everything, or where external approval is required for any interaction to happen. There's no "default" there.
Even if you manage to convince a bank or other financial institution to use a blockchain, they won't relinquish control over what they deploy there. There's just no incentive in favor of that, and so many against (regulations, complexity). But more to the point: "using blockchain" as a constraint doesn't change the incentives when it comes to interoperability.
As I explained in another comment in the same thread, it's a far cry from ensuring interoperability. The term "open ledger" is also misguiding since it's just an open ledger of whatever you want to put there, it doesn't necessarily reflect even a representative part of a whole system that would provide some kind of financial service.
As another commenter explained regarding video ownership, there's also no incentive to move any old and non-interoperable system there to begin with.
Just a side note about your digital movies: You can connect your various accounts and share your library across services with Movies Anyhwhere: https://moviesanywhere.com
That’s not what I read in that article at all. What I read was that their data and methodology was flawed, and they weren’t willing to pay the price to fix it.
Zillow thought they already had enough data and accurate enough models to buy and sell houses profitably. The last two quarters proved they didn’t. In the first quarter they were puzzled by making too much money and in the second they lost a whole bunch
The author is arguing that they should have pivoted from “we already have models” to “we’re intentionally gambling hundreds of millions of dollars so we can build good models over the next few years”. That might be a good strategy for a startup with loads of VC money and no other products, but it makes less sense for a more established company to risk going under on that bet
Their methodology might have been flawed. The author is speculating.
He uses Zillow to explain how datasets – especially the ones with money tied-in – can’t be trusted blindly. Building a high-quality dataset is an expensive endeavour.
This issue with take home interviews is that the time commitment on the side of the candidate is super high. If every company gives you some variant of this take home, you spend at 2-10 hours on each take home, and you're interviewing at 10-20 companies, it very quickly becomes a full time job.
There are occasions when it's absolutely necessary to see concrete examples of writing, programming, design, etc. A portfolio in other words. Now, this can often be satisfied with work that already exists. Though for programming you're now getting into "what do you mean you don't have open source projects on GitHub?" territory.
The big use cases are devops/monitoring data and IoT data. But it also applies to pretty much any use case where you want to answer questions about data in relation to time.
