Saturday, July 09, 2022

8: Heat Wave, Ukraine

Venture capital’s reckoning Why there won’t be a rerun of the dotcom crash ........ Over $600bn of venture funds were invested worldwide last year, nearly ten times the level a decade ago. ........ Pension funds and endowments that committed large amounts of “dry powder” to private markets are trying to preserve cash by asking vcs to slow their pace of investing. ........ One concern is how interlinked tech firms might be. Some apparently profitable startups are earning money by providing services, from digital marketing to cloud computing, to other startups that are losing money and that in turn rely on endless blank cheques from their vc sponsors. ........ What emerges from the chaos will be a leaner and more efficient industry—and one that will remain a powerful force. .



How to win Ukraine’s long war After doing well early in the war, Ukraine is losing ground. What next? ........ Ukraine won the short war. Mobile and resourceful, its troops inflicted terrible losses and confounded Russian plans to take Kyiv. Now comes the long war. It will drain weapons, lives and money until one side loses the will to fight on. So far, this is a war that Russia is winning. ........... Ukrainian leaders say they are outgunned and lack ammunition. Their government reckons as many as 200 of its troops are dying each day. ........ Fortunately for Ukraine, that is not the end. The Russian advance is slow and costly. With nato-calibre weapons, fresh tactics and enough financial aid, Ukraine has every chance of forcing back Russia’s armies. Even if lost territory will be hard to retake, Ukraine can demonstrate the futility of Vladimir Putin’s campaign and emerge as a democratic, Westward-looking state. But to do so it needs enduring support. .......... The Russian economy is much larger than Ukraine’s and in far better shape. In pursuit of victory, Russia is willing to terrorise and demoralise the Ukrainians by committing war crimes, as it did by striking a shopping mall in Kremenchuk this week. If needs be, Mr Putin will impose grievous suffering on his own people. ........ In 2020, before sanctions, the economies of nato were more than ten times bigger than Russia’s. .......... Mr Putin’s generals will continue to have more weapons, but the sophisticated nato systems now arriving have longer range and greater accuracy. By adopting tactics devised in the cold war, when nato too was outnumbered by the Red Army, Ukraine should be able to destroy Russian command posts and supply depots. ........ Ukraine scored a success on June 30th, when it used nato weapons to drive Russian forces off Snake Island, a strategic prize in the Black Sea. It should aim to impose a “hurting stalemate”, in which it takes back similarly symbolically important territory, such as the city of Kherson, imposing a heavy price on Russia. ........... If Russia starts to lose ground on the battlefield, dissent and infighting may spread in the Kremlin. Western intelligence services believe that Mr Putin is being kept in the dark by his subordinates. ......... The West can raise the cost to Russia of a long war by continuing to press sanctions, which threaten lasting harm to Russia’s economy. It can split Russia’s elites from Mr Putin by welcoming dissenters from business and politics, and encouraging them to see that their country should not throw away its future on a pointless and costly campaign. ......... At a summit on June 23rd, the European Union awarded Ukraine candidate status, promising a deep level of engagement over the next decade. At another summit in Germany this week, the g7 affirmed and strengthened sanctions against Russia. And at a third in Madrid, nato acknowledged the Russian threat by substantially increasing its presence on the alliance’s eastern front. ........ the global costs of a long war will grow. Mr Putin has been blockading exports of grains and sunflower oil from Ukraine’s ports, which will cause unrest and starvation in poorer importing countries. He seems to be trying to create gas shortages in the eu this winter by preventing members from building stocks over the summer. If unity falls apart over energy, as eu states hoard gas, it will disintegrate over Ukraine, too. To complicate matters further, nato members worry that if Ukraine gains the upper hand, Mr Putin will escalate. That could draw them into a catastrophic war with Russia. ........... You can see where Mr Putin is heading. He will take as much of Ukraine as he can, declare victory and then call on Western nations to impose his terms on Ukraine. In exchange, he will spare the rest of the world from ruin, hunger, cold and the threat of nuclear Armageddon. ............ He will fight tomorrow with whatever weapons work for him today. That means resorting to war crimes and nuclear threats, starving the world and freezing Europe. .........

The best way to prevent the next war is to defeat him in this one.

......... To prevail means marshalling resources and shoring up Ukraine as a viable, sovereign, Western-leaning country—an outcome that its defiant people crave. Ukraine and its backers have the men, money and materiel to overcome Mr Putin. Do they all have the will? .





What to do when Slack cuts no slack Consider "vulnerable honesty" with chatty colleagues. For example, saying, "I love that you are including me, I am just not up to socializing."



On Leaving GitHub and Joining OpenSea I only vaguely remember the early days where we reviewed code on a projector and took notes on a notepad. Then came GitHub and I fell in love with a product for the first time in my life. ........ GitHub’s come a long way from the early days when I joined – figuring out the right solution for management structure and growing the team to almost 300. ......... OpenSea’s mission speaks to me, and the team is made up of some of the most genuine people you’ll meet. Their commitment to the cause is like no other. I’m excited by their work to build a creator-first marketplace where makers have unlimited freedom to bring their work to life how they see fit, and share it with people however they want. ........... They say

a bear market is for the builders

. It’s an opportunity to focus on what matters most – what’s critical for a successful community and is pushing the NFT ecosystem forward. ....... Let creativity reign and the best work rise unhindered by a system meant to extract all profits from builders and overcharge their communities.



When the iPhone was released, many people within BlackBerry rightly pointed out that we had a technical leg up on Apple in many areas important to business and enterprise users (not to mention the physical keyboard for quickly cranking out emails)… but how much did that advantage matter in the end? If there is serious market pull, the rest eventually gets figured out… a lesson I learned from my time at BlackBerry that I was lucky enough to be able to immediately apply when I joined Google to work on Android. .......... At BlackBerry, we would hear stories of

customers “accidentally” dropping their devices into the toilet

to force their IT team for an upgrade. It was hard to imagine in the mid-2000s that by the end of the decade carrying a BlackBerry would become “uncool.” ........... When BlackBerry tried to force fit the enterprise product for the consumer market with devices like the BlackBerry Curve, Storm, and Tour, and it didn’t work. .......... I had the opportunity to learn from our mistakes when I became one of the first Product Managers on the Android team. At Android, we were maniacally obsessed about the product experience, not the “Google experience.” .........
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