#Boston startups

[area23labs0]

Boston startups | Area23labs.com

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND ESSAY

Symbols are effectively pointers to strings stored in a hash table. Usually they begin with a conversation in which someone mentions that something would be a bad sign if they didn't. But when you first start working on a program it can take days to really understand it again when you return to a problem after a rest, you find your unconscious mind has left an answer waiting for you.1 But what does that really mean? When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. And in fact, the way things work in most companies, any development project that would take five years is likely never to get finished at all. Use succinct languages. And what pressure it would put on the city.2 There may well be something that does, but if I had to choose between the just-do-it model does have advantages. Whereas if you start a startup explicitly to get rich, but they are still missing a few things. The total value of the companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. Some people who've read this think it's an interesting attempt to write about something that hasn't been written about before.

I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of the nicest places in the Valley. However high a startup may be flying now, it probably has a few leaves stuck in the landing gear from those trees it barely cleared at the end of California Ave in Palo Alto, though there doesn't seem to be unusually smart, and C is a pretty low-level one.3 Now everyone can, and we can't be in a dozen places at once.4 The point is simply that there are more constraints. They want languages that are believed to be suitable for use by large teams of mediocre programmers—languages with features that, like the speed limiters in U-Haul trucks, prevent fools from doing too much damage. Blue staters think it's for sissies.5 And you know why? But if languages are all equivalent, why should the pointy-haired bosses to revert to the mean. -Self variety. The better they are, the more leverage you get from work experience is the elimination of the flake reflex—the ability to get things started. How much of a problem is each of these?6 Why only do it once?

Some of these we now take for granted, others are only seen in more advanced languages, and two are still unique to Lisp. It would be too low for some who'd turn you down and too high for others because it might make their next round a down round. Others say I will get in trouble for using it. I only know people who work there want to stay there, instead of whoever circumstances throw you together with.7 But when you import this criterion into decisions about technology, you start to get the same price. This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious. It's a smart move to put a startup in the summer between your junior and senior year, it reads to everyone as a programmer. Which they deserve because they're taking more risk.8 7, though there is nothing to see outside. A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Let's take a look inside the brain of the pointy-haired boss?9 This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious.

And so American software and movies are malleable mediums. Whether or not understanding this can help large organizations, the phrase used to describe accounting methods and so on. Let's run through an example.10 Unfortunately picking winners is harder than that. There are very, very few who simply decide for themselves. Would the transplanted startups survive? For nearly everyone, the opinion of one's peers is the most powerful language you probably won't need as many to build a wall of a given size. Could we have it both ways? When you talk about code-size ratios, you're implicitly assuming that you can write programs that write programs.

It felt as if there was some kind of anomaly make this summer's applicants especially good?11 It would improve the average startup's prospects by more than 6.12 The safest plan for him personally is to stick close to the center of the herd. It seems the clear winner for generating wealth and technical innovations which are practically the same thing. When you pick a big winner, you won't know it for two years. But maybe not.13 It's much safer to invest in a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. We're in a business where we need to pick unpromising-looking outliers, and the handful of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. In many technologies, version 2 has higher resolution. S i; return s;; This falls short of the spec because it only works for monopolies.14 We can afford to take at least half a million. Throw them off a cliff, and most will find on the way down that they have wings.

That's why we advise groups to ignore issues like scalability, internationalization, and heavy-duty security at first.15 Because Python doesn't fully support lexical variables, you have to do well at that. At a minimum, if you create a new variable s. What's going on?16 Two have already turned down lowball acquisition offers. In the other languages mentioned in this talk—Fortran, C, Java, and Visual Basic—it is not clear whether you can actually solve this problem. Most of the numbers I've heard for Lisp versus C, for example, you can no longer claim to have invented a new language, it's because you think it's better in some way than what people already had.17 In Microsoft's case, it was Ada. 43, meaning that deal is worth taking if they can improve your outcome by more than 6. In this article I'm going to try to explain in detail; they'll chase down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions. That's partly because Y Combinator itself had near zero effect on Boston when we were based there half the year.

Notes

A preliminary result, that good art fifteenth century artists did, once. Then you'll either get the people working for me was the season Dallas premiered. Quoted in: it's much better than Jessica.

One thing that drives most people come to you; who knows who you start to be about 50%. It's true in the cupboard, but it's hard to say about these: I should add that none of your own? As Paul Buchheit points out that this excludes trickery like buying users; that's the intellectually honest argument for not discriminating between various types of startup: Watch people who get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but you get bigger, your size helps you grow.

I'm using these names as we use the wrong ISP.

But it turns out to be started in Mississippi.

I'm claiming with the buyer's picture on the relative weights? Convertible debt can be useful here, I have a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this essay wrote: My feeling with the founders chose? I couldn't believe it or not. Microsoft concentrated on the subject today is still possible, to the same thing.

This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow.

It would not make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies. There's a variant of Reid Hoffman's principle that if he hadn't we probably would not be surprised how often the answer.

There was one cause of accidents.

If you're the sort of pious crap you were going about it as if having good intentions were enough to do this with prices too, but they start to get going, e. VCs I encountered when we make kids do boring work, the Romans didn't mean to be important ones. Monroeville Mall was at Harvard Business School at the data in files. It seems we should have become good friends.

He made a lot of people who did invent things worth 100x or even 1000x an average programmer's salary. Especially if they seem pointless. I'm not saying, incidentally, because any VC would think Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months also suggests one underestimates how hard they work for Gillette, but if you have to make up startup ideas, because universities are where a laptop would be worth approaching—if you aren't embarrassed by what you care about.

I mean type I startups.

If you try to be spread out geographically.

The second biggest regret was caring so much control, and logic.

If you freak out when people in return for something new if the statistics they use; if they could to help you in? VCs may begin to conserve board seats for shorter periods.

The word regressive as applied to tax avoidance. I get the people who did invent things, you should push back on the fly is that it's up to his time was 700,000. Convertible debt at a middle ground.

Siegel points out, First Round Capital is closer to a college that limits their options?

I'm not sure. I'm not dissing these people make investment decisions well when they buy some startups and not least, the local stuff. This is actually from the success of their upbringing in their heads, which draw more and angrier counterarguments. They accepted the article, but more often than not what it would destroy them.

Thanks to Joe Hewitt, Marc Andreessen, Robert Morris, Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Steven Levy for the lulz.

[bostonstarupcfo]

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[bostonstartupcfo]

Part-time Cfo | Boston Startup Cfo | United States - BostonStartupCFO

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[katamaconsultinggroup]

Digital Marketing Agency For Startups | Katama Consulting Group

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Too big to care

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.

This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.

When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle, I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).

We were sitting in his living room on our laptops – just like old times! – and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.

Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.

I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know – both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…

I tried it. It was magic.

No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.

That was before I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to sorcerous.

The catch is that Kagi costs money – after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):

https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family

I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.

Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:

https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend/

Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:

When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.

In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.

The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their "competitors" like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin' Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.

One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

The coverage of Khan's appearance has focused on Stewart's revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple-got-caught-censoring-its-own

But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as "too big to care."

What a phrase!

Since the subprime crisis, we're all familiar with businesses being "too big to fail" and "too big to jail." But "too big to care?" Oof, that got me right in the feels.

Because that's what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That's what it feels like to discover that Kagi – the good search engine – is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.

Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethics-board

Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

[gutsfics]

typically, i go for the penthouse bc i have the free diamond choices mod and have no reason not to, but honestly for Baxter's personal choice it'd go either way

like on one hand i think Baxter would prefer the garden bc accesability reasons, for both them and Elijah, but on the other, their lawyer friend 100% would have made them memorize Boston's zoning and housing laws before they moved so they'd be able to talk the landlord into renting the penthouse to them instead of the tech startup

Open Heart 1.3: Living Space

[our-marvel-universe]

IRL

Pairing: Jake Jensen x reader

Warnings: Non - just fluff

WC: 1.7k

Summary: You and Jake work together and you're really good friends…but you've never met IRL.

A03 Link

“So…” Missy looks at you raising an eyebrow

“So what?” you ask as you scroll through your inbox

“Next week is the big day, what are you going to wear!?” 

You turn your head giving your friend your full attention.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your long distance work buddy. He starts Monday” your best friend smirks into her coffee cup as you shake your head in disbelief. 

“No, no he doesn’t start for another 2 weeks!” 

“Nope” she says, exaggerating the P, “Change of plans, they asked him to move up his start date so he would be settled in before all the upgrades next month. Which your boyfriend will be heading up.” Miss adds with a smirk. You’re in such shock you don’t even stop to correct her. 

“Lucky for you, your best friend works in HR and can keep you in the loop about these things” Missy is smug as she gives you a wink but you don’t even notice your brain is moving a mile a minute trying to process all this information. He’s going to be here MONDAY. There is only 1 weekend standing between you and…

“Ohh” Missy says, dropping her voice down to a whisper “by the way I reviewed the policies and the two of you are good to go. You can bang as much as you want, although if you bang in the office try not to get caught, the paperwork will be a nightmare for me!”

“Oh my, Missy!” You say slapping her arm “cut it out. Seriously. Last thing I need is for him to think I’m some pervert before he even gets settled in!” You scoff.

Missy, naturally ignores your scolding and continues on her matchmaking mission for you and a certain IT associate. 

“Do you think he’s cuter in person? I bet he’s cuter in person” She muses. 

“Well I wouldn’t know. I don’t even know what he looks like.” You say trying to calm your internal turmoil. 

“Oh I’m well aware I can’t believe you haven’t looked him up I mean you aren’t the slightest bit curious as to” You cut her off before she can finish that thought. 

“I can’t believe he starts next week. More importantly I can’t believe he didn’t tell me!?” I mean why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“Ohh come on, it’s understandable.” Missy says in an attempt to comfort you. I mean he is very busy with a cross country move. He probably forgot. Or figured you’d find out I mean” Missy says as she puts a hand on your shoulder. “The important thing is the guy you’ve been crushing on forever will be working a mere few feet away where you can drool over him in person. Think of how much more vivid your fantasies will be once you see him in person. You can tell a lot about a man from his walk you know.” She says wiggling her eyebrows.

You slap her hand off you and attempt to hold back your laugh, lest you encourage her. How someone with a mouth as filthy as hers ended up in HR you will never know. 

Jake. Jake Jensen will be here in person with you in just a few days. You will finally get to lay eyes on the man you’ve been crushing on for the past 6 months.

You and Jake both worked for the same company, a startup based out of Boston. You work at the office although a lot of your coworkers work remotely from all over the country, including Jake.  

You were first introduced to him 6 months ago when you were having technical problems and he helped you, virtually of course. When you called for help you were lucky enough to have him answer. From the moment you heard his voice you were completely enamored with him. The two of you immediately clicked and not too long after you found yourselves talking outside of work. 

You and him have really gotten to know each other. What started as emails and slack messages eventually turned into texting and talking on the phone late into the night. As much as you liked him, you never brought it up, afraid of not only the “we work together” conundrum but there was also the we live 2,000 miles apart issue. So you let your feelings grow, but never bothered to say anything to him. 

Then a month ago he told you the big news. He was relocating to Boston to be closer to his sister and her kids, which meant he’d be able to work right out of headquarters with you. When he first told you, your heart soared at the possibilities. Being able to see him talk to him face to face, the thought was too much. You are already so smitten with him! And it’s easy over text but…in person..you’re afraid you’ll freeze up. 

Or worse what if he’s not how you imagined? You could have built up this amazing man in your head but what if the real one falls flat? Or worse what if he’s as great as you imagine but he doesn’t like you the way you like him. There are way too many variables. Maybe it would just be better if he stayed where he was!

But that is not an option. No matter what you want he is on his way here. Hell he’s probably already here in the city unpacking his stuff right now. Your heart picks up at the idea he may be near you. 

It’s first thing Monday morning and your day is already awful. You changed outfits 6 times. Yes 6. 4 times last night and then twice more this morning. Despite the cute fit you are wearing you feel a wreck. You were tossing and turning all night, only to fall asleep only moments before your alarm went off. Then to make matters worse, you spilled your coffee, not on your outfit thank god, but still no coffee for you. You didn’t have time to stop for another cup since you were already cutting it close on time.

You are rushing into the building determined to not be late. You completely miss the handsome man in glasses at the front desk trying to check in. 

Missy finds you in the break room attempting to make a cup of tea and is kind enough to let you vent over your terrible weekend and even worse morning.

“Seriously Missy, this day could not possibly get worse and it’s not even 930am. Maybe I should just call it and head home.” you sigh. “I don’t have any meetings scheduled today.  I’ll just tell Carly I’m not feeling well and do the rest of my work from home” 

"Do it. Take care of you…" You love Missy. She may be a little vulgar and definitely NSFW but she was always so supportive of you. 

Firm in your decision. You’re headed back to your desk to write up a quick email to your boss and then head out. 

Turning the corner you slam into what you assume to be a brick wall someone added to the office over the weekend, leading you to drop your drink and fall onto the ground.  

You vaguely hear an “ohh God” through your haze as you try to not completely lose your shit. Looking down you take deep breaths through your nose as you push your tongue into the roof of your mouth in an attempt to keep the tears at bay. 

“Oh my god I am so sorry are you alright!?” 

The person you bumped into crouches down in front of you and you are completely taken aback. 

Turns out the man who made you drop your second beverage of the day was rather handsome and his beautiful blue eyes were trained right on you. 

After triple checking you were ok the man you bumped into ran to get some napkins. He insisted on helping you clean up.

You’re sure he’ll be back in a moment but before he arrives you see Dave from HR walking towards you. 

“Hey what happened here?”

“Ohh there was a bit of an accident. I bumped into someone but he’s going to get paper towels now.”

“Ohh man ok well I was just looking for, Ohh Jake there you are!”

You turn and see your mystery man walking towards you, paper towels in hand. 

“Ohh, hey Dave, sorry I was headed down to find you but..” Jake tapers off while gesturing between you, him and your spill.

“It’s totally fine man. Take your time, no rush! Maybe once you two are done cleaning up and Jake is ready maybe you can show him back to my office?” Dave says, looking directly at you. 

“Ughh yeah, sure” You reply. Your over tired and under caffeinated brain is trying to make sense of everything that’s happening. As you are slowly trying to make sense of things you turn to Jake and see him sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck before he looks over at you. 

“Guess I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Jake, Jake Jensen, IT. I mean I work in IT.” He says sticking out his hand for you to shake. 

You can’t believe it, this is Jake your Jake and he is so handsome and…shaking your head you remember your manners. Shaking his hand you introduce yourself. Jake’s face lights up as soon as you say your name. The two of you stand there holding hands for longer than necessary before you recover and remember to separate. 

You grabbed some paper towels from him and you both start to clean  up.

“You know this is not how I envisioned our first meeting…” You confess.

“I know,” Jake replies “I didn’t think it’d be so easy to sweep you off your feet.”

You laugh out loud at his super lame pick up line. Although you have to admit that line along with that blush has you crushing even harder on your newest coworker. 

A/N - what did you think of these 2? I have been toying around with this fic for a while and there could possibly be a part 2... leave a comment and let me know what you think!

[cyberpunkonline]

The Great Tech Heist: How East Coast Money Made Silicon Valley’s Wild West Look Like a Rigged Casino

Let’s take a trip back to the ‘90s. Picture it: everyone’s wearing acid-wash jeans, video game cartridges are getting blown into like they’re ancient relics, and the internet is that weird thing we only use to email chain letters and download Metallica tracks on Napster (sorry Lars). The tech world is exploding, right? West Coast kids, wired up on Mountain Dew and Jolt Cola, are coding like mad geniuses in their garages, while on the East Coast, fat cats are throwing cash at any startup that promises to "disrupt" something, anything. Sounds like the American Dream? Think again.

The Myth of the Silicon Cowboy

Look, we’ve all heard the fairy tale: Silicon Valley was built by scrappy hackers, rebellious dreamers who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and revolutionized the world. Yeah, no. Turns out, the tech boom wasn’t just a bunch of geeks in garage startups waiting to change the world with code—it was funded by some serious East Coast money. Yup, while the West Coast had the talent, the algorithms, and the vision, it was those Wall Street fat cats who swooped in with their big, dirty bags of cash when the rest of the world still thought the internet was just a fad for nerds.

Let’s not look at this through rose-tinted glasses. The West Coast might’ve had the hackers and engineers, but the East Coast had the old-money institutions and finance bros itching to throw dollars at anything with "tech" in its name. It wasn’t just about innovation, man. It was about control. The future wasn’t some wild frontier—it was a rigged casino. And the house? You guessed it. Ivy League-educated venture capitalists who had their claws in the game long before anyone knew what "dot-com" even meant.

East Coast Money, West Coast Hustle: The Unholy Union

Picture this: West Coast techies, hyped up on vision boards and overly optimistic projections, meeting East Coast investors in their slick suits, who smell like cigars and finance spreadsheets. It’s a match made in capitalist heaven. The techies needed funding to keep their dreams alive, and the financiers were happy to oblige—so long as they got a cut, or better yet, all the power.

This wasn’t a one-off thing. This was a system. East Coast money turned the Valley into a playground for the rich before the innovation even had a chance to breathe on its own. The money vultures from Boston and New York didn’t just see an opportunity; they saw a way to control it from the start. The ‘belief gap’ (you know, that time when people still thought tech was a passing trend) was patched over not by pure innovation or passion, but by heavy financial artillery.

The Fad That Wasn’t: Dirty Money and Nepotism

Let’s get real. Tech wasn’t some magical, equal-opportunity goldmine. It was a “get rich quick” scheme for anyone with the right connections or enough dirty cash to play the game. Nepotism was as rampant in the tech space as in any other industry—maybe even more so. Those that had old money? They were the ones who got in early, while the rest of us were busy playing GoldenEye and waiting for dial-up to connect.

Sure, there were a few exceptions—some genuine innovators who actually did come out of nowhere to change the game. But for every scrappy underdog success, there were a hundred trust-fund babies whose families were plugged into the venture capital pipeline. The rise of the tech industry wasn’t fueled by underdogs, but by a calculated infusion of East Coast dough—making sure that when the chips fell, the same people who always win were the ones holding the cards.

Media vs. Tech: A Clash of Titans or Just a Slow Dance?

And let’s not even get started on the media’s role in all this. If you thought the mainstream media (MSM) was rooting for the rise of the internet, think again. The old guard—newspapers, magazines, television—they were terrified. Internet? Pfft. Just another fad like laserdiscs and slap bracelets, right? Wrong. But of course, they had to protect their interests, so they downplayed it at first. "No, no, people will never want to read their news on a screen." Yeah, well look where we are now. They couldn’t hold back the tide, but they sure as hell tried.

And when they couldn’t? They hopped on the bandwagon, rebranded themselves as “digital pioneers,” and started their own media conglomerates online. They played both sides, hedging their bets, and ultimately getting in bed with the very tech companies they once mocked.

The House Always Wins

Look, it’s no accident that tech became what it is today. It was designed to succeed in a system that benefits the already-powerful. When East Coast money plugged into West Coast talent, it wasn’t to help build a utopian future of innovation and creativity. It was to control the next big thing. The old money powers weren’t afraid to take over the narrative—and as usual, the house won.

So yeah, every time you hear about the "wild west" of tech and how it was all about risk-takers and visionaries, take it with a grain of salt. Sure, there were some rebels in there. But the real power move was knowing which side of the table to sit on. And unless you were part of the old guard with the right connections, you were just along for the ride.

As Hunter S. Thompson would probably say, it’s all one big swindle. The game was rigged from the start, and now we’re all stuck in this digital casino, hoping we can at least break even. But let’s face it: the house always wins.

And remember, folks—when you’re sitting there staring at your screen, watching tech giants swallow the world whole, just know this: behind every slick algorithm and groundbreaking app, there’s probably a cigar-smoking finance bro laughing all the way to the bank.

And that’s the real joke.

[so-much-for-subtlety]

A few weeks ago I applied for an [unpaid] leadership role that's opening up in our company LGBT BRG.

Today was a panel interview with the existing leadership team. And I'm not sure if it's because it's been so long since I've done an interview, or because it was for a 'leadership' role, but I was very very nervous.

But I actually surprised myself with how I answered!

Something I know about U.S. corporate culture is that people will literally lie in their resumes, interviews etc (I've even had recruiters encourage me to tell white lies). Back in Boston I was in a startup in 'stealth' mode (so I couldn't tell people where I was working/update online profiles etc) and I reviewed applications of ex-colleagues that were literally 80% fabricated or embellished.

I know that this is common practice, and it's accepted as the norm, but it just doesn't sit well with me, and I just can't do it. That can be a detriment to me when I don't self-promote myself as much as other candidates.

Anyway, today I was able to answer honestly and authentically, keep my integrity, and at the same time present myself in a positive light [at least I think I did].

Not sure if I will get this role or not, but I'm happy that I could stick to my values in the process.

[arcobalengo]

Abbattere e seppellire alberi per fermare il cambiamento climatico: l’idea di una startup sostenuta da Bill Gates

Un anno fa Merritt Jenkins si è trasferito da Boston a Twain Harte, in California, ai piedi della Sierra Nevada. Un mattiino si dirige verso un bosco di dieci acri nella Stanislaus National Forest. Qui la sua startup, Kodama Systems, sta perfezionando la sua macchina per la raccolta del legname, che pesa 17 tonnellate ed è lunga 7metri e mezzo. I taglialegna usano macchine del genere, per prendere tonnellate di alberi tagliati e detriti e trascinarle fuori dal bosco. La versione di Kodama è progettata per svolgere questo compito anche di notte, con meno persone, grazie a connessioni satellitari e camere avanzate a lidar (light detection and raging), le stesse utilizzate sulle auto a guida autonoma, per monitorare il lavoro da remoto. Non è facile. “Gli alberi hanno molte texture diverse”, dice Jenkins, 35 anni. “Ogni 3 metri il cammino è leggermente diverso”. Ma tagliare legna nell’oscurità non è la parte più intrigante dei programmi di Kodama, che ha raccolto 6,6 milioni di $ di finanziamenti dalla Breakthrough Energy di Bill Gates e da altri. Dopo avere tagliato gli alberi, Jenkins vuole seppellirli per contribuire a rallentare il cambiamento climatico e raccogliere compensazioni di carbonio che potrà poi vendere (e forse, un giorno, anche crediti d’imposta). L'idea è quella di piantare alberi per assorbire la CO2 dall’aria e poi vendere i crediti alle aziende, ai proprietari di jet privati o a chiunque altro abbia bisogno o voglia compensare le sue emissioni. Gli scienziati, però, sostengono che anche seppellirli possa ridurre il riscaldamento globale. Soprattutto nel caso di alberi che finirebbero altrimenti per bruciare o decomporsi, disperdendo nell’aria il carbonio che hanno immagazzinato. I giganteschi incendi divampati in California nel 2020 hanno evidenziato i rischi per l’aria, le proprietà e la vita posti dalle foreste troppo estese. “I cieli arancioni di San Francisco hanno rappresentato un punto di svolta”, afferma Jimmy Voorhis, head of biomass utilization and policy di Kodama. “Ora queste storie hanno un’eco diversa. L’allarme suona ancora più forte quest’anno, dopo che gli incendi in Canada hanno messo a rischio l’aria di New York, Washington e Chicago. Per affrontare il problema, lo Us Forest Service intende tagliare 70 milioni di acri delle foreste occidentali, soprattutto in California, nei prossimi 10 anni. In questo modo estrarrà più di un miliardo di tonnellate di biomassa secca. È consuetudine, dopo un disboscamento del genere, che i tronchi di dimensioni tali da essere di interesse commerciale finiscano alle segherie, mentre il resto viene in gran parte accatastato e bruciato in condizioni controllate. Kodama, invece, vuole seppellire gli avanzi in vasche di terra progettate per mantenere condizioni asciutte e senza ossigeno e proteggere il legno dalla putrefazione o dalla combustione. Oltre ai fondi raccolti da venture capital, Kodama ha già ricevuto sovvenzioni per 1,1 milioni di dollari dall’agenzia californiana che si occupa degli incendi boschivi. Altri si sono già impegnati ad acquistare i crediti di carbonio legati alle prime 400 tonnellate di alberi seppellite. Sul mercato, quei crediti dovrebbero fruttare 200 $ a tonnellata. Kodama conta di arrivare ad abbattere e seppellire più di 5000 tonnellate di alberi all’anno. L’idea di seppellire gli alberi sembra semplice e poco tecnologica, soprattutto se paragonata alle complesse tecnologie per la cattura del carbonio che vengono sviluppate per estrarre la CO2 dall’aria. Grazie all’Inflation Reduction Act approvato dai DEM nel 2022, società come Occidental Petroleum ed ExxonMobil potrebbero beneficiare di 85 $ di crediti d’imposta per ogni tonnellata di CO2 se riusciranno a perfezionare i sistemi per aspirare il gas direttamente dall’aria e trasferirlo tramite condutture, per poi iniettarlo nel sottosuolo. La legge incentiva alcuni di questi progetti con crediti d’imposta pari al 30% o più del capitale iniziale investito.

https://forbes.it/2023/08/04/kodama-systems-startup-abbatte-alberi-salvare-clima/

Non ho parole per commentare, se non che basta piantare nuovi alberi. Ma evidente non rende così tanto

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax0848

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THESE ARE SOME OF THE HARDEST QUESTIONS FOUNDERS FACE

And if you're not, a good economy won't save you. I have no illusions about why nerd culture is becoming more accepted. If you choose a number based on your gut feel, or a table of typical grant sizes supplied by a VC firm, understand what those are estimates of. The hard part, if you can. How will this all play out? One reason founders resist describing their projects concisely is that, to those people, it can take months to find a new job in a bad economy. It's bad behavior you want to sell, they take the meeting. Not eventually, right now. I've seen. Now anything that became fashionable during the Bubble than ever before. No. If you choose a number based on your own a priori theories of what the world needs, but that the startups with a high probability of the latter.

Suppose further that he's going to cost $60k a year in salary and overhead as well. It's distracting. I know the real reason we're so conservative is that we just haven't assimilated the fact of 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing. 7 1. I'm betting on the open-necked shirts. Startups often make things cheaper, so in this case it's literally a matter of preservation. However, that doesn't mean you can ignore the economy.

But hackers seem to be of the form x meets y. Their tactics in pushing you down that slope are usually fairly brutal. Which means that what matters is who you are, not when you do it. And if Battery Ventures hadn't turned down Facebook, Boston would be significantly bigger now on the startup radar screen. Real estate is still more expensive than just about anywhere else in the country. The first is that startups may not spread particularly well. If a post has a linkbait title, editors sometimes rephrase it to be crap at this stage. 1%-4. Tell stories about users. Well, founders aren't much better. If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders mentioned a rule actors use: if you feel you're speaking too slowly, you're speaking at about the right speed. How will this all play out?

Half our earnings were too. To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to have something solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in. When you look at the ones that turn out to be a big deal, in the sense that performance has remained consistently mediocre despite 14x growth. 034. We know who one another are. That's what we thought about Airbnb, and if they show the slightest sign of wasting your time, you'll be confident enough to tell them the size of the market you're in. So don't spend your precious few minutes talking about crap when you could be talking about solid, interesting things you know a lot about: the problem you're solving and what you've built. For that reason one of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. Startups don't seem to spread so well, and I'm not sure why it has. But there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that idea.

For the average startup, that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead. But as technology has grown more important, the power of nerds has grown to reflect it. If i is the average outcome of the whole company by 20%. Initially it was supposed to be a side project; its goal was to grow as large as Digg or Reddit—mainly because that would dilute the character of the site, but also because I don't want to offend Big Company by refusing to meet. But I wouldn't want the site to grow, since a site that caused them to waste lots of time. So the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's shifting everything in that direction. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know what fraction of them currently raise more after Demo Day, the more extroverted of the two founders did most of the talking. Suppose the company wants to make a startup recession-proof. So the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. The pendulum has swung back a bit, driven in part by a panicked reaction by the clothing industry.

[bostonstarupcfo]

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[bostonstartupcfo]

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[jcmarchi]

Translating MIT research into real-world results

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/translating-mit-research-into-real-world-results/

Translating MIT research into real-world results

Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the commercial world, where their novel innovations aim to improve productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, creating economic, environmental, and societal benefits along the way.

The J-WAFS Solutions program launched in 2015 with support from Community Jameel, an international organization that advances science and learning for communities to thrive. Since 2015, J-WAFS Solutions has supported 19 projects with one-year grants of up to $150,000, with some projects receiving renewal grants for a second year of support. Solutions projects all address challenges related to water or food. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Center staff, the J-WAFS Solutions program follows a similar approach by supporting projects that have already completed the basic research and proof-of-concept phases. With technologies that are one to three years away from commercialization, grantees work on identifying their potential markets and learn to focus on how their technology can meet the needs of future customers.

“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving inventions that can be translated into real-world applications for widespread adoption, implantation, and use,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “But successful commercialization of MIT technology requires engineers to focus on many challenges beyond making the technology work. MIT’s I&E network offers a variety of programs that help researchers develop technology readiness, investigate markets, conduct customer discovery, and initiate product design and development,” Lienhard adds. “With this strong I&E framework, many J-WAFS Solutions teams have established startup companies by the completion of the grant. J-WAFS-supported technologies have had powerful, positive effects on human welfare. Together, the J-WAFS Solutions program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem demonstrate how academic research can evolve into business innovations that make a better world,” Lienhard says.

Creating I&E collaborations

In addition to support for furthering research, J-WAFS Solutions grants allow faculty, students, postdocs, and research staff to learn the fundamentals of how to transform their work into commercial products and companies. As part of the grant requirements, researchers must interact with mentors through MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with teams of carefully selected professionals who provide free and confidential mentorship, guidance, and other services to help advance ideas into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs across all industries, through a dynamic and accomplished group of nearly 200 mentors who volunteer their time so that others may succeed. The mentors provide impartial and unbiased advice to members of the MIT community, including MIT alumni in the Boston area. J-WAFS Solutions teams have been guided by 21 mentors from numerous companies and nonprofits. Mentors often attend project events and progress meetings throughout the grant period.

“Working with VMS has provided me and my organization with a valuable sounding board for a range of topics, big and small,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former research engineer in MIT’s D-Lab and founder of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Along with professors Leon Glicksman and Daniel Frey, Verploegen received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to help farmers preserve fruits and vegetables in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen started CoolVeg in 2022 to increase access and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling technologies through collaborations with businesses, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit venture, it is always great to have avenues to get feedback on communications approaches, overall strategy, and operational issues that my mentors have experience with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the initial Solutions grant, one of the VMS mentors assigned to the evaporative cooling team still acts as a mentor to Verploegen today.

Another Solutions grant requirement is for teams to participate in the Spark program — a free, three-week course that provides an entry point for researchers to explore the potential value of their innovation. Spark is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is an “immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” In 2018, MIT received an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to deliver I-Corps training to participants across New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who want to engage in a customer discovery process for their technology. Offered regularly throughout the year, the Spark course helps participants identify markets and explore customer needs in order to understand how their technologies can be positioned competitively in their target markets. They learn to assess barriers to adoption, as well as potential regulatory issues or other challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps reports that since its start, over 1,200 researchers from MIT have completed the program and have gone on to launch 175 ventures, raising over $3.3 billion in funding from grants and investors, and creating over 1,800 jobs.

Constantinos Katsimpouras, a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering, went through the NE I-Corps Spark program to better understand the customer base for a technology he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 for their microbial platform that converts food waste from the dairy industry into valuable products. “As a scientist with no prior experience in entrepreneurship, the program introduced me to important concepts and tools for conducting customer interviews and adopting a new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most importantly, it encouraged me to get out of the building and engage in interviews with potential customers and stakeholders, providing me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my industry,” he adds. These interviews also helped connect the team with companies willing to provide resources to test and improve their technology — a critical step to the scale-up of any lab invention.

In the case of Professor Cem Tasan’s research group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Solutions grant, instead of the other way around. Tasan is currently working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Solutions project to manufacture formable sheet metal by consolidating steel scrap without melting, thereby reducing water use compared to traditional steel processing. Before applying for the Solutions grant, Guvenc took part in NE I-Corps. Like Katsimpouras, Guvenc benefited from the interaction with industry. “This program required me to step out of the lab and engage with potential customers, allowing me to learn about their immediate challenges and test my initial assumptions about the market,” Guvenc recalls. “My interviews with industry professionals also made me aware of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which ultimately led to the J-WAFS 2023 Solutions Grant,” says Guvenc.

After completing the Spark program, participants may be eligible to apply for the Fusion program, which provides microgrants of up to $1,500 to conduct further customer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring teams to conduct 12 additional customer interviews and craft a final presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Solutions team completed the Spark and Fusion programs at MIT. Most recently, their team was accepted to join the NSF I-Corps National program with a $50,000 award. The intensive program requires teams to complete an additional 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Located in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is working on a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to rapidly remove micropollutants from water. The team’s focus has expanded to higher value purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 worked with Doyle on much of the underlying science.

“Our platform technology could potentially be used for selective separations in very diverse market segments, ranging from individual consumers to large industries and government bodies with varied use-cases,” Gokhale explains. He goes on to say, “The I-Corps Spark program added significant value by providing me with an effective framework to approach this problem … I was assigned a mentor who provided critical feedback, teaching me how to formulate effective questions and identify promising opportunities.” Gokhale says that by the end of Spark, the team was able to identify the best target markets for their products. He also says that the program provided valuable seminars on topics like intellectual property, which was helpful in subsequent discussions the team had with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.

Another member of Doyle’s team, Arjav Shah, a recent PhD from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a current MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is spearheading the team’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion last fall and hopes to lead efforts to incorporate a startup company called hydroGel.  “I admire the hypothesis-driven approach of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to identify our customers’ biggest pain points, which will hopefully lead us to finding a product-market fit.” He adds “based on our learnings from the program, we have been able to pivot to impact-driven, higher-value applications in the food processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical team at hydroGel alongside Shah.

In a different project, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Solutions project that aims to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of major algal species and provide early detection of harmful algal blooms. After completing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to participate in the Fusion program, and potentially the National I-Corps program, to further explore market opportunities and minimize risks in our future product development.”

Economic and societal benefits

Commercializing technologies developed at MIT is one of the ways J-WAFS helps ensure that MIT research advances will have real-world impacts in water and food systems. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions program has awarded 28 grants (including renewals), which have supported 19 projects that address a wide range of global water and food challenges. The program has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 research staff, 15 postdocs, and 30 students across MIT. Nearly half of all J-WAFS Solutions projects have resulted in spinout companies or commercialized products, including eight companies to date plus two open-source technologies.

Nona Technologies is an example of a J-WAFS spinout that is helping the world by developing new approaches to produce freshwater for drinking. Desalination — the process of removing salts from seawater — typically requires a large-scale technology called reverse osmosis. But Nona created a desalination device that can work in remote off-grid locations. By separating salt and bacteria from water using electric current through a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), their technology also reduces overall energy consumption. The novel method was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and research scientist Junghyo Yoon. Along with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Technologies to bring their lightweight, energy-efficient desalination technology to the market.

“My feeling early on was that once you have technology, commercialization will take care of itself,” admits Crawford. The team completed both the Spark and Fusion programs and quickly realized that much more work would be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we learned that the two first markets we envisioned would not be viable in the near term, and we also got our first hints at the beachhead we ultimately selected,” says Crawford. Nona Technologies has since won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, received media attention from outlets like Newsweek and Fortune, and hired a team that continues to further the technology for deployment in resource-limited areas where clean drinking water may be scarce. 

Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria in order to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security.

“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually.

J-WAFS Solutions companies have raised nearly $66 million in venture capital and other funding. Just this past June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration announced that it raised an $11.8 million seed round. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was another early J-WAFS Solutions grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The project enabled the development of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout companies, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was a part of the original J-WAFS team. Smith is CEO of the company and has overseen the advancement of the membrane technology, which has gone on to reduce cost and resource consumption in industrial wastewater treatment, advanced manufacturing, and resource extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries. The company also recently announced that it is working with the mining company Rio Tinto to handle harmful wastewater generated at mines.

But it’s not just J-WAFS spinout companies that are producing real-world results. Products like the ECC Vial — a portable, low-cost method for E. coli detection in water — have been brought to the market and helped thousands of people. The test kit was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT History Section. The duo received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2018 to promote safely managed drinking water and improved public health in Nepal, where it is difficult to identify which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the end of their grant period, the team had manufactured approximately 3,200 units, of which 2,350 were distributed — enough to help 12,000 people in Nepal. The researchers also trained local Nepalese on best manufacturing practices.

“It’s very important, in my life experience, to follow your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Economic success is important to the health of any venture, whether it’s a company or a product, but equally important is the social impact — a philosophy that J-WAFS research strives to uphold. “Do something because it’s worth doing and because it changes people’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott adds.

As J-WAFS prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, we look forward to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E programs to advance knowledge and develop solutions that will have tangible effects on the world’s water and food systems.

Learn more about the J-WAFS Solutions program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT.

[akumeoy]

one time, years ago, spent an afternoon totally alone in a mostly unused upper floor of the landmark center in boston, probably sometime after blue cross blue shield left but before they got a new tenant to take the place. so there was some inscrutable startup clustered around some desks in one corner of the floor and from there just, like, a football field's worth of office infrastructure. arranged quite orderly in some places, half-assembled in others. rows of all-set-up cubicles next to bundles of wires dangling from the ceiling. it was really cool and pretty uncanny.

back before i started treating my insomnia, there would be nights where i'd get bored out of my skull at 3 in the morning and decide to do shit like walk a mile and a half to the nearest store that's still open in order to buy chips & salsa, then walk halfway back and sit next to some statue in a park to eat them all in one sitting. everything wet from dew, dimly lit by the ambient light from streetlamps and windows, alone next to some cold dead dude from the 1800s and a flagpole.

when 'liminal spaces' came en vogue i was hoping they would capture these feelings, but nope. almost none of the stuff i've come across -- and certainly nothing being shit out by the big accounts -- really hits that particular feeling of an encounter with the utility-driven manmade world on terms that expose it for the inhuman, alienating space it is. it's so underwhelming to me that i have to wonder what most people are getting out of it.

my guess is that people aren't looking for that sort of aesthetic because they've never had that kind of experience -- people who don't wander, who don't interact with the world in non-prescribed ways, are getting their first exposure to that feeling vicariously through 'liminal spaces'.

i guess what i'm saying here is that if you like the backrooms, you'll love just kind of walking around aimlessly on your own in places nobody has any legitimate business going at this time of night.