This is well known in cybersecurity circles. I mentioned here[1] a couple years back that I know CISOs who've had to clean up big messes because their predecessor was on the Cyberstarts payroll, but on the bright side I also know a couple of those predecessors who were fired for it.
Cyberstarts is the most blatant offender, but to be fair, VC has turned into the next rung on the career ladder for CIOs/CISOs, whose role is otherwise generally terminal (unlike e.g. COO or CMO). So a lot of deals get done now just on giving CISOs a path into VC. It's more subtle than Gili's way, and just as effective.
People point to the basic structure of "It's not X, it's Y" as the hallmark of AI, but I find it's more the incongruity between X and Y, especially when figures of speech (invariably strained) are involved[1]. That first quote reads like a real interaction that's been tightened up for print, but the second, the 'farm equipment' <> 'life-support system', does smell like AI, even though the article implies it's from an in-person conversation.
1. These are all from a single 850-word op-ed I saw the other day: "Presidents do not usually lose power because of a single speech. They lose power when a speech reveals something structural." "But the most important part of the speech was not the applause lines. It was the compression." "Markets can rise. But voters do not live inside charts. They live inside grocery stores and mortgage payments." "The issue is not whether a statistic was stretched. The issue is that the presidency becomes reactive instead of agenda-setting." "That friction is not theoretical — it is baked into the constitutional design." "Trump’s address was not a pivot to persuasion — it was a doubling down on confrontation as strategy." "They are not just another campaign cycle. They are leverage."
Happens all the time and doesn't mean anyone got screwed. A couple years ago Lacework sold to Fortinet for around $200m. That sounds like a nice exit for everyone, right? But this was after they'd raised $1.8b at a valuation north of $8b, which, ouch. When founders and employees fail this completely, yeah, their equity is going to zero.
Of course there are other cases where people do get genuinely screwed. My point is only that the cash value of an exit, even when it's a big number like $350m, doesn't tell you much.
Without liquidation preferences BrewDog wouldn't have been able to get the investment. They may have been able to get a loan instead, but the interest would've driven them under that much faster and then the creditor, just like the preferred investor, would have priority over other shareholders.
Which isn't to say preference stacks (like debt stacks) can't get absurd when a failing company is doing anything it can to stay alive, but standard investor terms (1x liquidation preference) simply mean you're first in line to get your money back if the company is liquidated for less than the price you paid.
The self-dealing bit is generally already illegal and orthogonal to liquidation preferences.
Passkeys can absolutely constitute two factors. At least the iOS and Android default implementations back user verification (which the website/relying party can explicitly request) with biometric authentication, which together with device possession makes them two factor.
That's not what two-factor means. Forget about passkeys -- if you use a password manager, and that password manager has a biometric lock, your accounts don't thereby have a biometric lock as a second factor. The transitive property doesn't apply here.
Someone gotta tell all these SaaS about that if so, because currently everyone is treating Passkeys as an alternative to 2FA. Take a look at how GitHub handles it for example when you use TOTP, they'll ask you to replace TOTP with passkeys.
Many do what you describe, probably because some manager somewhere needs to tick some checkbox.
But GitHub, specifically, allows you to sign in with a passkey. On the sign-in page, there's a "sign in with passkey" link. It activates my 1Password extension, asking if I want to use my passkey. I say yes, and I'm in, I don't type anything. This also works the same way with my YubiKey.
They are an alternative to 2FA. Which means they aren't 2FA. If they were 2FA, they wouldn't be an alternative to 2FA. They'd just be 2FA.
Anyway, passkeys and FIDO broadly aren't the same thing. You can read the definition of passkeys at https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/ or look at any of the marketing, which invariably talks about how great it is that you don't have to futz with passwords anymore.
FIDO credentials in general can obviously also be used as second factors. This is baked into the name of the original standard: U2F, Universal 2nd Factor. The specific point of passkeys though is that they're the single factor.
What you're describing isn't a pump and dump, but in any case what Jane Street did wasn't a pump and dump or what you're describing. It also had nothing to do with market making.
India's market trades options much, much more than the underlying stocks. This means that on one hand you can trade a lot of options without moving the market, and on the other you can move the market by trading comparatively few shares. Since options prices tend to be bounded by the price of the underlying, this is...a problem. For example you could buy shares to move the price up, sell calls, buy puts (aka a collar), then sell the shares to move the price back down so both calls and puts make money.
But it doesn't necessarily look like this is what Jane Street was doing. Instead they seem to have realized that stock and option prices already regularly diverged, and put the collars on to profit from corrections. In other words: arbitrage. Which, fair, can be functionally indistinguishable from market manipulation. But on paper it looks like they made prices better for everyday folks at the expense of the market makers and other institutions.
Matt Levine wrote a long Money Stuff column about this around the middle of last year.
This particular gift is also problematic because Horowitz is an investor in Flock, and Horowitz's family foundation is spending money on Flock that will in turn increase its value, which benefits him as an investor. Of course lawyers will have looked at all this to make sure it doesn't run afoul of self-dealing rules, but that just means the rules verge on uselessly weak.
It works because the original filter has suboptimal settings. An optimal filter of that size and number of items would set 5 bits per item and have about a quarter of the false positive rate. The 2 bits per item in the blocked filter is still suboptimal, but it's also saving them from saturating a bunch of 32-bit blocks, at the cost of a much higher overall false positive rate.
That struck me as an odd choice, too. On average there's no difference in false positives, but the smaller the blocks, the more likely they'll be saturated. Since there are 6 leftover bits in the hash anyway, there's no cost to increase the two 5-bit values to 6 bits and the block size to 64. You'll have a lot fewer hot blocks that way.
With blocks this small there's also no reason not to optimize the number of hash functions (albeit this brings back the specter of saturation). There are no cache misses to worry about; all positions can be checked with a single mask.
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