gigantic surprise: you're "family" when it means sacrificing for the company, and you're a human sacrifice when the company needs to make its shareholders feel better about the economy.
"the author grossly does not understand the medical tests he had done and misinterprets the data"
As the author himself, I can corroborate your statement that I don't understand medical tests as well as a trained physician. :) However, the point of the post was to present the data so others could interpret / draw conclusions. I gave my observations and perspective, but I made every attempt to indicate the potential weaknesses in my experiment. I do hope people don't lose miss the forest for the trees here.
The EGFR thing is regrettable. Thanks for pointing it out!
I'm sorry, but you've collected no data, only noise. Eating rice for 2 weeks would have produced similar effects. As to your subjective experience – it's probably 100% placebo.
If you want to call something an experiment, you should know how to conduct an experiment in that respective field. Your experiences only show how a product like Soylent induces magical thinking in its consumers.
If you want to produce a single data point with Soylent (that would hardly be relevant, as it would be a sampling size of one, but still, it would be one sampling of data rather than zero), eat nothing but Soylent for at least 6 months.
If you don't mind me asking, can you produce some food studies/experiments that are up to your standards, so I can get an idea of what one would look like?
Most of those published in the New England, for example. Of course, one can substitute a shorter duration for a larger sample if the results are ver significant with a large effect. But if you have a sample size of 1, and want it to be data, however insignificant, rather than noise, you better keep at it for a while.
I don't think you read the parent comment properly.
Of course it was "an experiment" but that doesn't mean you can automatically draw useful or even valid conclusions from it. If I ate nothing but peas for a day, my "experiment" wouldn't say much (if anything) about the effects of a pea-only diet on the human body, but if I did it for a year, I might get some useful data. Except that would still only be the effects of peas on my body, and may not generalise to other humans anyway.
You did not mention the placebo effect though. That's the largest weakness of such an experiment. Your brain may be convinced (without you being strictly conscious about it) that Soylent is good for you and trigger all kind of benefits that you assessed yourself.
That's why clinical trials are running in double-blind modes, to remove as much as possible the placebo effect. A self-assessed experiment is, and will always be, meaningless.
After reading the opening paragraph and seeing how excited the author was to try this I couldn't help to think about the placebo effext. With all the bogus diets out there they show results in 2 weeks and then fail miserably I can't help to think longer testing periods are needed.
Obviously you didn't read the whole thing; search for the word "placebo" and you'll find my discussion of it under the section called "Potential Weaknesses In The Data".
We don't need to re-research nutrition starting from verification of macronutrients. The placebo could be an imbalanced mix of macronutrients. That way, you would expect malnutrition, not starvation.
Respectfully, if your startup wants to be recognized as a thought leader, YOU should write and manage your own blog. Your brand is one of the only assets you have in the early days; don't water it down with a steady flow of mediocre blog posts by strangers. Your personal brand, expertise, and storytelling as a founder is the most compelling part of your company. This is why Jake wrote this blog post rather than having an automated writer from their network do it.
IMO content and automation never belong in the same sentence together, unless your only goal is to fill in SEO content of which you aren't particularly concerned about the quality. If you're a startup concerned with your image, I don't think you want to be in that game.
You can't automate quality. It's impossible develop high-quality media without constant, transparent communication and editorial oversight. Especially if you're trying to do it cheaply.
If you're a big-budget brand with that wants to trade out banner ads for thoughtful content marketing, hire an editor with real journalism experience, then hire (or contract) the best journalists you can afford, with the biggest social media followings. This is why Red Bull, American Express, and Gilt Groupe kill it with content marketing, meanwhile you and I have never clicked "Like" on an auto-generated blog post from a random startup. The only way you'll compete with media companies for content-share is by beating them at their game.
We're a TechStars NYC class this year (Contently), and the program has been an amazing experience. Harvard has good and bad students; YC turns out great companies and duds alike (though not very often, for sure!). I'm sad that Melanie had a bad experience, but TBH it wasn't for lack of support in the program, or for lack of amazing mentors and networking experiences.
Reality TV is a pretty bogus misrepresentation of actual reality, anyway. I'm glad they didn't film our class!
TechStars is an absolutely amazing program, and we had a fantastic experience. I could not be more complementary of the program itself. My post was only commenting on the TV show, and trying to clear up some events that were portrayed by Bloomberg.
It seems like it makes sense, and they probably expect you to be shopping around to other VCs (why put all eggs in one basket). But as far as "is it dick to shop around once you have an offer?" I'm not sure, as I've never raised capital before. I'm curious how long a VC would give you before you've got to say yes to an offer. Like, can you take a month to "think about it" while going around and pitching other people? Will they know that's what you're doing?
Moo is the only one who lets you print just 50 cards, with the exception of ONP who hasn't updated in the price search yet. If you search for other quantities you'll see plenty of others. :)
It would be nice to just see this as an HTML bulleted list, so users don't need to scroll around. I'm not sure how the spatial relationship is important after you click on a startup hub in the first map -- a multi-level list would be easier to navigate. (My screen resolution is 1400x900 so I'm scrolling in all directions after a click).
