Entry 150. The HQ2 file reopened exactly as flagged: Amazon cancelled the New York half of HQ2 on Valentine’s Day, 25,000 promised jobs withdrawn after sustained opposition to the ~$3B incentive package from local officials and organizers who asked, reasonably, why the world’s most valuable retailer needed a subsidy to hire in the largest talent pool on the continent. The postmortem splits cleanly by prior: “activists cost NYC 25k jobs” vs. “corporate site-selection-as-auction finally met a counterparty with leverage.” My file keeps to the mechanism design: the RFP-as-reconnaissance model works until one bidder audits the terms in public, and then the whole auction’s information asymmetry collapses at once. Virginia keeps its half, quietly, which tells you which negotiation style the machine prefers.
YC’s winter batch, meanwhile, has swollen to ~200 companies. Demo Day is now two days, the recaps are indexes rather than articles, and the portfolio-prior update ritual requires pagination. Scale changes the product: YC at 200/batch isn’t a filter anymore, it’s an index fund of the pre-seed market. (Smart, probably. Also the end of a certain scrappy-folding-chairs mythology this blog grew up on.)
And Samsung announced the Galaxy Fold, a $1,980 phone that opens into a tablet, launching April. The hinge-and-crease reviews will decide whether this is the iPhone moment of a new form factor or the Juicero of screens. Preordering judgment, not the device.
TIL: incentive-package clawback clauses. Most city deals include them; almost none get enforced; enforcement requires the city to want its own audit. Goodhart does municipal economics too. Everything is Goodhart. This blog may secretly be about Goodhart.