Entry 150. The #143 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file reopened exactly as flagged: Amazon CANCELLED the New York half of HQ2 on Valentine’s Day — 25,000 promised jobs, withdrawn after sustained opposition to the ~$3B incentive package from local officials and organizers who asked, reasonably, why the world’s most valuable retailer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 (#143): the RFP-as-reconnaissance model works until one bidder audits the terms IN PUBLIC — 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 #103 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 (#105) 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 (#095) does municipal economics too. Everything is Goodhart. This blog may secretly be about Goodhart.