Eric Cho

building Trata (YC W25)

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

The coolest publicity we could ask for. I’ve been a fan of Money Stuff for years!!!

@matt_levine 🤝 @trytrata

Public investors: My DMs are open. Funding secured. As always feel free to reach out anonymously. Acceleration coming soon

https://t.co/I6GJLee8sD

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

Spent some time on this question w the team, not sure if any of them qualify at the moment for our users

[Trata (YC W25) @trytrata]

Which models should our users be leveraging for non-trivial reasoning work? Some quick experiments, graph made in 4 minutes with @Lovable

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

This app is probably the biggest time sink of feeling productive without actually learning anything - self reflection after increasingly lurking on tech twitter for the past 3 months. Will default to touching grass

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@Vienna13Capital @SavneetS Can you open your DMs? Would love to message you

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@roojoo3 @paulcerro @trytrata 🤔

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

fr

[Skely @123skely]

You need to be insanity maxing. You need to be getting crazier. You need to be getting wilder. You need to be constantly out of pocket.

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

Trata is now live on X

[Trata (YC W25) @trytrata]

Trata (@trytrata) is now on FinTwit. We host anonymous buyside to buyside conversations via voice calls. We work with 125+ funds (vs. 10 in March) and receive 25-30 human-to-human calls weekly. We compile these conversations into a library of investment research.

EX: Fund 1 is bullish and Fund 2 is bearish on $OPEN, they ask each other questions they want answered surrounding the key debates for anywhere between 30-60 minutes.

The average fund on the platform: ~$200-400mm in AUM, 3 investment professionals, fundamental research focused. These funds use tools like Bloomberg and third-party expert networks, and have regular access to management teams.

To the qualified lurkers and anon accounts of FinTwit: Request a call on any ticker (bull or bear). If we pair you, we’ll give you:
1. Access to that transcript and any transcripts on that ticker published through the end of 2026
2. Airpods

[Austin Walker 🛴 @austinxwalker]

when you’re young, you should minimize the degrees of friction between you and serendipity.

don’t live 2 hours outside the city to save a few bucks on rent.

you’ll miss the last-minute dinners and random meetups that could change your life, and pay back everything you “saved”.

[Prompter @PromptLLM]

you don't have a discipline problem.

you have an environment problem

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@shreygupta Jealous

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Bill Gurley on why “TAM conservatism” often hurts investors

“I’ve found that TAM conservatism hurts you more than it helps you as an investor. If you feel like something is super disruptive and it’s unlocking things, your optionality to build on top of that is going to be pretty spectacular.”

Bill recalls NYU professor Aswath Damodaran’s conclusion that Uber was worth only $5.9 billion given the size of the taxi market.

Bill responded in a blog post titled “How to Miss By a Mile”:

“There are multiple reasons why this is a flawed assumption. When you materially improve an offering, and create new features, functions, experiences, price points, and even enable new use cases, you can materially expand the market in the process. The past can be a poor guide for the future if the future offering is materially different than the past.”

To be fair to Aswath, Bill already knew that Uber was 20x the size of the taxi market in San Francisco at the time.

But Bill cites a McKinsey study as another classic example. In 1980, they predicted that cell phone penetration in the U.S. by 2000 would be 900,000 units. This turned out to be less than 1% of the actual figure, 109 million.

As Box CEO Aaron Levie put it:

“Sizing the market for a disruptor based on an incumbent’s market is like sizing the car industry off how many horses there were in 1910.”

Today Uber’s market capitalization is north of $150 billion—almost 30x Aswath’s estimate.

Video source: @tferriss (2023)

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@spencermateega @valsai hyperscalers are using a six-year straight line depreciation policy on the equipment they’re using. But NVDA comes out with superior tech every two years so the depreciation should be two years instead. pls include this in the evals

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@abhiaiyer @corbinklett @antonysam2000 What a stellar group of guys

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@abhiaiyer I missed out

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@shreygupta @DemicLive Looks like a good time. Good memories

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@alexanderqchen The hat 🙌🙌🙌

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@abhiaiyer @MorganWallen I wouldn’t have expected this but good choice

[Eric Cho @_ericcho]

@oc_ulus @AndrewRangeley @trytrata I’ll be in touch - can you open your DMs?

[sarah guo @saranormous]

I don’t sleep very much, so I have been really enjoying reading a bunch of dotcom bubble/bust era books.

this was written (by a software engineer) about the uselessness of mobile: