Dave Sikora

Dad, tech entrepreneur, board member, investor. Thoughts my own, unaffiliated w/anyone. My LinkedIn profile:

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@Suresh_00S @grok @elonmusk can do it for sure, not a problem. Let him IPO @SpaceX, then merge with @Tesla, but knowing him he might just say “fuck it” I’ll do it all. That’s what we love about him. And it will change the world on yet another dimension.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

I think that Autocorrect on @Apple iPhone should be renamed to AutoINCORRECT. Or maybe I just miss the @BlackBerry keyboard.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

This is spot on….not only this but our country has lost the trades. So much social pressure to go to college, even folks inclined to work with their hands sat in classrooms earning worthless degrees.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️The American university system is the largest wealth transfer from the young to the old in human history and nobody frames it that way because the people who benefit from it control the framing.

Eighteen year olds who can’t legally buy a beer are signing six figure debt obligations to institutions that face zero accountability for outcomes. The loan is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. The university gets paid regardless of whether the student gets a job. The incentive structure is pure extraction. Get them in. Get the money. What happens after is their problem.

43% underemployment isn’t a failure of the students. These kids did exactly what they were told. Study hard. Get good grades. Go to college. Get the degree. They followed the script perfectly and the script was a lie. Not a lie that anyone intended maliciously at first. But a lie that became profitable enough that nobody corrected it even after the data made it obvious.

The people who designed this system, the administrators pulling $500k salaries, the tenured professors teaching subjects with zero market application, the loan servicers collecting interest on degrees in fields that haven’t produced a living wage in twenty years. None of them are underemployed. They’re doing fine. The 43% is subsidizing their comfort.

Now add AI. The entry level professional jobs that justified the debt are the first ones being compressed. Not blue collar work. Not trades. The exact white collar knowledge work positions that the degree was supposed to unlock. Legal research. Financial analysis. Consulting grunt work. Content production. The 43% who are already underemployed are about to be joined by a significant chunk of the 57% who thought they made it.

The people who will come through this are the ones who figured out early that the credential was a trap. The ones who built skills instead of collecting letters after their name. The ones who found asymmetric paths. The ones who created value directly instead of waiting for an institution to certify them as valuable.

The university system had a real function once. It produced genuine education and genuine opportunity. That function has been hollowed out by decades of misaligned incentives until what remains is mostly a financing operation that happens to have classrooms attached.

And 43% of its recent customers just confirmed with their own lives that the product doesn’t work.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@barkmeta Land- the only true finite resource on our planet.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

That’s because Microsoft is an innovation laggard. 60+% of their operating margins come from products developed in the 90’s and earlier. With that kind of a monopolistic safety net they have air cover for all kinds of science projects, some of which succeed, most don’t. They have to rely on outside parties to do real groundbreaking stuff.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@elonmusk Matter can neither be created or destroyed. Don’t forget Conservation of Mass.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

We should stop throwing all SaaS into into one category. Agree that AI will have profound impact, but maybe we should stack rank software stocks by switching costs? Removing some SaaS products is akin to a heart transplant and will provide those incumbents more than enough time to organically adapt (less likely) or through M&A (more likely).

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@elonmusk The core problem is that the system is setup to spend “other people’s money”, and nobody watches because it’s “other people’s money”. What @elonmusk is doing is great but the system needs to change so fraud watch is programmatic. Or we’ll be back here right after @DOGE leaves.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@JDunlap1974 You know

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@jaypgreene US Govt should take equity from these research universities. Many of them have Technology Transfer depts that launch companies and raise money from VCs for their publicly funded innovations. Hold the stocks in the SS Trust Fund.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@m2jr Mike, so sorry to hear about your dad. I considered him a mentor and friend and learned a lot from him. He was generous with his wisdom, and his board meeting commentaries have stayed with me to this day. He will be missed in the tech community.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

Nice touch @united in the United Club in the Denver Airport. Also appreciate how they take care of their 1k members!

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

Solving for the @tiktok_us issue is simple. Tell China to allow @amazon, @google, @facebook and all other US internet properties access to China, and @tiktok_us can exist in the US. China’s entire online economy exists because they blocked and copied US innovations. Just do it.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

The narrative of blocking @tiktok has to consider the entire Chinese internet economy exists due to the “Great Chinese Firewall”. They illegally blocked and copied EVERY US internet innovation. So a little retribution, while certainly not Libertarian, is kind of fun to watch.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@elonmusk @paulg @elonmusk you should rename “community notes” to
“X-rays”…..your welcome.

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

Rich McMahon - watching BBB downfall has been painful, but it would not have happened had you been at the helm. I have great memories of DIGBY building BBB's very first mobile storefront and mobile application back in 2011. At the time mobile traffic was…https://t.co/t2uiAAEOaH

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@APhilosophae Just when you thought we elected smart people to represent us. #ideocracy

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

It's an honor to be nominated and elected as Board Chair at TDECU. At $4.7B in assets, 1000 employees and almost 400,000 members, TDECU is the largest state-chartered credit union in Texas. When I was recruited to join the board se…https://t.co/VBBKX7sveo https://t.co/yIe5iFcHko

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

Warm welcome to ALTR Board of Directors to Snowflake executive @sanderiam! We will benefit from his domain expertise in this dynamic Data Industry and look forward to working together to drive ALTR to new levels of success! #data #…https://t.co/6y72WyKb11 https://t.co/DW8u4uddr1

[Dave Sikora @davesikora]

@APompliano What’s not discussed enough is the Chinese Great Firewall. They blocked and continue to block US software companies from entering their market. China’s entire digital economy exists because they copied us and blocked us from their country.