It appears that MetaMed has gone out of business. Wikipedia uses the past tense “was” in their page for MetaMed, and provides this as a source for it.
Key quote from the article:
Tallinn learned the importance of feedback loops himself the hard way, after seeing the demise of one of his startups, medical consulting firm Metamed.
It would be nice if people were open when their startups close, especially when previously advertised on LW, so we can learn from mistakes. Or is there some reason to not admit a startup has failed?
The only exposure I have had to metamed was Yudkowsky saying he spent X dollars on it to get advice to take melatonin microdoses hours before going to bed. When i saw the dollar amount I burst out laughing because I had literally a week earlier come to the same conclusion using google scholar searches at the library in my quest to normalize my own sleep schedule (though my problem wound up having a very different solution in the end).
To be fair you do have a strong biology background that makes you more likely to do an efficient literature search than the average person.
You are also at a university with journal subscription which isn’t true for everyone.
There might be room for people paying other people to do this kind of research. But the price is likely to high.
I wonder if Metamed’s problem was that if you were smart and well informed enough to understand the company’s value to the average person, you personally didn’t need it because you could do the research yourself.
What has happened to Metamed? Their site is down :-( http://www.metamed.com
It appears that MetaMed has gone out of business. Wikipedia uses the past tense “was” in their page for MetaMed, and provides this as a source for it.
Key quote from the article:
It would be nice if people were open when their startups close, especially when previously advertised on LW, so we can learn from mistakes. Or is there some reason to not admit a startup has failed?
Maybe the bankruptcy proceedings aren’t yet through. A bunch of the MetaMed people are still listed as MetaMed on their LinkedIn accounts.
Interesting idea. Could you explain why that would make them wary about disclosure? Maybe they’re trying to sell the brand?
I don’t have concrete information about the state of MetaMed that goes beyond publically available information.
Yeah, sorry, I meant ‘do you know why startups in general would be shy about disclosing their closing?’
Bankruptcy proceedings aren’t yet through. The employees haven’t yet moved on to new jobs.
The time to a post-mortem is after those things.
Zvi discusses it a bit on his blog, here
It seems like the business model of charging individuals prices that are that high just doesn’t work for a startup without a proven brand.
Datapoint:
The only exposure I have had to metamed was Yudkowsky saying he spent X dollars on it to get advice to take melatonin microdoses hours before going to bed. When i saw the dollar amount I burst out laughing because I had literally a week earlier come to the same conclusion using google scholar searches at the library in my quest to normalize my own sleep schedule (though my problem wound up having a very different solution in the end).
To be fair you do have a strong biology background that makes you more likely to do an efficient literature search than the average person. You are also at a university with journal subscription which isn’t true for everyone.
There might be room for people paying other people to do this kind of research. But the price is likely to high.
I wonder if Metamed’s problem was that if you were smart and well informed enough to understand the company’s value to the average person, you personally didn’t need it because you could do the research yourself.