HN user
VCs would happily invest in low risk, high-return investments -- that is in fact what they are looking for.
But wherever there is truly low risk, multiple funding sources will compete, and returns will be driven lower. Companies that fit the profile you describe will generally use debt financing, which is not available to venture startups.
If you're working on a big idea that is slightly ahead of its time, then persistence can pay big dividends -- check out the story of Pandora (http://www.businessinsider.com/pandora-story-2011-6).
If you're working on a smaller, highly tactical idea then persistence is often a waste of time. Anyone who meets a lot of startups will see many ideas that just aren't going to work. The sooner the founders realize it and move on, the better off they are.
This is the tech equivalent of being trapped in a Portlandia skit. You guys are taking his parody seriously...
Is this guy for real? Or does he transcend our limited notions of "reality"?
In general I think pay-to-pitch is highly suspicious, but I'm sympathetic to Graham Lawlor and Ultralight startups. He charges a small fee to cover expenses and make sure people are moderately serious. There's no way he's getting rich off of it. Pizza is included. The feedback and exposure are well worth the minimal cost. If the fee still bothers you, then just don't pitch there.
On the one hand, it's kind of a classic dick move by Mark, pretty typical of his bloody mindedness. (He's more of a bulldog than Zinga ever was.)
On the other, in any company as big as Zynga there are people who coast along and don't really earn their shares. Zynga isn't trying to take back what's vested, just clamping down on future shares for people who aren't doing a great job, maybe playing a lesser role than they were originally hired for. That seems like a perfectly valid thing to do -- in fact it's only fair to the employees who are pulling their weight.
You're absolutely right -- RDBMSes were designed to solve problems with the nosql-type approaches that preceded them. The nosql bandwagon is blindly rolling into the past, where it will crash into the old problems of concurrency and consistency under load.
BTW if you want nosql-style schema flexibility within an RDBMS, then a simple solution is to store XML or JSON in in a character blob. Keep the fields you need to search over in separate indexed fields. If you make incompatible version changes, then add a new json/xml field.
There's already artemisinin resistance starting in several places around the world, especially the Thai-Cambodia border, a very chaotic area with high endemic malaria.
The main problem is that cheap medications are often out of date or have improper dosage. Also, people stop taking medication when they feel better, but before the parasite is eliminated. The result is resistant parasites survive the treatment, and then spread.
We have maybe a decade of artemisin usability in the hottest areas. Could be more or less depending on how efficient public health practices are. But no way is it a permanent cure.
Most vaccines are against viruses and bacteria. Malaria is a more complicated organism, a protist with many local varieties, and a tremendous ability to evolve around vaccines and medications in general.
Natural immunity to malaria is often limited to the local variant -- go a couple hundred miles, and you have no resistance at all. Vaccines rely on the body's natural immune system, so it is nearly impossible to create a single vaccine that is effective across the world.
For this reason, I'm highly skeptical that this initial test result will hold up with broader trials. BTW my spouse is a malariologist, formerly at WHO, and I've been a witness to much of the fight against malaria over the years.
There are so many ways to screw over a non-employee, minority common shareholder, you may well have no case here.
For example, if the company hit a rough patch, it might have been recapitalized, with all current shareholders wiped out. Since your partner had 80% of the shares, and plenty of cash, he could have easily pulled this off.
Depending on what state you're in, you may no longer have any right to seek redress. If your partner knows what he's doing (or has a lawyer who does), the best you're going to get is a small amount of cash to go away. And if you guys are on bad terms, you may not even get that.
Why change when you are hauling in billions of dollars per year, and there's nowhere to go but down? The mobile carriers are going to extract as many dollars as possible while they still can.
The fundamental problem is lack of competition. When there are only a small number of providers, none of them have an incentive to slash the price of texts to a more reasonable level.
Comforting words from pg...
If you start a startup, you'll probably fail. Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.
The real story might be that his product just isn't as good as the competition. It took 10 seconds of searching to find https://www.igradeplus.com/, which on the surface looks like a much better offering.
He seems critical of his customers and dismissive of his competitors, both of which are big red flags.
@pg I think you should consider that your portfolio company is possibly not telling you the whole truth after they screwed up in a major way. I have no idea what happened -- just asking you to consider the possibility, which you seem to reject out of hand.
They have every right to promote their differentiation. Speaking as someone who lives in a great part of Manhattan and is often out of town, I've never used AirBnb because I don't trust their verification. I will definitely look for a competitor that does more thorough screening, even if the volume and rental price is lower. It's worth it to me.
The most important reason to move to EC2 is flexibility -- do you need to quickly add servers, then later turn them off?
If you have very predictable needs, and already have dedicated servers running, then there's no clear reason to change.
There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs had awful pay, about $15K/yr, but it was a chance to break in to the business.
One grizzled editor chain smoked cigarettes through our interview (you could do that in the office back then). He listened to me describe why I wanted to write. Then he leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke, and told me:
"You kid come into this business thinking you're going to make a difference. Pretty soon you find out, you're just filling the space around the ads."
He was right, actually. So I got into high tech instead, and have been doing startups ever since. Not sure I always make a difference, but at least I'm trying, instead of just filling space...
1x is still 1x -- if you don't get over it, the common shareholders don't get paid. In a pool as big as YC's there will be plenty of examples.
You'd be surprised. The ones that raise the most money also have the hardest time getting over the preferred total. The purchaser will take care of the employees it wants, but other common shareholders often end up out of luck.
If YC holds common shares, then you need to adjust the expected value down quite a bit. On any exit that isn't a huge win, non-employee common shareholders are by far the most likely to get short end. The expected value is probably 10-50% of the fully diluted headline value of a VC deal.
But YC is clearly going to do spectacularly well. They deserve big congrats for what they've accomplished.
If Java could be redesigned from scratch, with no concern for backwards compatibility, it would probably look a lot like C#.
I say this as a person who has read thousands of resumes and hired hundreds of people at multiple startups: Your record will hurt you badly at places you don't really want to work. It will help you at the places you want to be.
Make it clear what your passion is, what you've learned already, and what you want to learn. Then apply everywhere that looks good. You'll do fine.
Please let them hire some decent people to handle communications to AWS users!
And we won't complain if they also get some engineers with world-class expertise in network attached storage.
Chrome used to crash frequently for me on multiple Windows 7 64-bit machines, but it runs rock solid now. It turned out the problem is that Chrome auto-updates flash, and their software frequently crashes on 64-bit windows. One one computer, I had to disable Flash altogether. On the other, it was enough to disable Flash hardware acceleration. In both cases, Chrome is now completely crash-free.
On your broader question -- why not native 64-bit app -- I think the key reasons are 1) level of effort, 2) performance and 3) plugins:
1) Supporting 64-bits means a lot more than recompiling. It will need to be a separate development effort, probably doubling the resources required for the project.
2) 64-bit pointers are twice as large, and 64-bit programs take up more memory. Due to caching, this also means that the programs run slower.
3) All the plugin partners face similar problems of effort and performance. A 64-bit browser will necessarily ship with a lot fewer plugins than a 32-bit version.
Right now, a browser maker looking at a 64-bit version sees a lot of effort for a slower version with less functionality. And that just doesn't seem like a good bet.
We had consistent serious problems related to EBS for a several-month streak about a year ago, and I heard almost identical stories from other EC2 users around the same time. Instances with EBS attached would suddenly become completely unreachable via the network. Sometimes we had to terminate the instances, but usually we could revive them by detaching all (or most) of the EBS volumes, then reattaching and rebooting. Amazon seems to have fixed this problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if we suffered in the future the way reddit has.
Overall, EC2 is a very impressive offering, for which I commend Amazon. At times, I've been so frustrated that I'm ready to switch, but they fix things just quickly enough that I never quite get around to it. In the end, I'm willing to accept that what they're doing is hard, there will be mistakes, and it's worth suffering to get the flexibility and cost-effectiveness that EC2 offers.
In his example, the company is profitable from day one. The question is deciding how much those profits are worth -- ie, valuing the company. PE ratios and comparable company valuations are two standard ways to assess the long-term value of a stream of profits.
Adding up the profits until it equals the sum of your investment is an extremely crude measure, because it leaves out what you most care about -- how much the company is worth at the end of the initial time period.
This guy is math challenged:
>Let's do some simple math here, folks. Assume you bought an entire company that had $100 in revenues and 50% profit margins. And that you paid just two times revenues, or $200. It would still take you four years to break even with revenues holding steady.
The company he describes is in fact a fabulous buy, with a PE of 4. His mistake is to completely discount cash flows past the fourth year. You still own the company after four years, so unless it is set to self destruct, it is worth a lot more than the $200 you paid for it. A non-bubble growth tech company with those margins would typically be worth $1000+.
He's also ignorant of history. Great companies like Google and Microsoft had very high PEs in their early years, which many investors balked at. Those who could stomach the valuations made a mint.
Another way to value companies is to look at comparables that aren't affected by the bubble. For example, Yahoo has been bouncing between 20 and 30 billion -- a valuation that has held up for years. Facebook has similar revenue potential but much better execution and vastly higher growth. Valuing it at 2-3x Yahoo looks reasonable in my book.
He may well be right that some of the companies in the article are overpriced, but he makes a very weak case for his argument.
It's impressive that YC helps founders succeed by putting them through a short but intense program.
It's even more impressive that YC helps founders succeed by rejecting their applications, and motivating them to try harder.
The latter is a truly scalable business model. Maybe YC should get a chunk of stock simply for letting companies apply to the program...
These definitely happen all the time.
Another thing to watch out for is for unfilled seats that can change the board dynamic. If multiple parties have to agree on the board seat, then an intransigent investor can maintain an advantage by never approving any candidates. Don't put off filling these seats! Ideally, you should agree on a specific person before you sign the docs.
I think the problem is lack of a clear data element that captures what you need. The current vote up/vote down system blends a lot of factors together, which is valuable for some calculations, but not the one you're looking for here.
I suggest a "flame" flag for every comment, which can roll up into a user's rating as a "flamer." The flag would only be available to HNers with a low flame rating themselves and a significant history of comments.
By default, no one would see comments that have high flame ratings. Users that accumulated flame points would get a time out from commenting, leading to a permanent ban if the behavior doesn't stop.
The site is wonderfully minimal at the moment, but using a UI graphic such as a fireball or flame could draw attention to the importance of civility.