cehrnrooth

It could be about optics. They might prefer people direct their anger at a random non-existent stranger for paying above face value than have them direct their anger at Stubhub.

That said, shifting blame for high prices isn't a new problem, so it's surprising the domains were all registered in the last 6 months.

Maybe it's a bigger project around market making and price optimization. I priced mine around 70% of the price of similar available tickets (since mine hadn't sold in the 3 weeks I had them listed) and they sold later that day.

This is really interesting, because I had the same experience happen to me yesterday (the domain was emeraldsummitadvisors.com).

I didn't find much discussion about it, but one theory I saw was that for high-value tickets Stubhub will act as an intermediary to verify the tickets or prevent the buyer and seller from knowing who the other person is (because the original buyer info is typically on a ticket or revealed during the transfer, and the new buyer info is given to the seller).

I assume this is to cut down on scams and other issues related to claims of not receiving tickets.

InkWorks, Inc. | USA | Full Time | Remote (Bay Area) | Founding Software Engineer | Seed Funding

We're a seed stage startup developing software to improve the business workflows of commercial printers.

Print is a $75B business with million dollar equipment purchases and software that looks and works like it was found in a time capsule from 1991. Our software modernizes and streamlines customer quoting and order workflows, improves internal and external collaboration, and enables printers to generate more business and improve customer satisfaction.

This will be our first hire and this role will have have a significant influence on the culture, processes, and tools that will be used.

If you're interested in learning more you can email me at carl@getinkworks.com or my co-founder Jose (our CTO) at jose@getinkworks.com

A full description of the role is here: https://angel.co/company/inkworks-1/jobs/2016772-founding-so...

SF specific anecdote - I had a radical idea while walking up Divisadero last week. What if we removed Divisadero and Geary St. and built apartments where the road is today. You'd have European style narrow streets for pedestrians and could increase the density massively. Imagine taking out the multiple lanes across Geary St and how much housing could be built. Would there even be a NIMBY problem since the road is publicly owned?

Thanks for writing this, one of your quotes "Founders often hold too tightly onto solutions and too loosely onto problems" really resonated.

If someone were evaluating their next opportunity to tackle, would you recommend they focus less on identifying a specific pain point (that they may know how to solve), and instead identify a large market and then search for inefficiencies (even if they have less domain expertise in it).

Obviously the intersection of the two would be better (large market with a pain point you know how to solve) but curious which you would optimize for if you had to choose.

That seems questionable, how can they charge you with obstruction when you can just not answer any questions you're not legally obligated to answer.

What are ways this can be bet on since these are non-public companies?

So far I've identified:

1. Commercial real estate. Could take a short position on any public companies (ex. CBRE) though they're likely too diversified to drive them down to zero.

2. Hiring. Could bet against LinkedIn? Most local recruiters / agencies are privately owned and the public ones are diversified.

3. Ancillary services. Seems like start-ups serving start-ups so there's no publicly available position to take.

4. Tax Revenue. Assuming a contraction, can you bet on local municipalities being short on budget / revenue with a smaller tax base?

Might be a fools errand to short these if the excess capacity can be picked up by all the behemoths (Google, Facebook, Apple).

I wouldn't dare take a short position on SF residential real-estate although outlying areas might see a larger contraction.

I'm impressed by their plan to 5X their top-line in one year and improve their margin at the same time (which would indicate either raising prices or reducing subsidies).

Quality of life is probably similar but the cost of living is much lower.

'NO PLATE' and 'NO TAGS' are taken but 'NO TAG5' is available if anyone wants to take their chances.

-edit 'MI55ING' is available too.

Location density of the deliveries has got to have a massive impact on their effectiveness. I'm highly skeptical of their ability gather groceries and deliver to 5 separate locations within 1 hour. Even in a dense area where it's 5 minutes between each location (plus parking, plus entry / exit and delivery) that's 25 minutes minimum.

The longer the time, the lower the $/Hr. The further away the locations are, the higher the transportation costs are for the driver, further cutting into their actual take home pay (not including, miles, depreciation, insurance, etc...).

Instead of making deliveries after the order (and trying to bundle orders and deliveries), I would think a dispatch model where one set of workers go out in the morning and make the orders and deliver to a central location. Then have a second shift make deliveries, but that would make it difficult to maintain the independent contract status of their workers.

This is exactly what I've been looking for since Parse announced they were suspending their service. I've been taking a wait and see approach to migrating until something easy to use comes out and this looks like it might be it.

Really cool of First Round to share this data. Whenever I see interesting data it makes me ask more questions and these are some of the things I'm wondering about after reading the post.

Female founders outperforming male teams: My hunch would be that the bar for women to get funded (at least historically) has been higher than men so the female led start-ups would be a better calibre of company. Related, since this is based on investment performance, could it be that the female founders received smaller initial investments so performing on par with male teams would make the ROI look better?

Halo effect: This to me would indicate that we shouldn't be encouraging fresh college graduates to work at start-ups and instead get experience at a more mature company. I wonder how much tenure they had at their halo company prior to founding the start-up and how it ties with the average age of founding.

Solo founders perform worse: I wonder what happens if you frame this from the point of view of the founder. If the solo founder had a $100 return and the team had a $260 (160% better) return; assuming equal dilution and equal division between founders, solo founder get's $100, a two founder team get $130 each (30% better), a three founder team gets $85 (15% worse).

Next big thing from anywhere: Also interesting, I'd like to see how this varies by referral source. Do companies referred by other investors perform better than non-investor referrals (or can other investors pick companies better than social connections).

Not necessarily. As other people have pointed out, Uber's business model, margins, and valuation are based on shifting their costs onto their drivers (especially the capital costs of vehicles).

Switching to driverless raises the question of who owns the vehicles they'll be using, and if they're the ones owning the vehicles in their fleet that represents a major shift in capital expenses and ongoing maintenance costs.

One cool innovation I've seen is converting from a % upfront model to a % recurring model (Ex. instead of 25% upfront convert to 2% over 12 months).

It benefits start-ups because they don't have a large cash outlay at once and aligns the incentives of the firm to find great candidates that will stick. It also creates a more predictable revenue stream in the form of monthly recurring revenue.

Current valuation should be based on future revenue projections. If you assume a 10X multiple they'd need $450M ARR to justify $4.5B which implies growing 22.5X ($20M * 22.5 = $450M).

Last report I saw pegged their number of customers at 10,000 which would mean a $2K average customer annual value. To get to $450M ARR they either need to grow to 225,000 customers or increase their average customer value (or a combination of both).

According to the US census there's over 2M companies with more than 5 employees which means they need to capture about 10% of the market.

Doesn't seem too unreasonable especially when you consider a company can stay with their platform even if they switch providers / plans every year (minimizing churn).

Interesting approach to helping students find work. From an employers point of view, I'd think most college students are interchangeable for entry-level work and student demand would outstrip employer supply, what's the incentive for employers to pay and use the platform?

I would recommend The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. Whether or not you agree with the rule in the book, I found all of the historical examples and anecdotes interesting to read on their own.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_48_Laws_of_Power

There was a great article in the New Yorker about police interrogation techniques and how they can influence people to confess to crimes (and the studies that explain why people would falsely confess).

[1]http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-interview-7

This book and tutorial taught me my foundational web development skills and was the reason I was able to launch my own start-up. I can't praise it enough.

It sounds a lot like BoxBee which I think launched earlier this year.

Additional thought, you could put a unique promo code on the senders copy (code tied to their account) where if they buy X credits they get Z free.

Assuming the marginal cost of printing an extra card is fairly small, have you considered sending a copy of the card to the sender?

Unless the recipient provides some sort of feedback the sender doesn't really get anything to show for it. This could also let the sender see the quality of product sent. You could limit it to just the first card sent to limit your cost increase.