HN user
David Graeber, the author of the book Bullshit Jobs, walked out of the room twice when Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant confronted him with pitfalls in his reasoning.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een-ongeloof...
Barry Diller's wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, was a proofreader of Sam Altman's last article 'How to be successful'.
Most surprising thing about this article: Diane von Furstenberg, fashion designer and wife of billionaire media entrepreneur Barry Diller, was a proofreader.
Stanford course by Russell Berman and Peter Thiel
The author does write about GE's business problems. GE capital, as mentioned above. And the Alstom acquisition, which was a too expensive bet on the wrong horse.
Non-paywalled version here.
Nrs. 2, 6, 10, 11, 17 and 24 went through YC.
Respectively, they are: Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Instacart, Machine Zone and Doordash.
In march of 2016, Asana also raised $50 million. Sam Altman led that round, at a valuation of $550 million. Crunchbase wrongfully states that YC led it.
If Sam Altman's investment exits add such amounts to his bank reserve that the reserve gets bigger than $10 million, he spends the surplus above that $10 million on 'improving humanity,' which I read as charity. (1)
(1) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
It's also badly written, with many me's an I's, like
'I squint at the plant names that have been rendered into Dutch.'
and uninteresting facts about the appearance of the scientist, like:
'Meis is a big man, almost a foot taller than me, broad-shouldered and bullet-headed with an exuberant laugh. Eyeing the boxes, though, he looks solemn.'
YC has funded approximately 1,900 companies. 93 are valued at $100 million or more. 19 are valued at $1 billion or more. Stripped from nuance, one could say that if you get accepted into YC, you have a 5 percent chance of building a $100 million company, and a 1 percent chance of building a $1 billion company. That's impressive.
Afaik, YC is the only seed funder-startup accelerator in the world, among thousands of other ones, that has given birth to companies worth $1 billion ore more.
At least until three years ago, it hasn't passed funding on a single billion dollar company (1).
Also, rumours are that Coinbase is raising money at a valuation of $8 billion (2). This is the same valuation that the company supposedly gave itself when it acquired earn.com in april this year (3).
(1) https://twitter.com/rabois/status/634205368172814337 (2) https://www.businessinsider.com/coinbase-8-billion-company-f... (3) https://www.recode.net/2018/4/27/17287184/coinbase-earn-acqu...
With a post money valuation of 14.6 billion dollar, Cruise surpasses Dropbox as the third most valuable company that YC has invested in. The valuation of Airbnb is 31 billion, Stripe 20 billion, Cruise 14.6 billion, Dropbox 11 billion.
YC doesn't hold shares in Cruise anymore, since the company as a whole was sold to GM for 1 billion in 2016. After the acquisition, GM invested another 1.1 billion, Softbank Vision Fund invested 2.25 billion and now Honda invests 2.75 billion. So more than 7.1 billion dollar has been invested into Cruise. It's the best capitalised YC company. Airbnb has raised 4.4 billion, debt financing included.
Former SEC enforcement attorney John Reed Stark wrote about the complaint against Musk:
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But here’s the rub. The SEC does not typically file SEC enforcement actions like the one against Musk. Indeed, a close reading of the SEC’s complaint against the celebrated billionaire finds a litany of glaring absences within the SEC’s allegations, including:
No alleged profits or other ill-gotten gain earned by Musk; No alleged scheme conducted by Musk; No alleged market manipulation orchestrated by Musk; No alleged pump and dump ploy executed by Musk; No alleged conspiracy between Musk and anyone else; No alleged evidence of scienter or intent by Musk; No alleged false filing or other false or inaccurate Tesla report to the SEC by Musk; No alleged violation of any sort of required SEC “quiet period” by Musk; and No concrete evidence of an alleged motive attested to Musk (though not required in SEC enforcement actions, motive is typically pled or implied in some way, shape or form).
(...)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/secmusktesla-settlement-dawni...
You are right.
Right now, 1 euro is worth about 1.17 dollars.
Some valuation context, although I'm fully aware that Stripe is a private company and that many of its investors could have investing or striking privileges.
Stripe: 20 billion. Adyen (stock symbol: ADYEN) 19 billion. Shopify (stock symbol: SHOP) 17 billion. Square (stock symbol: SQ) 39 billion. Paypal (stock symbol: PYPL) 107 billion.
Paypal cofounders Elon Musk and Thiel are early Stripe investors.
Former Paypal EVP Keith Rabois is a Stripe investor and was COO of Square.
Stripe is the second most valuable YC company. Total valuation of all companies that YC funded (more than 1,900) now exceeds 100 billon dollars.
Airbnb has a private valuation of 31 billion. Stripe has a private valuation of 20 billion. Dropbox has a public valuation (DBX) of 11 billion.
So the two most valuable companies account for about half the total value of all the YC companies. This is what a power law looks like!
Non-paywalled version:
https://riskcapitalpartners.co.uk/2018/09/23/luke-johnson-fo...
Airware raised money from Y Combinator and Andreessen Horowitz.
https://blog.ycombinator.com/airware-yc-w13-raises-10-dollar...
Great batch. I'm especially impressed by the hard tech companies that produce atoms. But unfortunately, on demo day 1 there was a company that makes the world uglier and is supporting the massive ongoing trend of middle class and sometimes even upper class people imitating an aspect of the underclass. On demo day 2, there was a shamelessly partisan company that makes the world worse. It wants to get more people to support a process that, contrary to entrepreneurship, brings out the worst in people who actively engage in that process.
May the companies from the S18 batch flourish, except those two.
David Graeber doesn't even acknowledge that most bullshit jobs are in governments. The man is really an intellectual: he lacks common sense. Also, when Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant confronted him with other pitfalls in his reasoning, he walked out of the room twice.
https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een-ongeloof...
I do not understand why Stripe choose a headline that does partially cover the content of the article. In a sexist, but politically correct way. I also don't understand why comments about this being sexist get flagged. Finally, I wonder why the moderators changed the original HN headline to the same headline that Stripe uses. Isn't it HN policy that headlines that seems clickbaity or wrong get changed by the moderators, so that they become more factual and understated?
Anyway, great move from Stripe. Seems that they want remove barriers for starting and running a company, which is good for the creation of wealth and jobs. Be it Stripe Atlas, the card business, Indiehackers or the publishing company. Al those newly founded companies are also target customers for Stripe. Which is completely ok and speaks of good common business sense!
I know it's HN policy to submit the original source. But the accounting remark of @jasonlk is a worthwile addition.
I'm wondering how Musk's compensation scheme will change when Tesla becomes private again. It was approved a few months ago by Tesla shareholders. It gives Elon Musk no salary, only restricted stock awards. They can reach a value of tens of billions of dollars. Restrictions for the full package: Tesla has to reach annual sales of 175 billion and the stock market has to give TSLA a market cap of 650 billion.
Paul Graham in 2015:
It would have been a good deal for Apple's board to give Steve 95% of the company.
Market cap when he came back: 1.73b.
5% now: 33b.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/674760647767285761
Today, 5% of the company is 50 bilion. Jobs became de facto chief after then-CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997 (wiki). So that would make an annualized AAPL gain of 17.3 percent, excluding dividends. Even more impressive.
For anyone who thinks that Paul Graham is still a YC partner: he has retired from Y Combinator.
#9 reveals the prejudice of the authors. It's about founders who experienced difficulty in fundraising because of their sex. Last sentence of that paragraph, in bold:
To the 12 men who said it hurt their chances... really?
I'm aware that that many of doctors' high salaries are due to the government creating artficial shortages and I support less government regulation in order to make helathcare better and more affordable.
That having said, I don't think high doctors' salaries are the most important societal problem in healthcare. Years and years of studying, long working hours, great responsibilities, saving lives and healing patients: doctors are welcome to their high salaries.
The one kind of people who aren't named in this article: investors. Ben Horowitz of A16Z explained why A16Z prefers to invest in founder-led companies.
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The macro reason: that’s the way most of the great technology companies have been built
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Professional CEOs are effective at maximizing, but not finding, product cycles. Conversely, founding CEOs are excellent at finding, but not maximizing, product cycles.
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Innovator’s requirements – what does it take to find the product cycle?
So where did Jobs get this “founders courage” and what is it? In addition to general brilliance, we see three key ingredients to being a great innovator:
1. Comprehensive knowledge
2. Moral authority
3. Total commitment to the long-term
Great founding CEOs tend to have all three and professional CEOs often lack them. Here’s why.
(...)
Comment from economist Tyler Cowen when the same group of journalists released the Panama papers:
Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?
Let’s say a group of criminal defense lawyers kept a database of their confidential conversations with their clients. That would include clients charged with murder, robbery, DUI, drug abuse, and so on. In turn, a hacker would break into that database and post the information from those conversations on Wikileaks. Of course a lot of those conversations would appear to be incriminating because — let’s face it — most of the people who require defense attorneys on criminal charges are in fact guilty. When asked why the hack was committed, the hacker would say “Most of those people are guilty. I want to make sure they do not escape punishment.”
How many of us would approve of that behavior? Keep in mind the hacker is spreading the information not only to prosecutors but to the entire world, and outside of any process sanctioned by the rule of law. The hacker is not backed by the serving of any criminal charges or judge-served warrants.
Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status, as is the case with the Panama Papers. Furthermore most of those individuals probably did nothing illegal, but rather they were trying to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations. Admittedly, very often the underlying tax laws should be changed, just as we should repeal the deduction for mortgage interest too. But in the meantime we are not justified in stealing information about those people, even if some of them are evil and powerful, as is indeed the case for homeowners too.
Once again, politics isn’t about policy, it is about which groups should rise and fall in relative status. And many people believe the wealthy should fall in status, and so they will entertain the morality of all crimes and threats against them. These revelations will of course lead to some subsequent cases of blackmail, against Chinese officials for one group.
I had tweeted “Are your views on privacy and #PanamaPapers consistent? Just asking…” and my goodness what a response, positive and negative. Most interesting of all, many people had never pondered the question before. Somehow “good things” such as “privacy” and “transparency” cannot stand in such conflict because all good things, like all bad things, must come together.
(...)
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/04/the...