nabeel

Except it was not leaked by Postmates. Full stop.

On the broader subject, even if numbers are quite good, there are many reasons why private companies do not want this data to be out in public. Any investor who needs to see the data on Postmates will be seeing it as they fundraise, as that is a relatively small pool of people.

It is entirely fabricated. The team have never conducted themselves that way. Sad this was posted.

This is generally true, most VCs are afraid of things that have strong technical risk. But the point of the post is that starting a few years ago some VCs are finally catching up to founders on this. YC, Lux Capital, AH, Khosla, and of course our firm are trying to increase funding in the space and will continue to.

Except that article is dead wrong. The court decisions were a convenient scapegoat that had nothing to do with the shutdown whatsoever.

i've spent well over an hour in the latest prototype with no sickness, and in the dev units I can last 5 minutes tops.

Palmer choose Brendan as his partner to help transform Oculus from a project into co-founding a company because they wanted to work together. To characterize him as an "investor" seems strange since he is an entrepreneur. And suffice to say Brendan, Palmer, and Carmack are voting with their time.

That is of course exactly what Startups do today. And it feels unfortunate. "Wait, you have me cash just to spend it on your legal bill?"

Well put pg. It isn't that the money was that material, it just felt wrong and petty that it was being done in the first place so we wanted to fix it. Just feels silly we didn't do it a lot sooner.

no, they are definitely not going to all be big businesses. for every Zynga there are plenty of RockYou's (or Free Gifts) that grow but never turn into sustainable businesses.

but the point is that the conditions that allow companies to grow are fleeting, they happen rarely and the people building real companies are best to sit up, take notice, and take advantage.

I like your core point. If you aren’t building something of value, then the press doesn’t matter you won’t last anyway.

But the “90% of Techcrunch companies are gone in 6 months” stat is just wrong. I don’t know who this Dreamit guy is, but seems to have no bearing on the reality of an average Techcrunch post.

Namely, most of the Techcrunch announcements nowadays are AFTER some amount of angel money has been raised. And most companies target around 18 months of cash. So even if they were building something horribly crappy, there’s no way they are gone in 6 months.

Looking at page 1 of Techcrunch today, and filtering just for early stage startups. We have: Worlddesk, Snapguide ($2m), Kibits ($1m), Circl.es, Hootsuite ($20m), Skills.to ($3m), RentSocial. While you can go through $1-3m quickly if you spend badly, six months is unrealistic.

As others are saying.. this is just a dumb, wrong stat.

37signals seems to like this topic.. The last time they sounded off on why half-assing it is a good idea, I reacted just as viscerally as this post. Since they did a redux, I will too:

http://nabeelhyatt.com/post/130164127/instead-of-watching-tv...

Yeah, the data was just software companies. So no Apple, Nokia. They also didn't have Google or Yahoo, which was unfortunate. Still, in terms of top 100 software companies, it's a valuable sample.

This was starting with the premise of "success" -- let's assume it's a world class idea and hits $50m in revenue, goes public, and becomes one of the top 100 software companies in the world (in terms of capitalization). How long does that kind of amazing success take?

If you're wildest predictions about growth of your startup are off from what the historically most successful companies public today are doing, that's worth looking at.

Hi. Nabeel here. To be clear this should not be thought of as conclusive academic analysis. These were just interesting indicators that I found.

I was using the data that was available from the article linked, which means it's the largest 100 public software companies, then segmented by type. Which meant, any individual category had roughly 5-8 companies with which to sample.

In the entertainment category it was Activision (4 years to $50m), Electronic Arts (6), Take-Two (6), International Game Technology (10) and a few others.

"The pressure for a startup to go towards conventional wisdom is intense" is probably what I should have headlined this article as.

As someone else mentioned, both David Cohen and Brad Feld have a history in Boston, it's where they got their start (as it has been for many others thanks to MIT and Harvard). There was also a strong push for quite a while from the Boston and Cambridge entrepreneurial community.

I'm in Huron village, and it's about as suburbia as I can stand. But, hey, to each his own.

Not to worry about Boston, there's actually an interesting announcement that will help fill the YC gap that is coming in the next 60 days.

good to hear you guys are sticking around for a little bit.

good article. but i may be biased. :)

The only place I've had that feeling that "education" was more important than knowledge in Cambridge was actually directly on the Harvard campus. But I completely agree.

There are two strains of culture in Cambridge, "you should be smarter" which is why I love living here. And "you should have two PHDs" -- which is very different and unfortunate message. It's almost the opposite of the Valley, which speaks so reverently of the Harvard drop-out.

The best thing that those of us who live in Cambridge could do is keep the culture focused on ideas and less on diplomas.

FYI, we are actually doing an event next Wed at the OpenCoffee Cambridge for co-founders. It's from 9-12pm at Andala's Coffee.

It is the case that there is between 20-30% valuation that they typically need to invest. And yes, that does effect valuation math. However, there are of course plenty of other cases outside the "norm"

a) A super hot company people will always make exceptions for. Especially smaller more focused funds like Union Sq.

b) No VC is going to give you $250k on an A round valuation and expect 25% of the company. They will either be angels (who will take more like 2-25%) or if a VC they will do the $250k as convertible debt to the A round.

Do not raise $2m if you don't need $2m. Structure your round around the capital requirements, not the other way around.

danw, I don't think OpenCoffee club really is like this right now. But after reading PGs essay I think that perhaps it should.

Perhaps opencoffee should have a culture of demoing every week. You show up, you get scrutinized, but it's all for the best.

Story of a boston start-up social network+gaming and a little on how the VC round came together.

Hot or Not. Made the owners enough free flowing cash, in the millions every year, that they certainly weren't even looking for an exit.

great, I'll be there. although I second the vote for Andala's, as it is a block from 1369, larger, has better coffee, and free wifi.

You can also drop by the Boston OpenCoffee's - a lot of young entrepreneurs and YC types. It's in cambridge every thursday. www.opencoffeeclub.org

Will be there. There is also the weekly OpenCoffee in Cambridge that does have free WiFi and a mix of VCs and entrepreneurs. ( http://boston.going.com/event-122245 )