portman

I mean, N=3, but I've made decent money on smaller exits.

The relevant metric is not exit price, it's ratio of exit price to pref stack; i.e. raise $40M and sell for $50M, founder is worse than if they raised $2M and sold for $10M.

I believe the author made a simple math error.

Economic returns of VC-backed companies follow a power law distribution. This means that the vast majority of the returns for the VC are at the "fat head" of the distribution. The "long tail" does not impact returns, for the VC.

However, for the founder, those returns in the tail can be life-changing. It takes a $5B exit for YC to care. But a $5M exit can be real money for the founder.

So the correct math, from the perspective of the founder, is not "what % are unicorns" but rather "what % sell for more than capital invested" and that number is likely to be closer to 50% than 1%.

I had not realized that PG and his family moved to England.

I also recently moved from California to England, so would be fascinated to learn more about the genesis of PG's move. (As an aside: I sometimes hear my kids late at night trying to convince their friends back in California to ask their parents to move here. Anecdotally it does feel like many families are considering it. Of course I have an availability bias here.)

Does anyone know of any essays or interviews where PG discusses his decision to emigrate?

Wrong stock. That is the share price of an unrelated chemicals company.

UKG is privately held.

> then you should launch a payment processor that serves the market

Checkout.com was most recently valued at $15 billion.

Sincerest form of flattery. Plenty of room in this market for all players.

Grow really fast. It’s fairly one-dimensional: if you are growing at +50% month/month, then you will be able to raise substantial rounds with minimal dilution.

If you are not posting exponential growth, then you will likely give up more and more control with each subsequent round.

I have a year-old startup and this is the first major Internet outage we've had to deal with... was really awesome to have your play-by-play and definitely changed our incident response (for the better!). Thank you so much.

Quick note about secondary financings. Not targeted at you per-se as much as the large quantity of HN comments that seem to not understand the nuance.

You can't include primary and secondary financings in the same total, because you would be double-counting. That would be like measuring a public stock on its total volume traded, not its market cap.

For example:

- Investor A invests £100M into Uber for 1M shares

- Investor B buys those 1M shares from Investor A for $400M

- Investor C buys those 1M shares from Investor B for $500M

There has been "$1B in fundraising" but: (a) only $100M went to Uber and; (b) the market cap of those shares is $500M

Fascinating to read, thank you.

“There are more soldiers in that board there than doctors” is one of the original comments!

akharris --

Any pointers on the most polite but firm way to defer speaking with investors when you're not ready to raise?

We just raised Seed, and get 5-10 inbounds per week asking about Series A. I usually write something like:

"Thanks for the note. We recently closed our seed round and are not looking to raise at the moment. But we will definitely reach out when that changes."

Hopefully that's not too curt/dismissive? Thanks in advance for any tips.

Meta: I urge you to post this again in a few days. Very sad to see it never “got heat” and its reach was limited. I think this is one of the more valuable posts this year and wish more folks had seen it.

also $1.25MM x 3% = $37.5k

Not $45k

It is difficult to trust the calculator when arithmetic errors exist in the prose.

It may have started equal at founding and changed over subsequent rounds. I know of a case where 4 founders started equal and differed by order of magnitude by the end.

I had VIN #150,000 18 months ago, and they crossed 200,000 in May 2017 so it’s likely sitting at just shy of 300,000 right now. The 150k figure you are citing is US only (where there is a race to 200k when the federal credit expires).

Isn't this particular test susceptible to confounding effects? Traffic fluctuates day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month, so how can you be sure it was the presence-or-absence of ads and not something else? If you randomize at the visitor level, you are sampling from both high-and-low traffic days, and control for any external fluctuations.

It's a beeswarm plot, linked in the footnotes: https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/6526445e2b44303eebf21da3b662732...

As such, the x-axis is a metric about the population, not the individual. I happen to use them a fair bit as I find them easier to intuit density from than the alternative, which is to plot on a single line with transparency.

The electric drivetrain, when coupled with a vast supercharging network...

I took that to mean that the car exclusively refueled on Superchargers, so the fuel cost was $0. That is a legitimate apples-to-apples comparison to the ICE vehicles.

Not sure if it's related to load, but whenever I try it on a long-tail site (i.e. not one you would have precached) it comes back with information about google.com instead of the domain I'm on.

Commercial air travel will serve just shy of 4 billion departures this year, with about 40 million flights.

You are correct in the ratio (1:100) but I think you mistook departures for flights and extrapolated 2 orders of magnitude too far.

> Slack will also let employees and other shareholders sell equity to investors as part of the deal

Translation: partial liquidity for founders and early employees.

Charge Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian, and anyone else who has 1MM+ followers. Charge them per tweet. They are the true economic beneficiaries of Twitter.

(Like any software company, offer lower pricing to charities.)

Use that cash to get rid of ads (they are not working) and invest in more tools for publishers (who are now paying).

According to Google Trends we reached "peak Google" in 2013:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google

What's actually happened is that fewer people are using search engines as their app launcher, because they are using the smartphone home screen instead.

Can anyone from New England comment on why Vermont and New Hampshire are so different? Demographics and weather are similar, so surprised to see that Vermont is highly negative and New Hampshire highly positive.

>after that incident Tesla put out an update preventing autopilot from being set for more than 5mph over the speed limit.

That's not correct. I routinely drive with autopilot set to +10mph over the speed limit.

Also, I take it to mean 21% use a client-side A/B testing framework.

You could be performing A/B testing server-side and it would not be detected using this approach (which ultimately boils down to greping the HTML for known strings).

Comcast's cable business generated $435/subscriber in the most recent quarter. That's $800 in two quarters let alone two years.

There is significant revenue opportunity in video. Apps are the new video. Music and iCloud are gravy. That's what the market is reacting to.

Maybe AAPL won't achieve it but you can't dismiss at as prima facie impossible.

Article is actually titled "Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals" which is less sensational and more accurate.

Does anyone know why this exclusion exists?

    Excluded from this list are companies that were
    majority-controlled by an institutional investment 
    firm at one point. 

I suspect they have already started to do so.

<anecdote>

Every morning I drive in the HOV lane of the 101. Waze and Google Maps give me traffic-based ETAs that are about 20 minutes longer than Tesla's. And every morning, Tesla wins. (And since I am a dork I continue to pit the 3 apps in this lopsided battle.)

The 20 minute delta is precisely the difference between the HOV and non-HOV lanes. My guess is that the Tesla traffic estimator is using telemetry from other cars on the road, which are also using the HOV lanes like me.

</anecdote>

This is purely speculative, but the technology certainly exists that would allow Telsa to do this.