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There isn't a winner and there likely won't be one (at least not for a long time). Tabular will likely be acquired by Snowflake and the two industry behemoths now back their own formats, and each will treat their own as a first class citizen.
Also curious! But even that does help to appreciate what a 1:4800 chance something is. I really like that frame of reference.
The Rehearsal (and Finding Frances) is with Synecdoche, New York in the bucket of "I didn't know art could do that". I was just in complete awe of what he did with with both of those.
I also found found it incredibly hard to watch, and was also ruined me for days if not weeks. In fact, I think a certain part of me has been permanently changed.
And that is exactly why it is now my favorite movie. A lot of movies have moved me, but this thing did something I didn't even know movies could do.
I'm a huge fan of Kaufman's work but only recently saw Synecdoche, New York, which immediately became my favorite movie, ever. That led me down a rabbit hole of listening to basically every recorded interview he's ever given. He's absolutely brilliant, sincerely humble, probably depressed, and just an absolute joy to listen to. I have a simple quote from him on my computer that I look at from time to time:
I try to do what I can to put something in the world that is not garbage.
Not the first one and certainly not the last...
half of them were psychologically incapable of staying in a cushy mid-six comp position at a big company, even when they had the chops. It's part of what drove them to do something else.
This is an incredibly good point. I, myself, left BigCo to launch aforementioned startup, and mentally, I was accepting that if went to zero (it did) at least I was spending the prime of my career doing what felt like the most meaningful thing I could be doing. I did not, however, create my recommended operating agreement or get the buy-in of my wife.
Using founders of $1B+ companies is absolutely using outliers and is evaluating survivorship bias.
As it relates to this article, a $1B+ company generally has product market fit and the founder has taken $10M+ off the table, which is more than they would have made in a regular job over a ~10 year period. The authors concerns don't apply in that situation.
Pitbull ownership is a contentious subject and just overall a very shitty situation. I've seen a pitbull kill another dog and two other pitbulls attack children. That lead me to look at data, and while there is conflicting data, I walked away with the impression that pitbulls are disproportionately more dangerous and should not be kept as pets.
I agree that they should explored other options to see if the dog could have been given to another owner in an environment better suited for a pitbull. I don't know that one exists, but if you choose to own a pitbull, you hold that responsibility when you decide to disown it.
You're actually proving the exact opposite of your initial claim, but at least you are now teasing out the confounding variables that actually explain this.
There is no significant causation related to a founder's marital status.
Don’t be fooled, older founders have considerably more assets and a wealth of connections in their industry, as well as older more independent children. This offsets the wife and family effects.
No, because there are a lot less older founders than younger ones. So when you extrapolate from the data it will seem that having a wife and kids is a negative for a founder’s chances of success.
These are the the confounding variables you were looking for. Older founders _are_ more successful and it has to do with, among other things, the experience and connections they have, and that people are more risk-averse as they start families.
_Coincidentally_, the likelihood of being married increases as one's age increases, which is why you see fewer but more successful founders at the ages they are more likely to be married.
I'm a founder that let starting a startup wreak massive havoc on his marriage. This shit is real.
My suggestion to anyone in a serious relationship that is starting a business:
Cofounders often layout an operating agreement when they start a company. A founder and their spouse should do the same: layout your expectations (time, money, opportunity costs, life responsibilities) and frequently have open and transparent conversations about if each party is still comfortable with the arrangement.
Hearing the author see his pivots and realizing he would cut off his arm before folding the company (hyperbole, I know) signals he is probably crossing the line of what would have been put in the operating agreement.
A good technical founder is forgoing $500k+ a year in comp for a high-percentage chance of nothing. That has an immense effect on a relationship. Watching a spouse who is that committed and failing has to be absolute hell.
What does "Pull the other one" mean in reply to "forgot they used the service"?
Are you implying all companies that have an open core model are using "bait and switch" tactics?
Would pointing you to the dozens of publicly traded companies with open core models "prove you wrong"?
I don't disagree, but was there something in this post that suggested their monetization strategy was support and consulting? I do see they are going to be focused on "ethical monetization" but I have no idea what that means.
I'll second the opinion of having your contracts reviewed, but will curb some expectations: most contracts (NDAs, employment agreements, home contracts etc) are fairly standard. There may be some small points to negotiate if they are off-market, but you had better have the leverage to negotiate.
This just hit as probably the most powerful comment I've read on here in the 15 years I've been reading. Wow.
Regretfully, I can think of dozens of {tools|processes|concepts} I treated as "fidget toys" rather than critical things to be learned and mastered. It fucking hurts to think about it.
This comment is the right attitude and I hope to think of this often. Thank you.
I'm surprised how often I speak to technical teams that do not utilize PagerDuty (or an equivalent alternative). As PagerDuty integrates with nearly any external system, it separates the collection of telemetry from the incident response lifecycle, i.e. what is wrong? who should be or is looking into this? what did we learn from this? how often is this happening?
Personally, I find notifications in Slack to be an anti-pattern: a lot of teams expect someone to just "pick up" the incident based on their availability or expertise and _maybe_ the resolution is documented. Assigning direct responsibility by component and on-call schedule appending the RCA reduces the time-to-resolution and overall toil of the process.
Exactly. I'm not sure what the appeal of these crossovers are (they're effectively small sedans on the Chassis of a small SUV) but at that price point, just get a foreign sedan that you can drive into the ground. I have a number of friends with 100k+ miles on Carollas that drive like they're brand new.
Some vehicles have gotten insanely expensive, but the real dollar cost per mile of a safe and reliable vehicle has never been cheaper.
That sounds nice in theory, but in reality, whether you raise from a firm of three partners or 300, you're going to work very closely with a single partner, and his or her competencies/style is mostly what your interaction with the "firm" is going to be. And you rarely, if ever, get to chose the partner with whom you work.
Unless the product is like still in development, right?
We're getting flooded with products that are just thin veneers over ChatGPT, which is fine. But some products require clearing a massive R&D hurdle. Sharing what you are working on, building a list of interested folks, and onboarding them when the time is right is critical for 'hard tech' products, even ones using AI.
Some of my favorite products were ones I learned about before launch. I was even an important beta tester to one of them.
I watch a YouTube channel that frequently features a guest from New Zealand, and in every video in which he appears, different people in the background will parrot the guest after he says certain words that really show off the NZ accent. I think he's become numb to it, because he shows no reaction. I'm sure it gets very old, but hopefully it's seen as endearment. imo, it's the best accent one can have :)
It's plausible that a handful of these new startups can define themselves as the next generation software of their industry, but I'm not sure many of these startups will make out of the "Tug-of-War valley" as the article describes.
I'm amazed at the amount of seed deals being done around "X with AI" where X is an established area of software.
The bet is that a new startup will be able to deliver a better product than the incumbent players (often established companies with large adoption and distribution).
Of the many I've looked at, the hurdle the startups will have to clear seems to be massive compared to the incumbents being able to build these "AI powered" features.
simplified:
Exchanges are a group of public companies. Each company has a market capitalization, calculated by the number of shares * the share price.
Apple's individual market cap is greater than the aggregate market cap (sum of all companies' market caps in the exchange) in many other exchanges in the world.
It means what we already know: Apple is a very large company (it's the largest public company in the world).
This sounds like the modern version of the apocryphal 1902 quote of Charles Holland Duell (Patent Office Commissioner): "Everything that can be invented has been invented"
The economic climate has changed, but there are more problems to be solved today than ever before.
Fascinating.
Jumping up to public markets, I thought this was an interesting insight yesterday from Jamin Ball at Altimeter:
There's now only 3 cloud software companies trading >10x NTM rev. Snowflake at 15.2x, Veeva at 10.8x and Cloudflare at 10.5x [0]
:O
[0] https://twitter.com/jaminball/status/1653482586054987776
How is venture capital expected to perform well in these conditions?
I'm not sure that this author or Carta as a whole is trying to suggest private markets should be performing better right now. We're all painfully aware of why this is happening. These reports are usually just presenting the raw data.
I'm less interested in "how bad is the state of venture capitalism" right now and more interested in "when is it roughly expected to get better/be less bad again"?
An analyst's report for any asset class (real estate, public equities, etc) has to start with the cut and dry numbers. But they do sprinkle in a bit of guidance using the data:
"There are signs of a venture spring. Valuations from seed to Series C ticked up from recent lows. Median round sizes mostly stabilized. But these green shoots were overwhelmed by the decline in total rounds across all stages."
the three of us live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Steve and I each have three kids; we knew that the dollar figure that would allow us to live without financial distress – which we put at $175,000 a year
Putting aside the fact that is terrible way to determine the rate of pay for anyone, let alone every single person in a company - how on earth did they come up with such a lower number for such a high cost of living area?
I think you might have conflated a few things:
No VC is telling companies to just to wastefully hire people they don't need. That wastes money and creates friction and bigger problems inside of a company.
They do tell you to hire aggressively, and you often present them with a model that shows _how_ you will use the money you raise, and sometimes you hire too many people on accident. But no VC is pounding their fists on the table telling founders to explicitly go hire people that aren't needed. That's directly against the interest of both the founder and the investor.
It was certainly much more common the last few years. However, those transactions are more of "hey investor, let me sell you some of my shares in this round" and not whatever complex behavior is described in this article.
the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals.
The most fascinating part of this whole story to me is just how few checks and balances there were in this company. Even without a board, did major investors not get his quarterly financials? If the leaked balance sheet was any indication of their level financial engineering capabilities, it's hard to imagine there weren't major red flags through most of 2021.