wensing

Creator here.

You can use fuzzy numbers to get varied output, and if you want to do MC you can use the API into your model to call it with whatever distributions you want and aggregate the output. But no, our UI doesn’t natively support doing a MC sim because the demand is frankly less than you’d expect. :)

Strong agree on the size of the space and the room for many approaches.

wave :)

The exercise of modeling your business helps you become aware of all that you don’t know, which helps you stay humble and curious and focused on answering the right questions.

Hi, I’m the founder of Summit. Honored to be included among great and smart company.

Happy to connect anytime to talk financial planning or support usage of the product.

Long-time HN’er, had the idea for Summit while fundraising for my first startup (Stormpulse, recently acquired).

For the forecasting geeks and curious: this video lays out the tech behind Summit’s forecasting engine (password: everest3): https://usesummit.wistia.com/medias/fd3pk1fuvz

Thanks! Fixed, I think ...

The Babe Ruth effect of VC's needing big hits and the entire industry being a hits-driven business (unicorns, PG's Black Swan Farming, etc.) is a relic of the VC industry being not-long-tail compatible (i.e. offline). This will change, and more money will be made in the fat long tail than the hits.

I've been writing at length about this movement (https://medium.com/swlh/the-new-bootstrappers-how-alternativ...) and the kinds of startups that will emerge as smart investments (https://medium.com/swlh/rise-of-the-transformers-db7887c2668...)

Thanks for the nod to competence.

Re: "By binding the payback to profit" -- but it isn't bound to profit. Re-read the terms. It's Founder Earnings, which is profit PLUS any founder salary above a 'low but fair' threshold. You can be breakeven or below zero and still have shareable earnings with a SEAL if you are making a market rate (not low but still fair).

I spent days thinking this through and would be happy to explore your objections in a higher-fidelity forum or longer-form format than HN comments.

For now, suffice to say I have no incentive to mislead founders.

_"A Shared Earnings Agreement is not debt and comparisons based on interest rates are academically interesting, but misleading because"_

I address this in the 'Seal Typing' section of the article.

_"You may as well also include the effective interest rate on every VC investment that returns 50x or 100x their investment"_

I address this in the "Cash & Carry" section of the article.

Hybrids are hard to design[1], hard to evaluate, and hard to compare. That's part of my worry and a lot of the inspiration for the article.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-pontiac-aztek-and-the-peri...

Yes, absolutely. The key question in my mind still (after finishing the article) is what startups actually WOULD be smart to take money on these terms (what kind of business model, unit economics, and growth trajectory would they have to have for it to make sense).

My guess is it's a narrower slice of the startup population than Earnest intends. And my prediction is they will update their terms to broaden the slice.

Unless your forecast is probabilistic.

Senior Engineer | Riskpulse | Austin, TX | Full Time | ONSITE

Riskpulse is looking for a senior, full-stack engineer to join our team of engineers, scientists, and meteorological researchers solving problems across the complete supply chain.

On any given day you will be: - Writing high-performance Python and Javascript code powering web and native apps - Coordinating distributed data processing across our AWS cluster - Code-reviewing and mentoring other engineers - Analyzing mountains of data to surface valuable insights for our customers and fuel future product development

Requirements: - B.S. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical discipline - Strong experience with one or more of Python, Ruby or similar object oriented dynamic language - Distributed systems experience with strong knowledge of Linux internals - Knowledge of Python scientific tools such as Numpy, Pandas, SciPy, etc.

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https://angel.co/riskpulse/jobs/87376-senior-engineer

Ah! The real world! Hello.

I enjoyed all the mentions of weather, as Paul T. at the Memphis GOCC is someone I've had the pleasure of talking to about some of those issues.

I'm the co-founder of a company whose mission is to synchronize climate and commerce. Would love to find out what you're doing these days as you are clearly a SME (almost beyond belief) and I'm guessing I could learn a lot from you.

CEO of Riskpulse here. I've been through all of the monetization trenches for weather software and we are now capitalizing on real demand in B2B/enterprise. If either of you guys ever want to connect to talk shop or (in)formally partner or share ideas, let me know: matt@riskpulse.com

This resonates. We raised just under $2m through a seed round and then were fortunate enough to be able to raise a bridge that deferred any crunch. But then we did 2 other things: we focused our sales, marketing, and product design on the greatest pain within a single industry (instead of 3) and we reduced expenses. Now growth is great and we are very close to being able to say that raising money is completely optional indefinitely, and no matter what investors do or don't decide, we will be fine. A wonderful feeling but the challenge to get to that next level has also been nearly inexplicable. Great post-mortem.

The technology component of the company is completely solid

But the technology component is only ~2/10ths of a company.

I think you're underestimating how hard all those non-coding skills are. When you laundry list "UI, branding, PR, etc" I can almost see you doing a hand-wavy motion. The reality is, anyone that's truly awesome at non-technical things deserves some equity for the 10X-100X growth they will help bring to the business. The truth is you can be 8 years in, but only 10% of the way there.

On a related note, we are adding earthquakes to Riskpulse.com this week. It's amazing how much scattered and rich data there is, but it's just that ... scattered.

Hype is harder to create than a product? For what set of products?

Or an acquisition.

If you're interested in building risk-based applications, come talk to me about Pulse OS and Riskpulse - http://riskpulse.com/offerings/

The founder is surely already rich. The real losers in these cases are the employees with options. The outcome for them is very binary.

Is there any way to know with any degree of confidence whether something is a flash in the pan or a viable company? It isn't just about growth is it?

You aren't taking into account the value of money to people that are already rich.

Also, they have the scale to start testing monetization, but they are not, because they'd rather increase the value of their exit to an acquirer by growing users.

They want a larger exit.

Or

4) I'm already so wealthy as a founder that's sold stock through multiple rounds of funding that I might as well wait for the $5B offer.

Revenue (or lack thereof) doesn't determine "startup" status and I never said it did.

A startup according to Blank is a group if people in search of a business model. I am making the claim that SnapChat is not searching for a business model, but rather an exit -- by being a juicy component to someone else's model.

Snapchat isn't being valued on revenues or potential monetization, but rather as a piece of someone else's (eg Facebook's) business model.

In the Steve Blank sense I don't think it's even right to call Snapchat or any of these "growth looking for a home" things "startup"s. They aren't actually searching for a business model. Their plan is to grow until they dock with the Deathstar.

Most web apps are not that difficult to program. What needs the most innovation in a startup is the business model. Communicating that locally is hard enough. Remote? No thank you.

If you can't convince an investor like Evan Williams could, then you need to either be extremely frugal and keep your day job for a while, or quit your job and bet your life savings, or don't bother. There isn't a "bootstrap to become the Next Facebook" path.

I'm guessing the effort to switch to a different cloud wasn't something they wanted to invest in?

I've never used it. Is there not a network effect, like Facebook, where leaving is costly "because all my friends use Snapchat"? This switching cost is what ultimately allows social networks to place ads without people jumping ship.