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The 99% (of startups)

justinkan.com

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Re: The 99% (of startups)

#21

Post by harryjo »

Jasber wrote: post #17
Animats wrote: post #11

It's depressing that Amazon paid four times as much for this business as Bezos did for the Washington Post.

27 million people watched the League of Legends world championship[1] which is on par (or better) than MLB & NBA championships. It's pretty clear eSports is going to be huge. Having the biggest streaming site/brand will be valuable and doesn't seem crazy in that perspective. [1] http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/page/instantawesome-leagueof...

That's a high single-event number. Do the numbers sustain across the year? MLB and NBA have over 100 events per year (considering all the days games as one daily "event")

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#22

Post by josu »

Animats wrote: post #11

It's depressing that Amazon paid four times as much for this business as Bezos did for the Washington Post.

Content creation vs content distribution.

While both companies operate in a thin margin environment, content creation is not easily scalable but content distribution is.

Also, shrinking market vs growing market.

Besides, value to society and value to investors don't always go hand in hand.

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#23

Post by muzmath »

harryjo wrote: post #21
Jasber wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

27 million people watched the League of Legends world championship[1] which is on par (or better) than MLB & NBA championships. It's pretty clear eSports is going to be huge. Having the biggest streaming site/brand will be valuable and doesn't seem crazy in that perspective. [1] http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/page/instantawesome-leagueof...

That's a high single-event number. Do the numbers sustain across the year? MLB and NBA have over 100 events per year (considering all the days games as one daily "event")

Clearly this is a long game play.

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#25

Post by jaz46 »

CPLX wrote: post #15

What the hell is he talking about? Is the summary of that article something like "this one VC didn't buy shares from me but then I got rich so fuck the haters 99% of you are going to be rich too" or something? The article is like a word salad.

Justin is saying that VCs understand what's hot now, but are sometimes bad a predicting future value. So to founders, if you're creating value, keep going even if VCs don't see the light yet. They'll come around.

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#26

Post by ryporter »

At the time he attempted to sell his shares, Twitch had raised $42 million, and had been valued at around $100 million several months earlier [1]. He is complaining about the gall of VCs not to buy his shares at a price that would imply a valuation of less than $194 million (and presumably not that far below). I do not believe that this is a good attitude for entrepreneurs to internalize.

[1] https://www.pehub.com/2014/08/amazon-pays-970-mln-for-twitch...

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#27

Post by raylan_givens »

api wrote: post #20

"I tried to sell some of my startup shares for below what the market turned out to be willing to pay for them, but people said no because it wasn't trendy and it sort of hurt my feelings, but then I got rich so haha!" I feel really sorry for you bro. If you want some consolation you're free to PM me and we can totally hang out and you can buy me a house.

I really don't think that was the message he was trying to convey. If anything, he was trying to inspire other startups/founders that feel unappreciated/underestimated.

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#28

Post by Alex3917 »

jacquesm wrote: post #18
brandnewlow wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. He's saying that Twitch is a 1%-er now, but even 9 months before their deal they were in the 99%, aka VCs are clueless sometimes.

No, it is simply very hard to make the call.

Sometimes it's hard to make the call. Sometimes VCs are just stupid.

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#29

Post by noname123 »

Would love to see a series of good curves:

(1) of all startup's started by people who working in the industry, quit FT jobs to do startup or put in serious moonlighting hours in startup; total earnings - opportunity cost, annualized:

(total income from startup - opportunity cost of hours worked on startup) / years spent

Maybe this data-set should be split further into bins of founders whose last title prior to startup were only individual contributors, or were executives, their age and pedigree etc.

Would love to see the distribution + standard deviation say, for computer programmer who quits the job to do a startup would gain or lose in earnings per year.

(2) of funded all startup; the alpha of investment: total return on investment - (S&P500 Index return in duration of funding to IPO/exit) / (S&P Index Return)

Maybe this data-set should be split further into bins of people involved: founders, first 10 percentile employees by join date, second 50 percentile employees and so forth...

Would love to see the distribution of return on investing in startup's as an investor vs. investing in S&P500.

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#30

Post by minimaxir »

jaz46 wrote: post #25
CPLX wrote: post #15

What the hell is he talking about? Is the summary of that article something like "this one VC didn't buy shares from me but then I got rich so fuck the haters 99% of you are going to be rich too" or something? The article is like a word salad.

Justin is saying that VCs understand what's hot now, but are sometimes bad a predicting future value. So to founders, if you're creating value, keep going even if VCs don't see the light yet. They'll come around.

The haters-gonna-hate philosophy in Silicon Valley is starting to become a problem.

There's a lot of luck involved in making a startup, and startups can fail for any number of reasons that no data can predict. The notion that if you do your best, you will succeed, is dangerous to naive entrepreneurs.

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