151–160 of 176 posts
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Explain Berkshire Hathaway for me then, please.
Extremely unpopular fact: Berkshire has fundamentally the same business model as Bain Capital. They just do it better.
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Why would that be depressing?
Well, for people upholding certain cultural values like me, which are not exactly too far-fetched, it's pretty obvious why an era where people watch live gaming in droves is depressing when contrasted with the decline of journalism. I'd rather there was a citizenry that read the Washington Post more than watching others play video games (or NFL or whatever) more. Maybe people would have a better handle of politics, a…
I think you're just getting old - and I don't mean it in an insulting way. You can be certain that the Greatest Generation weren't pleased with how the baby boomers were not "upholding certain cultural values" when they were listening to Rock n' Roll instead of "real music"[1]: and yet now Rock n' Roll has it's own cultural cachet. Culture is dynamic. I do empathize with you, but complaining that the younger generation is losing values is an old, old phenomenon.
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Texas sharpshooter fallacy[0]. The specific problem with your argument is that you didn't set forth a hypothesis that would predict which VCs would be successful before they'd all started investing their money. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
Don't think that applies, the rules or criteria for economic succes are set. Perhaps the comparison should be against the index.
If you have enough people flipping coins you're bound to end up with some people who appear to have significant skill in consistently flipping heads in your pool of coin flippers. (Especially if the pool tends to replace people who don't flip heads in their first couple of tries with new entrants)
It's arguably the Texas sharpshooter fallacy because we define "top VCs" after the fact by looking at their past returns, rather than identifying the "most talented VCs" from a very early stage. Perhaps identifying the "crack shot" from a blindfolded firing squad would be a better analogy.
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Don't think that applies, the rules or criteria for economic succes are set. Perhaps the comparison should be against the index.
The point is that there's a relatively large number of VCs, a relatively wide distribution of returns and the pool of established VCs is skewed by those that don't enjoy early successes tending to be replaced with new VCs, irrespective of whether that was down to them being unluckier or less skilled than those which remain. If you have enough people flipping coins you're bound to end up with some people who appear to…
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Thank you for being (seemingly) the only person on HN who understands that startups are a lottery. A very, very expensive lottery.
But they aren't a lottery. Startups (and business in general) is about unfair advantages - knowing information that other people don't, and acting on that knowledge. As a founder, your job is to find your unfair advantage and execute on it. Startups that successfully find a valuable secret and exploit it become worth billions. Startups that have no such advantage usually die. I thought the article was getting at this…
I think the word that succinctly communicates what you really mean in this thread is 'insight'.
Successful startups are about exploiting insights that seem obvious to you but not to others.
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 startu…
Dug up a post of mine from 2 years ago [1]. I bootstrapped for 14 months without salary and then took a pay cut for 2 years. Here are my numbers. I blogged about this as well [2]. Loss of salary for 1 year, 2 months Does not include loss of 401k match or ESPP -$140,000 Successful Kickstarter @ $25k +$20,000 8 week contracting project @ 20hrs / week +$16,000 Living expenses for 14 months (savings/stocks) -$70,000 Post…
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Pretty sure the fb board wouldn't have a problem with Zuck getting any in into one of their top competitors. Zuck bleeds fb and a minority stake worth a fraction of his net worth isn't going to negatively impact his judgement. It's pretty common for companies to get minority stakes in competitors to get an in. Granted that is much more common in the public sector and sometimes sews the seed for a hostile takeover. Th…
> It's pretty common for companies to get minority stakes in competitors to get an in. Do you have an example of this? It will be conflict of interest and may bring anti-trust issues. No competitor will allow access to confidential information and board proceedings to be observed by competitor. I have only seen this happening when two companies settle some legal claims (ex: QTM-Data Domain) or form partnership (not c…
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It's fascinating to me that many startups put their crown jewels on github, a company with an inexplicably high valuation due to investments from some of the most successful VC companies. Don't they worry about exactly the kind of insider trading you're talking about, or worse? Same goes for slack.
"Crown jewels"? You mean a git repo? You know it's a matter of minutes to migrate between git repo hosting, right? :)
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Dug up a post of mine from 2 years ago [1]. I bootstrapped for 14 months without salary and then took a pay cut for 2 years. Here are my numbers. I blogged about this as well [2]. Loss of salary for 1 year, 2 months Does not include loss of 401k match or ESPP -$140,000 Successful Kickstarter @ $25k +$20,000 8 week contracting project @ 20hrs / week +$16,000 Living expenses for 14 months (savings/stocks) -$70,000 Post…
Thanks for the numbers. I imagine you got equity of the company in the end, so in terms of your personal asset accounting, it should be factored in (not that getting a valuation on equity is easy, if it hasn't been traded).
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The way you phrase this reminds me of what I studied happening in the hedge fund world, in that some of the 'top performer' funds only out-performed the market due to insider trading. Galleon (Raj - convicted), SAC (sanctioned), and probably a handful more that got spooked out of the avenue of enrichment. It almost seems - almost - like there may be a similar insular community whereby those who feel like piling in wi…
There's an old saying that "you can't fool an honest man". Where did all the Albanians who poured their savings into Ponzi schemes think the crazy returns were coming from? Drugs. Where have a 419 scammer's supposed riches come from? Usually embezzled from Nigerian public funds.
You can certainly fool one.