The 99% (of startups) • Hacker News Board

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#171

Post by noname123 » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 9:25 PM UTC

jmathai wrote: post #145

noname123 wrote: post #29

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…

Thank you jmathai for digging up your numbers and posting them again. Really appreciate it, echoing the previous poster, I think living expenses really shouldn't be part of equation as you would incur them anyways if you had a FT job.

I think it is really impressive that you generated a significant income, which puts you arguably in a relatively high percentile of people who try to do startups.

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#172

Post by ConfuciusSay » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 10:52 PM UTC

maaku wrote: post #151

scythe wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extremely unpopular fact: Berkshire has fundamentally the same business model as Bain Capital. They just do it better.

I disagree, but let's say you are right. Then that model does outperform the market, no?

It does, but how much of that comes down to lobbying. I wonder who was pressuring Obama to not approve Keystone, and who also happens to own a ton of railways that transport oil?

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#173

Post by bduerst » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 11:25 PM UTC

Estragon wrote: post #169

cunac wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is fascinating that people think most of the code from startups is crown jewels. If you look closely 99% of code is not hard to reproduce it is just time consuming to write but I doubt you will find some breakthrough ideas. Sure you might find some cool/impressive thing here and there but especially at early stages nothing there except number of hours put in. I know people tend to glorify things they write but mos…

If I was a VC assessing a firm, I would love to get a look at their git repository, and not just for due diligence. I would know where their demos are inadequate, which would be very useful for bargaining.

If you're a VC serious enough to start bargaining, you're going to have done a code audit already (whether or not it's on github) to validate claims.

The real value in these firms is not the code, but the employees' ability to execute on the entire business idea that their code supports.

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#174

Post by jodrellblank » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 9:21 AM UTC

Androider wrote: post #80

coffeemug wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This gives an interesting glimpse into the prognostication abilities of supposedly brilliant VC's. The question isn't whether VCs are brilliant according to some absolute metric. The question is whether they deploy capital better than random chance. The numbers show that top ten VCs consistently do.

Take 1000 people, have each predict a coin flip 10 times. The top 10 players will have predicted way better than random chance would have you believe. Why several of them are even 10 for 10, they must have special prediction powers! ;) Grow the player base, increase the number of predictions, you'll end up with some real super-stars who just go on winning. They'll probably write books and lecture about their techniqu…

British illusionist Derren Brown made a documentary about this, called "The System", where he wrote letters to people predicting the outcome of horse races using his secret system, and suggesting they place a bet.

He sent different predictions to different people, some saw his predictions come true, and he sent more letters to all those people. And then repeated that, eventually narrowing it down to one person, who saw week after week correct gambling predictions, and really believed he had a system for winning.

She borrowed family money to bet big - then he revealed that she was the result of survivor bias and he had no system.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/derren-brown-the-system/

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#175

Post by jmathai » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 7:09 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #159

sergiosgc wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Trovebox shut down in January 2015 so that equity is worth nothing.

We sold the technology to Western Digital and went along for an acquihire. In the end it approaches break even but even that's nearly negligible.

Re: The 99% (of startups)

#176

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 7:26 PM UTC

jmathai wrote: post #175

jacquesm wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trovebox shut down in January 2015 so that equity is worth nothing.

We sold the technology to Western Digital and went along for an acquihire. In the end it approaches break even but even that's nearly negligible.

Pity! I had my fingers crossed that you would have some kind of neat exit, you certainly deserved it with all the hard work put in. Better luck next round!