101–110 of 200 posts
The cynical side of me wonders if all this is "helpful advice" from VCs is just designed to bring valuations down to earth.
Contrarian takes aren't necessarily correct by the virtue of their contrarianism.
So the above is obviously written through a VC lens. Through an entrepreneur's lens - who also survived the dot-com bust (at etoys.com) and has since run several failed and now successful businesses - I'd add the following: The most valuable advice in this post reminds me of Marc A's awesome blog entry. Quote: "Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a "not winning" problem.…
I would love to read more about your experiences. I bet a lot of entrepreneurs can learn a thing or two from them.
So, just like it is in most of the world, then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couple of points. First, The idea of risk-reward trade-off is stupid. (This is demonstrated in my footnote.)[1] Second: startups aren't startups because they have a high risk of failure. Simply because they expect to be much bigger in 24 months than they are today. Someone making an app they want to sell on Android and iOS for $2 to all of the people who use smart phones is not a "small business", it's a startup. Why…
I was watching this comment carefully as I thought I might have to delete it (due to people not understanding the arguments therein). It started rising to +2 or +3, so I stopped watching it. Now that I've checked again, I see that a few downvoters got it down to -1. Since it is too late, I am happy to explain the thoughts in the above comment. I studied this area of economics from formal sources as well as having exp…
Risk is defined (in finance) as exposure to volatility.
Volatility is measured by calculating the standard deviation of annualized returns on an investment over a given period of time. The longer the time horizon of the investment, the more exposure to unknown and unaccountable variables you face.
Ultimately, this is because we do not have perfect information regarding the future. In fact, we have a very limited pool information that gets exponentially smaller the further out into the future we look.
In your example, the professor from 70 years in the future is much more valuable than the one from 2 years in the future precisely because the 70 professor has a much greater set of information about the future. Therefore he minimizes the risk that you will invest in the wrong technology because you already know what the world will need 10, 25, 50, 70 years down the line.
What goes unspoken is how tiny the overall effect of this will be. Yes, it will bring some concentrated pain to investors, CEOs, and employees of lots of companies. But how many people will be genuinely, life-alteringly affected by this? 1000? Maybe a few thousand? 1-2% of SF's population? By way of comparison Google has what, 50,000 employees? I keep having to remind myself that the big companies are the elephants i…
I don't know reliable this [1] is, but it suggests that there are ~50,000 tech employees total in SF, and the top 50 companies employ about 30,000 of those. So the big players have a lot of people, but it's not as dramatically skewed as you're thinking -- maybe 40% of tech employees work at smaller companies. That passes the smell test for me.
Even assuming that the big players wouldn't lay anyone off (they would; they always do) That's more than enough to make an economic dent in a downturn.
[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/02/jobs-at...
What goes unspoken is how tiny the overall effect of this will be. Yes, it will bring some concentrated pain to investors, CEOs, and employees of lots of companies. But how many people will be genuinely, life-alteringly affected by this? 1000? Maybe a few thousand? 1-2% of SF's population? By way of comparison Google has what, 50,000 employees? I keep having to remind myself that the big companies are the elephants i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by jump the shark there? Jumping the shark is normally a bad thing. It is a sign of the beginning of the end for a TV show or franchise.
you're right, I meant crossing the chasm not jumping the shark
The cynical side of me wonders if all this is "helpful advice" from VCs is just designed to bring valuations down to earth.
> If you are in Silicon Valley and your customers are mostly well-paid consumers with no free time, or other venture-backed startups, well, I’d be worried. That's the most beautifully I've heard this thought articulated. I constantly hear people in SV talk publically talk about how they're living years in the future due to getting services from startups that haven't yet hit other markets. These people are very wealth…
I agree with that, but I also have the experience of visiting my sister in 1995 and asking her if she understood the funny string at the bottom of a Toyota commercial that was a URL. She did not. And her only email address was one she had for work, because everyone else either wrote letters or talked with her on the phone. The point I'm trying to make is that many things of the current wave will pass into obscurity a…
We're not working together, we're letting investors decide what we make, and in the end what we produce is ephemeral.
Is our greed hijacking progress?