51–60 of 64 posts
As I said, just a subversive thought. I am sure it doesn't apply to any of us here ;-)
Maybe I'm dumb. I don't understand why anyone would give up spit for such a small amount of money. That early and the money offered is so small. Forget about the % and the stock and all that. From the amounts I read about I could do contract design work for a couple months and earn that much. Yikes. I mean, even if one of, say, two founders took a 6 mo contract working somewhere, and slso pounded code late at night,…
I think this sentence doesn't really make sense: "As you work your way forward in the venture funding process, the ratio of help to money increases, because earlier stage companies have different needs." Isn't one of the points of the essay the fact that, as a company progresses, the amount of help from a VC decreases relative to the amount of money received?
Maybe I'm dumb. I don't understand why anyone would give up spit for such a small amount of money. That early and the money offered is so small. Forget about the % and the stock and all that. From the amounts I read about I could do contract design work for a couple months and earn that much. Yikes. I mean, even if one of, say, two founders took a 6 mo contract working somewhere, and slso pounded code late at night,…
Either that or you didn't read the essay. Its whole point is that money is not the important ingredient in early stage investing.
People often say that the combination of team, market opportunity, and technology is what it takes. One typical cause for failure of great teams is that they are pointed at the wrong markets. The other usual cause is that the "great team" really isn't. I believe that your model, by encouranging early alphas, and by giving guidance serves to honestly vet the team and the market.
I think you guys are doing great work because you create new deal flows with a fraction of the money. That, in turn will reduce VC's risks, and lower their rewards. I'm going to guess that if you guys feed companies into VC deal flows, VCs will start looking more like banks and less like venture investors.
pg: But all it would have taken in the beginning would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the company could have died. Actually, it's even more interesting than that. Prior to AdWords (and, more importantly, the acquisition of Applied Semantics that gave them AdSense), Google did not have a real source of revenue. At all. Google Appliances were cute but negligible. Aft…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not atypical but also not the majority. I don't think it's a stretch to say most people pay for grad school.
It depends whether you're counting law school, business school, medical school, pharmacy school, nursing school, etc. as grad school. Among Hackers grad school is far more likely to be of the type "studying fractal patterns in African architecture while teaching two sections of introductory socio-cultural anthropology" Generally you pay through the nose for the first kind and they pay you (a little) to do the second…