91–100 of 231 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to be willing to drive a hard bargain, but that's not unethical, nor does it make you an asshole. I'm not sure being an outright asshole is ever required. Do you think it is?
Yes. Mainly when dealing with other assholes.
> There is a small cadre of people who actually have what it takes to successfully build an NBT, and experienced investors are pretty good at recognizing them. Because of this, they don't have trouble raising money. That's a pretty specious statement. I don't know how he came up with that; it certainly doesn't match with a lot of reality.
> I don't know how he came up with that By looking at history. If you look lists of the most valuable startups the vast majority of them didn't have any trouble raising money. In fact, I can only think of a single recent (last 10 years) counterexample.
There is a small cadre of people who actually have what it takes to successfully build an NBT, and experienced investors are pretty good at recognizing them. I really do question this. The "problem of induction"[1] comes into play when you start talking about pattern matching and learning from "experience". That is, there's no guarantee that the future will look like the past. Before Zuckerberg was Zuckerberg, I wond…
I recall seeing a comment by Paul Graham somewhere to the effect that Zuckerberg set off his "founder detector" very strongly. This was after Zuckerberg was successful, admittedly, but it at least gives some suggestion that someone skilled at recognizing founders would have seen his potential.
My 2 cents - As an investor or potential employee when analyzing a startup, pay close attention to how scrappy and capital efficient they are. Do they have excessively nice office space? Are the founders making too much in salary? Does it seem like the executives are working like animals, or do they have the big company mindset where they take it easy? Startups are nothing like established, revenue-generating compani…
When you see startups blow millions a year on AWS spend because its "easy", when you could do the same on dedicated hardware for 1/10th or even 1/100th the price, it always shocks me. Yes, queue the comments about "Total cost of ownership", past the point where you cant afford an OPs person(s) (which you will eventually need for AWS anyways) AWS is a money-sucking black hole.
The axe you're grinding is profoundly weird, and indeed a large part of my business is because the stuff we build is extremely cost-competitive with dedicated hardware. Difference being that I can open up the console and start shooting servers and nothing breaks. You're not saying the same with the overwhelming majority of naive "dedicated hardware" deploys, especially at the levels of skill and expenditure that small companies can employ.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely you can succeed without working like an animal? You probably can't take it easy like with a larger established company, but it doesn't mean you have to run yourself to into the ground in order to be successful.
Normal employees should work hard but not ridiculous amounts. Executives, whose compensation is highly tied to stock value, should be animals, at least in the early pre-revenue stages. That is my opinion.
The author makes good points here. While it's true that YC and other venture investors invest in many companies to increase the chances of large returns on the best of their portfolio companies, there is another significant advantage to YC having a bunch of companies in each batch - the teams that are not doing so well are a source of talent for the teams that are doing well. At some point YC can and has encouraged t…
So, pro tip: If you want to successfully invest, treat it like gardening rather than gambling.
There is a small cadre of people who actually have what it takes to successfully build an NBT, and experienced investors are pretty good at recognizing them. I really do question this. The "problem of induction"[1] comes into play when you start talking about pattern matching and learning from "experience". That is, there's no guarantee that the future will look like the past. Before Zuckerberg was Zuckerberg, I wond…
I recall seeing a comment by Paul Graham somewhere to the effect that Zuckerberg set off his "founder detector" very strongly. This was after Zuckerberg was successful, admittedly, but it at least gives some suggestion that someone skilled at recognizing founders would have seen his potential.
> And Graham knew that he had his own biases. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!’ ”
A VC once told me that there were "good angels and bad angels" Too many bad ones and he wouldn't invest. A couple specific bad ones and he wouldn't invest. To that, there are also good angels that will make introductions, spend time coaching, and really help beyond what I'd call a "hobby." It seems like there are good people out there with money and knowledge and they really want to help out others in an angelic sort of way knowing full well they will likely lose their investment.
There is a small cadre of people who actually have what it takes to successfully build an NBT, and experienced investors are pretty good at recognizing them. I really do question this. The "problem of induction"[1] comes into play when you start talking about pattern matching and learning from "experience". That is, there's no guarantee that the future will look like the past. Before Zuckerberg was Zuckerberg, I wond…
I recall seeing a comment by Paul Graham somewhere to the effect that Zuckerberg set off his "founder detector" very strongly. This was after Zuckerberg was successful, admittedly, but it at least gives some suggestion that someone skilled at recognizing founders would have seen his potential.