This is fucking insane. $300M for a dog walking company, a dog walking company. A dog walking company. A fucking dog walking company.
I work for a Healthcare startup and we are actually delivering health care and value to patients, care providers and insurers, and we are scrutinized 50 ways from Sunday in order to get table scraps, because most of them don't think we have a real business. But dog walking seems like the next market defining breakout.
Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
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Re: Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
#12You’ve got to applaud Masayoshi Son for his tenacity at the very least. Lived through the Dot Com Crash, caused the next one 20 years later. That’s a big achievement in my book. How many people can really say they’ve been able to do something like that? [Edit] I should probably add a caveat that Masayoshi Son isn’t the dumb one here. No, he’s actually quite the genius, managing to convince Saudia Arabia to basically…
Re: Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
#13Hot take - when it's all said and done (e.g. when the whole fund gets returned) the vision fund is going to devalue more companies than it is going to value them. If they're charging a management fee then they'll still make money but their LPs aint gonna be happy in the long term.
Re: Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
#14You’ve got to applaud Masayoshi Son for his tenacity at the very least. Lived through the Dot Com Crash, caused the next one 20 years later. That’s a big achievement in my book. How many people can really say they’ve been able to do something like that? [Edit] I should probably add a caveat that Masayoshi Son isn’t the dumb one here. No, he’s actually quite the genius, managing to convince Saudia Arabia to basically…
Re: Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
#15This is fucking insane. $300M for a dog walking company, a dog walking company. A dog walking company. A fucking dog walking company.
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
I’m sorry, all due respect, but.... a dog walking company.
Re: Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
#16Other than the ARM, Nvidia, and a few billion in biotech (about $3 billion[1]) investments, so much of the fund has gone into pretty "obvious" traditional startups.
If I had a $100 billion fund, I wouldn't be swinging for these singles and doubles (which Uber and WeWork were by the time Softbank got involved, although these companies can still provide value to customers).
Vision Fund should've been out-competing Google X to become the financial backer of basically the next Bell Labs. Instead of 3% biotech and 20% Uber and WeWork and Wag, I'd have flipped those two numbers.
The biggest loss from the Vision Fund is the opportunity cost of all the great disease-eliminating, fundamental-science research that could've had much greater upside than WeWork. And I never hear that opportunity cost discussed.
EDIT: I've added an additional comment with more supporting arguments for taking bigger risks but more ambitious risks when managing large sums: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=21096651
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/softbanks-vision-fund-deployi...
Re: Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
#17You’ve got to applaud Masayoshi Son for his tenacity at the very least. Lived through the Dot Com Crash, caused the next one 20 years later. That’s a big achievement in my book. How many people can really say they’ve been able to do something like that? [Edit] I should probably add a caveat that Masayoshi Son isn’t the dumb one here. No, he’s actually quite the genius, managing to convince Saudia Arabia to basically…
Masa Son in 2019: hold my beer, watch dis.
Re: Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
#18The moment the interviewer told me they worked with a php stack. I asked why they'd chosen to go with php given that the product was so new they could've chosen any newer tech. stack (JavaScript framework) and probably been better off. The interviewer didn't really response to my question.
The entire conversation with said person, was them talking at me for about 30 minutes. They said the company was going to try to pivot to developing some service surrounding their lock box service for the keys to get into people's houses for the dog walking.
It seemed very "directionless" and gave me a very bad taste in my mouth. They never got back to me or anything. Which was fine by me since I wasn't going to pursue them any further.