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Grub with the partners of Sequoia Capital

grubwith.us

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Re: Grub with the partners of Sequoia Capital

#21

Post by felipe »

rewind wrote: post #17
wavesplash wrote: post #9

Starving entrepreneurs outbidding each other to sit with two rich guys? It is just me or does this seem backwards?

People seeking knowledge, experience, and advice outbidding each other to sit down with people with knowledge, experience, and advice. For charity. Doesn't seem so backwards to me.

Start-up knowledge, experience and advice comes from entrepreneurs, not VCs. Read their bios, they are financial and marketing professionals. Nothing wrong with that, but they are not the kind of people who started companies from nothing and now are VCs (like PG for example).

It should be the other way around: They should be buying lunches for entrepreneurs. Scouting deals is their job after all.

Re: Grub with the partners of Sequoia Capital

#22

Post by chrismanfrank »

Is this a pivot for grubwith.us? I know the founders original idea was to connect people via family-style restaurant meals. But I've signed up for 3 meals now, and all were because I wanted to meet someone specific (Harj, other YC founders, Robert Scoble). It's a brilliant marketing idea, and a great example of why YC backs founders, not ideas. I could see these mini-fundraiser dinners being a huge market.

Re: Grub with the partners of Sequoia Capital

#23

Post by orijing »

klochner wrote: post #18
orijing wrote: post #8

It's a great idea. However, unless I'm mistaken, I believe his auction mechanism is not any of the standard "revenue maximizing" OR "social utility maximizing" mechanisms. The "maximum amount you would pay for this meal" suggests the meal's value to you. However, for all K=# of seats, his Kth-price auction does not have the property that inputting your truthful value is your dominant strategy. The price should really…

It's actually the multi-unit analogue of the first-price sealed bid auction. Note that in FPSB you also don't have an incentive to report your true value, but it is revenue maximizing and efficient in expectation assuming risk-neutral bidders [1]. The basic gist of the proof is that everyone has an incentive to shade their bids down in proportion to the probability that their bid sets the price. The amount you shade…

Yeah, it might be what they were after, but their text (How much are you willing to pay?) suggests that your dominant strategy is to input your true value.

If that's what they're after, the text is misleading in my opinion...

Re: Grub with the partners of Sequoia Capital

#24

Post by dwynings »

felipe wrote: post #21
rewind wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seeking knowledge, experience, and advice outbidding each other to sit down with people with knowledge, experience, and advice. For charity. Doesn't seem so backwards to me.

Start-up knowledge, experience and advice comes from entrepreneurs, not VCs. Read their bios, they are financial and marketing professionals. Nothing wrong with that, but they are not the kind of people who started companies from nothing and now are VCs (like PG for example). It should be the other way around: They should be buying lunches for entrepreneurs. Scouting deals is their job after all.

You don't consider Alfred Lin an entrepreneur?

Re: Grub with the partners of Sequoia Capital

#25

Post by ChuckMcM »

wavesplash wrote: post #9

Starving entrepreneurs outbidding each other to sit with two rich guys? It is just me or does this seem backwards?

Since the possible set of bidders includes non-starving non-entrepreneurs and everything in between, the vector relationship is direction-less and thus incapable of being 'backwards'.

That being said, this has been a staple of charity 'silent auctions' for a while. I and 79 of my closest friends had lunch with Dean Martin in Las Vegas one year as part of a MD telethon related charity event. That was like 1977 I think.

From the point of view of encouraging entreprenurial growth it is probably counter productive, you've got a lunch, with some guys who understand running a small business, but are you really going to be able to develop enough shared context to make any improvement over your current plan? I think it is unlikely and a trip to the library to read some of the things they have published (or accounts of how they did what they did) would give you a stronger benefit as the thoughts on paper are concise and on target, and not competing with 4 other people for attention.

Now if you're a founder doing a funding round and you think your pitch is going to take more than 30 seconds and you've been trying for weeks to get them to just take the damn meeting so you could pitch them, well this could be one way to work that.

Re: Grub with the partners of Sequoia Capital

#27

Post by snprbob86 »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #15

GrubWith.us removes your period as soon as you type it, so if you try to enter (say) 100.00, it is actually a bid for 10,000 -- I consider this a VERY BAD THING in this context.

Beyond that, it's bugged:

    $(".only_numbers").keydown(function(e) {
        var key = e.charCode || e.keyCode || 0;
        // allow backspace, tab, delete, arrows, numbers and keypad numbers ONLY
        return (
           key == 8 || 
           key == 9 ||
           key == 46 ||
           (key >= 37 && key = 48 && key = 96 && key
You're able to type ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) into .only_numbers boxes.

And you can't press cmd+a to select all, or ctrl+a to go to the beginning of the line, and argh all manner of awful.

Re: Grub with the partners of Sequoia Capital

#28

Post by alain94040 »

wavesplash wrote: post #9

Starving entrepreneurs outbidding each other to sit with two rich guys? It is just me or does this seem backwards?

Personally, I prefer a system where merit determines who gets the lunch with the VIP. That's why we built http://letslunch.com

Just last Friday, two entrepreneurs had lunch with Drew Houston and Trip Adler. Because they paid the most? No. Because they got rated highly by their peers.

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