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I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

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Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#61

He invests in seed rounds where those often go down the drain. The things that matter at this stage are: Founders and general market size. So sure, ignoring the noise of those two makes sense.

>Founders and general market size

And both of them can be as ambiguous as anything. If anything, its impossible to predict who or what can become successful. Look at the historic interview of zuckerberg and his competitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUNX3azkZyk Competitor seems more outspoken, got more airtime, had already monetized yada yada but here we are.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#63

This is probably meant to be, partially, in comparison to Warren Buffet, who famously claims to invest based on reading of financial statements (and other documents) in search of “good businesses.” https://www.amazon.com/Warren-Buffett-Interpretation-Financi... Suspect that both Buffet and Paul’s real methods rely heavily on instinct, context, relationship networks, combination potentials, personality and pattern mat…

Warren Buffet is not investing in startups. There is a big difference between an established business and a startup, insofar that established business has already demonstrated its potential. In startup potential is unknown, yet it's all that it has to offer

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#64

I have built a couple very successful SaaS businesses from scratch. 8 figure businesses. I have never in my life written a unit test or any kind of testing code in 20 years of professional software development.

Over the last 15 years, I built a unicorn and sold it for more than a billion and half. We wrote unit tests extensively.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#66
PG is a very, very bright guy and has left an outsized mark on the first two decades of 21st century consumer tech: his legacy is secure. I'll even grant that pre-A business plan decks are relatively low signal based on what I've seen.

But to just toss out the idea that balance sheets and discounted cash flows should have any bearing whatsoever on the value of an equity is so friggin Bitcoin.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#67
I've been reading a few Lean Startup books recently, and this morning I went to the local government's website to see what advice they could give to register and start a business...

From all the Victoria Government's main business website and to all of their small business grant websites, all I could find was advice on how to write a business plan. This was in complete contrast to all the Lean books that not once talked about business plans but instead focused on customer development.

... maybe it's no wonder 9/10 of new businesses fail if they start with planning documents that take weeks vs "getting out of the building".

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#68
post #10

I understand business plans, but balance sheets? It seems like you'd want to know the financial picture of a company. What else to you look at to, even at the most basic level, determine if the startup is going to be able to pay it's AWS bill and payroll that month?

Software businesses have one balance sheet item: cash.

I'm not sure what stage of company we're talking about here.

I'd argue that for ALL companies, in any industry, working capital--measured on the balance sheet--is a critical data point. That is, you may be booking revenue but not collecting cash from your customers (in an extreme case, the "revenue" may be fictitious, if the software doesn't work and the customer refuses to pay). And while you might have $x of cash on the balance sheet, you could also have a huge and looming payables balance because you're waiting to pay your bills until you're N days past due.

Also, revenue is just what you can actually book per the accounting standards, which has lots of specific tests for software companies. For most SaaS companies, a key number is also deferred revenue, a balance sheet item that records the difference between the cash you've collected (say, up-front for 12 months) and the remaining performance obligation to deliver software over the period. Or, if you have a big service component as part of your offering, a number to watch is the amount of revenue you've booked but not yet billed.

As an investor, I'd also be curious about the future obligations of the company that will consume cash, such as big leases, debt, and other liabilities (eg, legal judgements against the company).

Investors are free to ignore whatever information they'd like, I suppose. And a tiny two-person company probably has a very simple set of financial statements, if any. But those two founders have the ambition to build a big and successful company, I'd argue that understanding how to read financial statements with some mild degree of fluency just isn't that hard and is a very useful skill.

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#69

I have built a couple very successful SaaS businesses from scratch. 8 figure businesses. I have never in my life written a unit test or any kind of testing code in 20 years of professional software development.

Over the last 15 years, I built a unicorn and sold it for more than a billion and half. We wrote unit tests extensively.

Clearly one of you must be wrong or lying

Re: I have never read a business plan or balance sheet

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the last 15 years, I built a unicorn and sold it for more than a billion and half. We wrote unit tests extensively.

Clearly one of you must be wrong or lying

Maybe if I had written unit tests my companies would also sell for over a billion
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