351–360 of 398 posts
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It's sad that are multiple retorts about "lottery winners." Apparently, just on HN, we have about 25 lottery winners. Quite the coincidence! (cloudflare, shopify, databricks, coinbase, stripe, openai, freshworks, gitlab, dropbox, hashicorp, amplitude, vercel, plaid, hubspot, quip, notion, twilio, etc)
Out of....
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The article is specifically about this value judgement. If you do not value making a profit as a company you have to find value in something else. Which is fine, different things motivate different people and should, but at least be clear that it is fundamentally a values conversation.
Businesses are about profit not values. An NGO is a better vehicle for pushing values than a business.
Companies scale up more effectively than NGOs, attract investment much more easily, and can undertake a wider array of activities to achieve their mission. Then there’s C-corps etc if you want to make it explicit.
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Out of....
Certainly not 1 billion, which is what the lottery chances would be to win 25 times. (1 in 42m)
So far it has been won 403 times[1] what seems around 20 year time span. With a US population of around 360 million. So not sure why 25 winners would require a population of 1 billion.
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What a depressingly nihilistic world view. Certainly if you believe you are beholden to some entity’s rules you must follow then all you can ever learn is what the entity you follow is willing to teach. We took a different path. We talked to our investors generally four times a year at Board meetings. We had a rule that no sentence we said in those meetings could end with a question mark. We recognized that we were t…
A sincere thanks for sharing your experience and insights. Curiosity and a flexible mindset with a fast learning rate and a willingness to challenge even closely held assumptions can result in innovative knowledge under any context, including a vc investment one. But curiosity is not limitless. It is a function of time. And it would be disingenuous to completely refute the fact that a vc frame of reference will affec…
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Businesses are about profit not values. An NGO is a better vehicle for pushing values than a business.
Disagree, it’s often best to leverage the profit motive as a tool for achieving your values-based mission, and companies are usually the best way to do that. Companies scale up more effectively than NGOs, attract investment much more easily, and can undertake a wider array of activities to achieve their mission. Then there’s C-corps etc if you want to make it explicit.
No, I do not have stats for that. It is an observation.
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What tripped me up with real estate agents is how socially skillful they are. It's a survival skill, so as a cohort they're all anomalously good at building rapport and, from there, trust. If you don't know what you're doing, and what they're doing, and you rely on them as the domain experts, there's a pretty decent chance you're not going to be happy with the outcome. Their incentives aren't perfectly aligned with y…
Can you please share a link about understanding "what's going on and learn to read the room"? For real-estate and venture capital.
The incentives are highly not aligned.
If you do not understand that, you'd be disappointed. If you do understand that, you'll see where your agent is coming from.
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Agree that’s the right analysis for many people. Wasn’t arguing whether you should start a startup or not. Just that if you do bootstrapping isn’t inherently better than raising venture capital. Your broader point is important too: startups are unfortunately too often a luxury of the upper class. It is extremely scary to take a risk when you don’t have a safety net. I was personally broke when we started Cloudflare a…
I think we also focus and celebrate too much the route of college drop out start up founders. For these cases yes some family wealth is definitely beneficial as a safety net. But there are also plenty of people that have worked for a while, provided themselves a safety net and go on the startup journey in their 30s and 40s. Eg. Eric Yuan, who was a eng VP already before zoom. But I guess those don’t grab the same hea…
> you’ll also have the non-obvious effect that you hire people who are not perfect fits for your team. That's only if "you" are not a smart manager. You hire some 'B' players, and they in turn hire 'C' players. An 'A' player will hire other 'A' players. The article assumes that your business is already there and running. Many VC-funded startups only really get started when they have enough backing to do it. Hiring re…
I have never seen this effect in practice. I believe it is a trope.
> you’ll also have the non-obvious effect that you hire people who are not perfect fits for your team. That's only if "you" are not a smart manager. You hire some 'B' players, and they in turn hire 'C' players. An 'A' player will hire other 'A' players. The article assumes that your business is already there and running. Many VC-funded startups only really get started when they have enough backing to do it. Hiring re…
> You hire some 'B' players, and they in turn hire 'C' players. An 'A' player will hire other 'A' players. I have never seen this effect in practice. I believe it is a trope.