Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 224 posts

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#81

Post by lumost »

t0mas88 wrote: post #66
ethbr0 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed a guy the other day. CS degree. "I have a proven track record of building and leading amazing engineering teams." "Okay. What's the difference between a character and a string?" *crickets* We all have our specialities, but jesus ¢@&#ing christ: if you're interviewing for an engineering role, of any sort, you should be able to answer basic questions.

What role were you interviewing for? Sure anyone with a serious CS degree at some point knew the difference between a char and a string. But if you're hiring a VP or product in a larger org, it doesn't matter whether they remember because the people they'd be managing wouldn't even need to know.

It’s quite possible to avoid learning this. A trivial way is to do all of your coding in python, and then never do anything more advanced than a todo MVC app. Do this for 3 years then get promoted to management and stop coding.

When money was cheap, delivery didn’t matter for a while.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#82

Post by Dylan16807 »

jacquesm wrote: post #54
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #40

Are all VCs like this or did OP strike out with some bad apples?

I don't think the VCs are to blame at all. This is a one sided story but that side already gives off so many signals of not being cut out for the job that it isn't surprising to see them heaping the blame on another party. If you're the CEO and you are looking for capital you don't do that whilst giving the capital providers a mandate to run your company by proxy. That's on him. If VCs tell you to do 'X' and you don'…

It seems fair to assign a lot of blame to the person that told you to do it and paid for you to do it as the owner of a good chunk of it.

You don't think that should have any blame at all?

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#83

Post by xwdv »

seizethecheese wrote: post #33

I’m a VC backed founder. The VCs will give you lots of advice, but generally are removed enough from the business that it’s obviously up to you to make final strategic decisions. This story is remarkable in one sense: the founder removes all of his own agency from the story. The vast majority of initial financing rounds leave the founders in control of companies these days… Finally, a VC backed company is always like…

A nice small SaaS will also almost always die quick.

IMO, it is foolish to hinge the decision of taking VC money or not based on potential lifespan alone.

VC money could kill your startup quickly, but you could potentially make a lot of stable money in that short period of time, and end up better off than collecting smaller profit from your small SaaS that lives for a longer period of time.

And yea most of the time you are reinvesting profits but you should hopefully be paying yourself too along the way. Not to mention you are also paying a lot of other people as well and creating value for them.

Ultimately VC money isn’t destroyed, it’s just reabsorbed into a wider economy.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#84

Post by AndrewKemendo »

jamesaurichs wrote: post #55
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in what sense are we better off for this? Is the claim that innovation only happens in the USA? That the only good companies are US companies? What are the specific benefits, other than merely indulging the startup fantasies of a relatively small number of founders, that come from this "high risk, high reward" environment?

We get more rockets (literally), faster. We get Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Stripe, etc...

Said another way, America is the sandbox for the rich to experiment on the poor, with technology that may or may not be good for the poor but ultimately doesn’t matter because the ultimate winner is always the one funding them.

It’s the test and staging servers for global capitalism

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#85

Post by optymizer »

matrix_overload wrote: post #75
raincole wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He took VC funding so he did it perfectly right (well, depending on how much his previous job made).

Then I sincerely hope he played the kickbacks-and-favors game correctly and the reddit post is just for optics.

I'm not in the know. What's the kickbacks-and-favors game? I understand the words, but how does it work?

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#86

Post by ethbr0 »

somestag wrote: post #74
yieldcrv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bytes it takes up and how it can be cast? What answer would you be looking for

Presumably something like "a string is a sequence of characters" would be a good first answer, though it might prompt some follow-up questions. I love how questions like this suddenly become more complicated when you have a deeper understanding of the internals. Your first instinct of an answer might not be 100% correct. If I were asked this question unexpectedly, I'd probably trip over myself a few times as I though…

My high water mark was the basics... and then the candidate drawing an analogy between char as primitive and char-array-based-strings as object oriented classes that offered additional functionality on top of chars.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#87

Post by ghaff »

Waterluvian wrote: post #72
ghaff wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems obvious? At least in the tech industry, I'd expect someone in an executive role to have some understanding of VC given how it influences so much that happens in the space. If you hired someone from a traditional manufacturing company, maybe not.

I think more than anything this demonstrates the “my context must be everyone’s context” fallacy. The VC world is a little slice of the tech world. Hacker News is a wee little slice of the tech community.

If you're in a senior management position in a company which has any M&A activity, I'd expect you to have at least some understanding of VC basics.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#88

Post by jamesaurichs »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #84
jamesaurichs wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get more rockets (literally), faster. We get Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Stripe, etc...

Said another way, America is the sandbox for the rich to experiment on the poor, with technology that may or may not be good for the poor but ultimately doesn’t matter because the ultimate winner is always the one funding them. It’s the test and staging servers for global capitalism

Tesla creates American jobs for the poor to work in manufacturing

SpaceX creates aspiration for the poor

Google allows the poor to advertise their product to anyone in the world cheaply

Facebook allows the poor to market their product to anyone in the world cheaply

AirBnB allows the poor to live in an expensive city, cheaply

Stripe allows the poor to sell their product to anyone in the world cheaply

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#89

Post by lotsofmoney »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #51
jamesaurichs wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The built-in culture of risk taking in US can't be underestimated. Yes, we joke about Florida man and lament about the excess funding for startups. But with great risk comes great reward, and chances for inexperienced founders to prove themselves. Nowhere else on the planet are you able to do that with such magnitude, not in Japan, not in Europe, not in China (now that they're broke and in a Great Depression, and Xi…

And in what sense are we better off for this? Is the claim that innovation only happens in the USA? That the only good companies are US companies? What are the specific benefits, other than merely indulging the startup fantasies of a relatively small number of founders, that come from this "high risk, high reward" environment?

An insane amount of money, world hegemony, and a very high standard of living. I’m not sure the average European appreciates just how comfortable life in the US is. And the average American doesn’t know that things they take fir granted are luxuries even to Western Europeans. Outside of a handful of small countries with specialized economies, European income per capita is at or below per capita income in even the poorest US state. Even the vast majority of poor people here have iPhones and cars and can afford to run their air conditioners at 68F all day.

Re: My $0->$100M->$0 in 5 years story

#90

Post by matrix_overload »

optymizer wrote: post #85
matrix_overload wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I sincerely hope he played the kickbacks-and-favors game correctly and the reddit post is just for optics.

I'm not in the know. What's the kickbacks-and-favors game? I understand the words, but how does it work?

You hire useless people and pay them bloated salaries using investors' money. Then they order something from a consulting firm ran by your wife, or just remember the favor, and hire you into an overpaid useless role next time they secure a round.

On paper it looks like money is being spent on product development. In practice, it's a network of friends using buzzwords to direct VC money into their pockets.

Investors don't mind it too much. Fund managers are not investing their own money either (and are part of the game) and angels hope that a chance of owning 1% of the next Uber justifies all the financial shenanigans.

Post reply on HN