I like reading this guys blog, it's well written and weaves a nice story to follow almost always.
It's a shame a lot of the Tumblr crowd are like this:
http://www.reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction
The technology seems great and simple to use.
The One-Person Product
11–20 of 107 posts
Re: The One-Person Product
#12I know very little about David Karp. But after reading this, I'm a bit surprised that he decided to sell Tumblr. The way Marco talks about David's disinterest in money, and his singular obsession with Tumblr, made me think he wouldn't even consider selling it to someone else. I'd be curious to hear his reasons for selling, as oppose to doing a strategic investment like Facebook did with Microsoft at one point.
I believe they were running out of money and needed to do more work to bring revenues appropriately up. Yahoo allows them to not need to focus on revenues, as they already have a large and established an ad sales team.
Re: The One-Person Product
#13I know very little about David Karp. But after reading this, I'm a bit surprised that he decided to sell Tumblr. The way Marco talks about David's disinterest in money, and his singular obsession with Tumblr, made me think he wouldn't even consider selling it to someone else. I'd be curious to hear his reasons for selling, as oppose to doing a strategic investment like Facebook did with Microsoft at one point.
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Re: The One-Person Product
#14The post says he won't make "yacht-and-helicopter money"... I think helicopters are cheaper than he thinks. On a billion-dollar acquisition, I can't imagine the near-cofounder having less than 1% (hopefully quite a bit more). This means at least $10M, which should be plenty for a helicopter. Maybe I'm reading his comment too literally.
Re: The One-Person Product
#15The post says he won't make "yacht-and-helicopter money"... I think helicopters are cheaper than he thinks. On a billion-dollar acquisition, I can't imagine the near-cofounder having less than 1% (hopefully quite a bit more). This means at least $10M, which should be plenty for a helicopter. Maybe I'm reading his comment too literally.
Well, lots of brand new yachts can be had for mere hundreds of thousands, too. I don't think Marco has actually priced them. :)
Re: The One-Person Product
#16The post says he won't make "yacht-and-helicopter money"... I think helicopters are cheaper than he thinks. On a billion-dollar acquisition, I can't imagine the near-cofounder having less than 1% (hopefully quite a bit more). This means at least $10M, which should be plenty for a helicopter. Maybe I'm reading his comment too literally.
My sense is Marco is looking at the money in terms of: "how much yearly income can my money generate, and what kind of lifestyle would that be?" (kind of like thinking about a retirement account). In that sense $10M in savings is not enough to start buying yachts and helicopters assuming he doesn't want to blow all the money at once like a stereotypical lottery winner.
More importantly, he makes it clear he'll never have any money worries if he's careful. That implies a decent amount of money, and I think that's what most people on Hacker News really wish they had.
Re: The One-Person Product
#17I know very little about David Karp. But after reading this, I'm a bit surprised that he decided to sell Tumblr. The way Marco talks about David's disinterest in money, and his singular obsession with Tumblr, made me think he wouldn't even consider selling it to someone else. I'd be curious to hear his reasons for selling, as oppose to doing a strategic investment like Facebook did with Microsoft at one point.
I believe they were running out of money and needed to do more work to bring revenues appropriately up. Yahoo allows them to not need to focus on revenues, as they already have a large and established an ad sales team.
In contrast, another VC round surely would have forced them to focus on revenues, perhaps even at the expense of user experience and product quality.
Re: The One-Person Product
#18I like reading this guys blog, it's well written and weaves a nice story to follow almost always. It's a shame a lot of the Tumblr crowd are like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/tumblrinaction The technology seems great and simple to use.
The technology seems great and simple to use.
There's a reason why I call it "Fumblr". To me the user interface is hella cumbersome.
But I spend much of my day inside Emacs, so...
Re: The One-Person Product
#19The post says he won't make "yacht-and-helicopter money"... I think helicopters are cheaper than he thinks. On a billion-dollar acquisition, I can't imagine the near-cofounder having less than 1% (hopefully quite a bit more). This means at least $10M, which should be plenty for a helicopter. Maybe I'm reading his comment too literally.
For a helicopter, you need a hangar, a pilot, regular maintenance, insurance, fuel/oil as well as membership/pad fees if you actually want to fly anywhere besides airports. You could do a small helicopter for $200,000-$400,000 and then about $30,000-$40,000 a year in recurring costs before pilot, fuel and oil. You can expect $300-$400 per hour of flight time. If the 10 million is invested and has a return of 4% annually, the helicopter will cost 10% of the max you can pull out without depleting principle. That also doesn't include loan payments if you didn't buy the helicopter outright.
So, helicopter money is a lot higher than it looks.
Re: The One-Person Product
#20Well I guess that answers how marco is doing RE: post acquisition