141–150 of 216 posts
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>Facebook had to Facebook was started in some kid's dorm room, and I'm still not entirely clear on what they're selling.
Facebook sells highly targeted ad inventory. They may become the most effective advertising platform on the planet.
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Not sure why you're being downvoted. I've read estimates that Facebook now shows 10% (!) of all U.S. display ad inventory on the internet.
How does that percentage translate in terms of clicks ? Is that also 10% ?
A bit harsh, for something so speculative. It's a rare founder who has no offer he'd take. In fact, if you have shareholders or employees with options, and someone makes you an offer that's significantly above the expected value of your company, fiduciary responsibility requires you to take it. You can bend this requirement to some extent by overestimating your expected value, but there is always some number you'd ha…
True, but the world would probably be better off if Mint were an independent company headed for an IPO. I guess the question is why the existing system of incentives discourages this?
Never underestimate the risk of losing it all because of a failure to diversify.
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I think it's fair to say that 37 Signals' aspirations are, at best, orthogonally related to profit maximisation. They're there to enjoy building things they like, their way. No, I'm not some sort of Kool-aid drinking acolyte. But ultimately, I'm trying to do the same thing - to have fun and do what I find fulfilling, at the expense of considerably faster and more lucrative routes to making more money - so I can appre…
I get that. Really, I do. But they keep saying it over and over again in a public forum. Who are they trying to convince: the reader, or themselves?
Only nerds -- and people with no persuasive skills (or influence) -- think that saying something "the right way," once, is productive.
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> pay off close friends' debts Honorable, but basically flawed. Your relationship with your friends will change because of something like that, it is very very nice of you to want to share the wealth, but someone that has a sense of honour themselves will either have to refuse your offer or they will accept and it will hurt their sense about themselves. Should you ever find such wealth be very careful how you approac…
Had he suggested that he'd pay off his mother's mortgage, I doubt there would be many objections. For some of us, close friends are closer than family. If I came into a sum of money that enabled me to help the people closest to me, I'd do it in a heartbeat - and I'm quite certain that my friends would, too. I also can't imagine taking a heartfelt offer from a close friend as an "intrusion," but then I'm sure it depen…
I'd like to think that this wouldn't change our relationship, but you never know.
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I think what Jason's getting at is to look beyond the offer/fiduciary responsibility mindset and to think bigger, to be motivated by passion and have grander ambitions than looking at one's business as "company + product + customer = offer/price". There are many successful business that truly don't have a number they'd HAVE to take. It's a choice, and that choice doesn't appear to be actively made by this generation'…
I think what PG's getting at is that you can't "look beyond" the fiduciary responsibility "mindset" without being fiduciarily irresponsible. Which is basically illegal.
Everyone on this thread is just screaming their own point of view so they can feel validated.
Quit arguing on HN, and go DO something.
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pay off close friends' debts I think it would be a better idea to loan them money to pay off their debts. Of course, your loan should be interest free, shouldn't have any strings attached, should give your friends very long time to repay - otherwise there wouldn't be any difference between your loan and the 'other' loans in the first place.
Loaning people money is the best way to turn your friendship in to a business. The borrower is slave to the lender; why would you want that dynamic in your friendship?
It becomes a business when
1) you charge interest
2) you have some terms and conditions or attach some "strings"
3) you require collateral
4) you make your friend sign papers, and you leave "legal" options open
When I loan a friend, all I say is "dude, this is just to help you, I know you are going through tough times. No way this is to insult or patronize you. you can return the money when you can, even if it takes you 5-10 years"
That is trust and friendship, one friend helping the other, nothing more nothing less and definitely not a business.
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"Fuck You money" is such a myth. More on this soon in another post.
I think what we don't know here is the dream/ambition of the founders. Maybe their dreams were too expensive to chase or they otherwise didn't feel equipped to chase them. Fuck you money (for a lot of people) isn't "go buy a Caribbean island" money. It's "I can finally build the company I WANTED to build" money. (anticipating response of "Why not just build the company you're passionate about to begin with?") Some co…
Diamandis used a small initial grant from the Ansari family and leveraged it via insurance.
Is there any way to tell from the outside and at this point in time if the deal is a takeover from the inside like Apple buying Nexxt? Will the lead people at Mint have real power in Inituit? Will one of them be the next CTO? Are terms like those ever specified in a buyout?
1. Mint founder isn't Steve Jobs.
2. Mint founder didn't also found Quicken.
3. Mint made a pretty little web app, based on someone else's platform, nothing that Quicken themselves couldn't do, if they could be assed to hire a decent consulting firm...
4. NeXT, on the other hand, created bleeding edge hardware and an amazing new operating system that was worthy of being the core for the next decade or two of development.
Apple didn't "buy" NeXT. Apple paid $400 million as a way of groveling -- begging for Jobs to come back. And Jobs brought NeXT tech with him, of course, but let's not fool ourselves and pretend it was due to the tech. The tech was a bonus.
Jobs' return was the return of the prodigal son and messiah and troublemaker all rolled into one, and it was the last desperate gasp of a company that absolutely could not function without him.
But I guess most of you guys were too young to take in those subtleties at the time.
The bottom line is, Mint isn't even that good. Getting bought by their Big Daddy competitor is the expected outcome.
Did you ever really think they were going to spin it into a lifetime of riches and plucky entrepreneurial do-gooding?
They are buddy-buddy with credit card companies; they have a rather draconian ToS; their UI has only the gloss of friendliness, with glitz and shine and no true usability work baked in; they basically have screamed "BUY US!" the entire time they existed.
At $170 million, Mint is a mere toy to Intuit. The Mint founders are not going to revolutionize things at Quicken -- Quicken's key customer base does not overlap with Mint.com's customer base (if we can even call them "customers" since the service is free).
Mint must have been a mere annoyance, a PR problem, an insect buzzing around the room, crying "NEENER NEENER" in Intuit's ear, until Intuit decided it had to swat - or buy.
Buying is less work than swatting.