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Tell Sam Altman: I will take your bet

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell Sam Altman: I will take your bet

#61

Post by foobarqux »

fleitz wrote: post #52
foobarqux wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't serve the main purpose of the bet which is to find someone with a strong enough conviction about the specific terms to risk $100k.

That's welsher talk, if you make a bet and a person accepts then you have to take the bet or STFU. If you believe the person will not follow through that's one thing, maybe both parties should put $100K in escrow, talking about the purpose of the bet is weak.

Maybe he should follow through but the bet isn't interesting anymore.

Re: Tell Sam Altman: I will take your bet

#62

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #59
foobarqux wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't serve the main purpose of the bet which is to find someone with a strong enough conviction about the specific terms to risk $100k.

Pretty much everything a startup does is find resources that are underutilized and then utilize them for something outside their main purposes. If it is someone who's donating $100K to charity for publicity...well, that's a pretty neat hack, and one that everybody wins from.

[deleted]

Re: Tell Sam Altman: I will take your bet

#63

Post by foobarqux »

nostrademons wrote: post #59
foobarqux wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't serve the main purpose of the bet which is to find someone with a strong enough conviction about the specific terms to risk $100k.

Pretty much everything a startup does is find resources that are underutilized and then utilize them for something outside their main purposes. If it is someone who's donating $100K to charity for publicity...well, that's a pretty neat hack, and one that everybody wins from.

Fine, well done. But no one should care that Sam Altman bet that we are not in a bubble against someone who doesn't care much one way or the other but wants his name in the paper.

Re: Tell Sam Altman: I will take your bet

#64

Post by dspeyer »

javabank wrote: post #39
foobarqux wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I would be cautious, you might be getting played for publicity. If that's the case it wouldn't serve the purpose of the bet because the other side doesn't have any conviction about the outcome and only wants to raise their profile in the VC world. $100k is probably cheap to get your name in many major news outlets.

$100k is going to a charity one way or another. That's a good thing no matter how you cut it.

Am I the only one hoping they have the same favourite charity?

Re: Tell Sam Altman: I will take your bet

#65

Post by 300bps »

xxcode wrote: post #55

1. Dropbox: NPV is less than 10B. Will probably get brought for 3-4B by bigco if bigco can transcend internal politics. Not sure who will buy them - most probably Microsoft under Ndella. 2. Palantir: I have some experience with working with Palantir FDEs who were marketed to BigCo as 'gift from god to solve all problems'. They were pretty useless. I think Palantir is basically shit. Wait and watch.

Will probably get brought for 3-4B by bigco if bigco can transcend internal politics. Not sure who will buy them - most probably Microsoft under Ndella.

I'm asking in all sincerity - what does Dropbox have that Microsoft would want? Their OneDrive technology is "good enough" for the vast majority of users.

Latest statistics I could find were that DropBox has 200,000,000 users and that 96% of them were free user accounts. That means DropBox has about 8,000,000 paying users. Instead of buying the company for $4 billion they could instead pay each paying DropBox customer $500 to switch.

Or they could spend $4 billion on marketing / giving away their free 1 TB of OneDrive space with purchase of an Office 365 subscription for $6.99 per month.

I'm probably missing something?

Re: Tell Sam Altman: I will take your bet

#66

Post by mbreese »

fleitz wrote: post #57
dvanduzer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#3 isn't just a die roll, it's the entire basis of early stage investment. If he loses on #3, YC will either be a shadow of its former self, or Sam will have given himself enough rope to hang himself (as president of YC). This is exactly the sort of thing that everyone making press about investment capital should be willing to do. Sam isn't making a bet about money here, he's making a bet about his reputation as a fo…

That's not true, YC could just have a bad batch, or the economy could be in a serious downturn in 2020. A number of reasonably likely events could cause #3 to be false without any catastrophic loss to YC.

Or, 5 years isn't that long from now... for comparison (from CrunchBase) Dropbox was part of the Summer 2007 batch. So, in the context of this bet, they would have had to have had a valuation of 3B in 2012 (assuming the rest of the batch failed).

As of Jan 1, 2012, their most recent funding would have been a Series B round for $250M at ~ $4B. So, in this case, Sam would have won.

In my opinion, #3 is a little unfair, just because there are significantly more startups in these YC batches than in years past. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire W15 batch hit $3B in total valuation by the end of the year. There are roughly 100 in this batch, so they would only need an average of $30M in valuation for Sam to win #3.

Re: Tell Sam Altman: I will take your bet

#67

Post by mdlm »

sama wrote: post #28

I sort of love that the person willing to take the other side of this is a Boston-area VC :) I accept subject to verification that you really qualify as a VC, and I can't find a website for Immaculate Conception Ventures. What investments have you made and how large is your fund? If terms from the blog post are acceptable I will enter into longbets.

Sam,

Fund is $500K. Investments are listed below. Happy to provide LLC documents.

Please enter into longbets.

Michael

Fitocracy https://www.fitocracy.com/ Empreware https://empreware.com/ Modify http://modifywatches.com/ Ecovent https://www.ecoventsystems.com/ Amino http://narvii.com/ seedchange https://www.seedchange.com/ ROCKI http://www.myrocki.com/ CoolChip http://coolchiptechnologies.com/ edTrips http://www.bookity.com/ (via AngelList syndicate)

Re: Tell Sam Altman: I will take your bet

#69

Post by dkrich »

TimSchumann wrote: post #32

I'm surprised at someone actually taking the other side of this bet as I thought Sam was _very_ conservative on his projections. 1) Any one of those companies (besides Pinterest IMO) could conceivably achieve a market valuation of $200B by Jan 1, 2020. 2) Again any one of those companies (besides Teespring IMO) could conceivably achieve a market valuation of $27B by Jan 1, 2020. 3) Easy win for Sam.

Seriously? As I write this, Microsoft, the largest purveyor of enterprise software in the world, is worth roughly $340 billion. Oracle? Less than $200 billion. Hell, Amazon, the company that Dropbox runs on isn't worth $200 billion.

You honestly believe that any one of those companies, none of which has been around for more than ten years, could reach a market cap of $200B within 5 years? Either you are incredibly bearish on the dollar or we are officially in bubble times.

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