81–90 of 91 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Journalists make terrible VCs as a general rule.
Michael Moritz, senior partner at Sequoia Capital and arguably the best VC ever, started his career as a journalist. From his bio, it sounds like he leveraged that to start his career at Sequoia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moritz
"If you think about it like we’re driving a car, we want to go extremely fast at an extremely high speed, and go very far,” [CEO] Conrad said. “And if you want to do that you’re gonna burn a lot of gasoline. So this round we had to do the mother of all pit stops for gas and beef jerky, to continue building at the speed that we’re going."
Going extremely fast at an extremely high speed also frequently results in a fatal accident.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah thanks for the clarification. Today I learned.
We're working on some major changes to how banning and flagged/dead comments work, so please put a mental asterisk alongside all of this. Assuming our changes hold up in testing, the community will soon be managing most of it.
I see this as an awesome thing and as a horrible thing at the same time. Color me interested, ha.
$20M ARR... $5B Val?
$4.5B Valuation for an SaaS business that doesn't charge for it's service and makes money from commissions? Did they invent something no one else can do? Why would insurance companies not just scrap the middle man and build their own thing?
Last report I saw pegged their number of customers at 10,000 which would mean a $2K average customer annual value. To get to $450M ARR they either need to grow to 225,000 customers or increase their average customer value (or a combination of both).
According to the US census there's over 2M companies with more than 5 employees which means they need to capture about 10% of the market.
Doesn't seem too unreasonable especially when you consider a company can stay with their platform even if they switch providers / plans every year (minimizing churn).
One of my favorite displays of how little the tech press gets it is this stark contrast. (I think Garry Tan is the one who pointed to me it originally but I don't have that reference right now.) PandoDaily in 2013: "While I don’t have my Tarot cards handy, I don’t think there’s a big winner in this bunch either." http://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo-day-2013-still... Startups are a function of markets and ex…
http://i.imgur.com/tGg4zEd.png
(arguably they aren't Dropbox/AirBnB yet, but still something)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're working on some major changes to how banning and flagged/dead comments work, so please put a mental asterisk alongside all of this. Assuming our changes hold up in testing, the community will soon be managing most of it.
> the community will soon be managing most of it I see this as an awesome thing and as a horrible thing at the same time. Color me interested, ha.
Zenefits: you are growing too fast! Scale up your customer service and improve your customer satisfaction rates before making big customer acquisition pushes, else you risk disappointing your existing customers. (Anecdote: I am a disappointed existing customer)
Are you at liberty (and are willing) to share any specific examples of the problems?
One of my favorite displays of how little the tech press gets it is this stark contrast. (I think Garry Tan is the one who pointed to me it originally but I don't have that reference right now.) PandoDaily in 2013: "While I don’t have my Tarot cards handy, I don’t think there’s a big winner in this bunch either." http://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo-day-2013-still... Startups are a function of markets and ex…
Journalists make terrible VCs as a general rule.
