U.S. Tech Funding – What’s Going On?

Earth is humanity's lonely island. (I realize it's more complicated than that because billions of men on Earth do not make decisions in the same way that a lonely man on an island does. All I'm saying is that it is still more desirable to invest than save when we can, at least past some point. The extent to which society depends on consumption, perhaps excessive consumption, today, and "how to get from here to there" I don't know. I am however certain that flogging savers badly enough with high taxes will result in people burning their savings in what "from humanity's point of view" are very wasteful ways; also in people saving less in the first place by working less in the first place, also not that great - "imagine you have a business, would you rather have a worker who wants to make as much as he can and save it, or work as little as needed to survive because he can't save?")

Math is supposed to be useful. There's a long track record that it can be. I studied math hoping it would be useful, and I believe that it is for my project.

Doing some applied math might seem unusual, but it's not "crazy". The unusual part indicates an opportunity.

A "name"? For my work so far, I've not needed a static IP address so have not paid extra for one from my ISP. So neither do I have a domain name yet.

I won't get a static IP address or a domain name until just before I go live, ASAP.

My startup is for Internet search, discovery, recommendation, curation, notification, and subscription for safe for work Internet content where keywords/phrases work at best poorly.

My project might become a big thing.

The user interface is just a simple HTTP, HTML, CSS Web site, also simple enough for smart phones.

So, my software takes in data, manipulates it, and sends the user the results. The crucial core of the manipulations is from some math I derived based on some advanced prerequisites I got mostly in grad school.

Right, the users will see the results but not be aware of any of the math. What the user does with the Web site and the results they get back will seem intuitively reasonable and maybe even natural, but actually doing the data manipulations in a way with good promise of good results is a challenge, one that I addressed mathematically.

The theorems give good evidence that with some good data the results for the users will be good. Given what I'm betting on this project, I want the good evidence, up front, long before TIFO results, traction, etc.

My main use of italics is a common one, mark a word as being used in a sense maybe not the same as in a literal dictionary definition and, thus, needing some caution, reinterpretation, and/or apology.

I think that public companies can reveal true market value quicker than private investments.

For example, VCs invest in company xyz at a valuation of $100m, they don't actually know if that valuation is "real" until the company sells. Until then, it's made up numbers. That gap between investment and sell date might be 5-10 years and until then then there's no market proving of that valuation. We've seen it time and time again that private companies can exist with no revenue or at least no profit for years or until their private fund runs dry, but can still claim a "valuation" in huge numbers, even while the market provable "value" of the company is $0.

Public stock markets tend to suss out valuation much quicker, a company might be "valued" on the market with a market cap of $100m, but miss a couple quarters or some big sales and stock holders will dump and run and the market cap can drop quickly over even a matter of days or weeks. Public investors eventually start to want the fundamentals of their companies to be good even if they start as fantasies. Reportable revenue, eventual profit (or continued revenue growth that's quickly convertible to profit in the even of market saturation)...eventually these things all have to exist, and I'd wager that an analysis of stock market prices on a company over the long run has a strong correlation to these fundamentals. I can't go and buy 1 share of Tesla at $500 and suddenly claim the company is "valued" at $60b.

But you can do that with private companies because of the information asymmetry available to private companies. There's all kinds of wonderful ways to game "valuation", but that's fundamentally different than market "value".

There's an idea that publicly traded, but unprofitable, fast-growth companies, like Tesla, with big inflated stock prices are the same as overvalued privately funded companies, but there's some fundamental differences in those valuations. If Tesla's revenue growth curve turned downwards next quarter or two, their stock price would plummet and their valuation/marketcap would arithmetic its way downward as a consequence. But a private company's "valuation" would stay the same until the next funding round/corporate sales activity, a lag time that could be years away. Thus a private valuation is more likely to be divorced from any business fundamentals than a public one, and that's simply because private company valuations are more closely tied to investor activity not business activity.