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Truecar.com is going public

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Re: Truecar.com is going public

#11

Post by daeken »

dang wrote: post #4
pearjuice wrote: post #3

Are you ready for another pump and dump? starts beating chest and humming

This is not a good Hacker News comment. It's glib when it should be substantive, and tries to drum up indignation when it should be reflective. One of the best things PG ever said about HN is that comments "should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something". I intend to add that to the site guidelines. Please re-read what you post and, if doesn't have this…

One thing that I'd love to see is a system for adaptive edit/delete windows. Right now it seems to be a fixed length of time (I want to say an hour?), but I think it'd be conducive to better conversation to have flexible windows, where -- and maybe this isn't the right approach -- the window is extended by X minutes for every reply, or something along those lines.

It'd certainly flatten threads a bit, especially in the case of someone posting a factually incorrect comment and correcting it after the fact.

Re: Truecar.com is going public

#12

Post by thix0tr0pic »

daeken wrote: post #11
dang wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a good Hacker News comment. It's glib when it should be substantive, and tries to drum up indignation when it should be reflective. One of the best things PG ever said about HN is that comments "should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something". I intend to add that to the site guidelines. Please re-read what you post and, if doesn't have this…

One thing that I'd love to see is a system for adaptive edit/delete windows. Right now it seems to be a fixed length of time (I want to say an hour?), but I think it'd be conducive to better conversation to have flexible windows, where -- and maybe this isn't the right approach -- the window is extended by X minutes for every reply, or something along those lines. It'd certainly flatten threads a bit, especially in t…

In which case the original comment should stay as on so anyone can see what happened, but use strike-through formatting

Re: Truecar.com is going public

#13

Post by sixQuarks »

aclements18 wrote: post #5

This is a solid venture backed company that has been generating quite a bit of revenue for some time now. This exit will provide its investors with a solid return. Odd how little attention a company like this gets from the tech community. Bernie Brenner, the guy who heads up their business development, wrote The Sumo Advantage which one of the best books I've read on BD. He very clearly identifies the role of BD and…

Thanks for the book suggestion. this looks very interesting.

Re: Truecar.com is going public

#15

Post by ganeumann »

aclements18 wrote: post #5

This is a solid venture backed company that has been generating quite a bit of revenue for some time now. This exit will provide its investors with a solid return. Odd how little attention a company like this gets from the tech community. Bernie Brenner, the guy who heads up their business development, wrote The Sumo Advantage which one of the best books I've read on BD. He very clearly identifies the role of BD and…

It's a good company with a good service (I used them last year when I was buying a car--walked in with their piece of paper and said 'if you give me this price I will buy this car now, in cash.' That was the end of the negotiation. Drove out of the dealer a couple of hours later (yes, it still took a couple of hours to get the transaction complete.)

But I don't think the tech community should be all excited about this company. It's not a 'tech' startup per se, it's just a normal marketing (lead-gen, specifically) company that happens to use the Internet--and using the Internet to do business has not been something to get excited about for at least ten years now. It's not like Oculus or WhatsApp or Airbnb or even Uber. There's no technical innovation at play here, there's no business model innovation at play here, there's no new market segment being addressed, it's not disruptive or even radical innovation. It's not innovation driven, it's just a good company delivering a good product. It's not a 'startup' the way we use startup in the tech community, it's just a plain old business.

Re: Truecar.com is going public

#16

Post by patrickxb »

TrueCar sounds like a great idea (the dealership system is horrible).

But we just used TrueCar when shopping for a new car and instantly got spammy, sleazy emails and phone calls from dealers before even completing the process (which we never did).

It wasn't fun. I really wish we didn't give them any information. So I don't have high hopes for this business succeeding.

What really needs to happen is that people need to be able to just buy a car like they buy everything else without salespeople in the middle. Why can't I buy a new car from the manufacturer straight from their website? Seeing all the trouble Tesla is having fighting the dealership model is discouraging...hopefully it will improve, I'm just not sure TrueCar is the answer.

Re: Truecar.com is going public

#17

Post by highace »

dang wrote: post #4
pearjuice wrote: post #3

Are you ready for another pump and dump? starts beating chest and humming

This is not a good Hacker News comment. It's glib when it should be substantive, and tries to drum up indignation when it should be reflective. One of the best things PG ever said about HN is that comments "should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something". I intend to add that to the site guidelines. Please re-read what you post and, if doesn't have this…

I thought it was funny.

Re: Truecar.com is going public

#18

Post by dang »

highace wrote: post #17
dang wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a good Hacker News comment. It's glib when it should be substantive, and tries to drum up indignation when it should be reflective. One of the best things PG ever said about HN is that comments "should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something". I intend to add that to the site guidelines. Please re-read what you post and, if doesn't have this…

I thought it was funny.

It may have been, and I like to laugh too. As with any optimization problem, there are tradeoffs. It's not that you're against the things that get traded away; you're for them. But you're for something else more, if you can't have both.

In HN's case, we're optimizing for signal/noise ratio. The trouble with humor on HN is not that it's bad, but that—if you have a lot of it—you also get a lot of noise. There actually is a genre of humor that does well on HN; you might call it high-signal humor. It's rare, but it exists. This comment wasn't that.

There are other places to get internet humor, like Reddit comment threads. When I read those I'm astonished at how good they are at what they do. HN is never going to be that, and we shouldn't allow an imitation of it to detract from our core.

Re: Truecar.com is going public

#19

Post by sologoub »

aclements18 wrote: post #9
kirpekar wrote: post #6

2013: $134M revenues and $25M loss.

Amazon 2012: $61B revenues and $39M loss. To say, net income may not be the best indicator of success for high growth tech companies. They reinvest every dollar to continue to spur growth.

Look at the cash flows from operations. This is a big indicator of whether the core business is profitable. I have not looked at Amazon, but non-cash write-off usually play a significant role in lowering net income.

If you operations are sucking up cash, then the sustainability of the business depends on ability to inject new cash from somewhere else.

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