Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs • Hacker News Board

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#111

Post by segmondy » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

NorthOf33rd wrote: post #49

I'd love to see the LA Times go back and revisit the Utah Valley region and the culture that helped contribute to this. The Utah Valley is chock full of startups with a serious inferiority complex to their big brothers in Silicon Valley, hence derivative name. More importantly, Utah is the “multi-level marketing capital of the world [1]” This kind of sales and growth tactic is not limited to the diet smoothie and cos…

Nah, we should look at New York. WallStreet has always been the master in money extraction from other people's money. Other's are beginning to execute such playbook.

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#112

Post by codingdave » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:01 PM UTC

tntn wrote: post #99

aaronkchsu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people never mention https://instructure.com for Utah startups but I work for them and they seem great!

Again to clarify, I didn't mention them because they are based in Salt Lake. There are lots of great places in Salt Lake, but the discussion above was focused on Utah County (Provo, Orem, Lehi, etc.)

To clarify, you are the only person who has mentioned this split between Utah County and Salt Lake City. You've clearly got a chip on your shoulder, and I feel it is detracting from a productive conversation.

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#113

Post by georgeecollins » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

As an example of what can go wrong with two tier voting stock, look at the conflict between CBS and Viacom. I don't agree that a founder should have a greater voting share than his or her ownership. I know that has got to be a really unpopular view here. But even if you don't agree with me, how long is that voting ratio supposed to last? Can it continue after you break up the company into pieces? Should it apply to ancestors of the founder?

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#114

Post by Jach » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #112

tntn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again to clarify, I didn't mention them because they are based in Salt Lake. There are lots of great places in Salt Lake, but the discussion above was focused on Utah County (Provo, Orem, Lehi, etc.)

To clarify, you are the only person who has mentioned this split between Utah County and Salt Lake City. You've clearly got a chip on your shoulder, and I feel it is detracting from a productive conversation.

There is a split between Utah County and Salt Lake City. Though according to a friend (I moved away a decade ago) the "Silicon Slopes" locally refers mostly to the area in between (centered around north Lehi where Adobe's building is). However there's always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Slopes -- while the region spans SLC and Provo, the claim by 'tntn that the marketing purpose of "Silicon Slopes" was largely to concentrate on the more rural areas in between (i.e. most of Utah County) doesn't seem that unreasonable.

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#115

Post by tntn » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:29 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #112

tntn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again to clarify, I didn't mention them because they are based in Salt Lake. There are lots of great places in Salt Lake, but the discussion above was focused on Utah County (Provo, Orem, Lehi, etc.)

To clarify, you are the only person who has mentioned this split between Utah County and Salt Lake City. You've clearly got a chip on your shoulder, and I feel it is detracting from a productive conversation.

To clarify, I started this trend of listing companies, and failed to recognize that apparently "Silicon Slopes" refers to larger region than Utah County. Before looking into it more, I would have said that it was only Utah County, since there are massive billboards on I-15 southbound around Draper that say "you are now entering silicon slopes" and the phrase was coined by the founder of Domo.

My mistake. Since the edit window on my original post closed, I tried to explain in subsequent comments what I had in my head when making that first list so that people would realize they don't need to explain to me that all of Utah is not like MLMs.

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#116

Post by drewying » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #29

> Domo actually is part of the Salt Lake City region’s “Silicon Slope,” one of several regional offshoots of Silicon Valley. Going off on a tangent, this is really dumb. It’s not an “offshoot” of Silicon Valley. It’s a distant, unrelated region that happens to also have a tech industry. Are Austin, Seattle, and Portland also “offshoots” of Silicon Valley? How about New York? Zurich?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers#Pla...

There're a lot of them out there

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#117

Post by shemnon42 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:31 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #79

dustinlocke wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Built-in social network. Most church-goers automatically have access to a couple hundred people in the neighborhood. I live in Utah and I hate MLMs so much.

Also it pre-selects for people who don't say, "But this story makes no sense whatsoever" after your pitch. 419 scammers use deliberately poor grammar and other choices to weed out the people who will figure out it's a scam before they hand over any money, same for an MLM. You want the people who'll lie and cheat and pump every dime they have into your MLM, not the ones who attend a seminar, make interested noises the…

> Also it pre-selects for people who don't say, "But this story makes no sense whatsoever" after your pitch.

Thanks for exposing your biases, but you are wrong. It's more of a quid-pro-quo exchange on some of these MLMs or trying to be supportive of someone else's venture in your community. Nearly all know it is overpriced and not necessarily what they need, but it is the rapid exchange of social capital that keeps those communities the way they are. Before MLMs it was casseroles, cookies, tools, helping hands, and babysitting.

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#118

Post by DonHopkins » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #110

pm90 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a lazy way to jump on the SV bandwagon. So Austin is/was known as Silicon Hills or something and there are many other Silicon Something monikers for other places.

Well, at least they copied the meaningful part of "Silicon Valley". In Korea we have Pangyo Valley and Teheran Valley. (And no, they aren't valleys.)

Silicon Sinkhole

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#119

Post by drelihan » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

Shouldn't the criticism for IPO terms like this be directed at the money managers buying these shares on behalf of their clients?

It is ultimately those making the capital allocation decision to push back on unreasonable terms. Seems like they "sort of are":

"Domo acknowledges in its disclosure statement that Standard & Poor’s will be excluding companies with these structures from some of its indexes, and other index owners may follow suit. That’s a problem for Domo, because the rise of passive investments keyed to stock indexes means that many investors won’t be buying its stock."

Re: Hype and plunder: Domo a new low for self-indulgent IPOs

#120

Post by fallingfrog » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 9:39 PM UTC

jmull wrote: post #22

I take this as one of the two central themes of this article: "...points to a persistent flaw in Silicon Valley financing: the willingness to give start-up founders unassailable control of their companies, to the point that investors have no recourse if things go blooey." That's not a flaw, it's a fundamental part of how it is meant to work. The investors generally don't want to invest in companies run by a committee…

Not only that but the whole point of a limited liability corporation is that the stockholders cannot be held responsible for the debts of the corporation- and in return they relinquish control of it. That's the trade off. That's the defining characteristic of the corporate form. It creates a division between capital and labor, up to and including the CEO. That's why we call it "capitalism".