141–144 of 144 posts
Hi! I'm delighted to see you'll be using Long Bets: http://longbets.org/ As the programmer behind that, I'm glad to introduce you to the folks at the Long Now that can expedite that.
Didn't know this service existed. Just registered and tossed it up onto product hunt --> http://www.producthunt.com/posts/long-bets looking forward to see this play out.
I'm curious which one of his propositions do you think has a higher chance of not happening, and why. #3 can be phrased as "there is at least one unicorn among these 114 companies" so betting against that is rolling dice. I imagine you're either bearish on 1 and/or 2, or are betting on a macroeconomic event that would bring all valuations down. Could you elaborate?
Note that the bet is the conjunction of those three propositions, so you don't have to think any one of them is particularly unlikely to think that all three of them together are. For example, if you consider the propositions to be roughly independent, you might believe each one of them is individually nearly 80% likely to occur, yet you'd rationally believe Sam would be more likely than not to lose the bet, since 0.…
Personally, I might put the odds of each at 60%, 70%, and 90%, respectively. Independently, that gives me a mere 37.8% chance of losing. However, I also think that condition 1 succeeding is highly indicative that the others will succeed too. So, if it were really $100,000 at stake, I wouldn't take the bet.
The real conundrum is that stakes of winning aren't $100,000. The loser's money goes to charity, and the winner's takings are the publicity gained from being right. No doubt both participants feel that the publicity is worth more than $100,000. They don't need to have even 50% confidence to take the bet.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The determination of "valuation" is pretty obnoxious. These preferred securities with liquidation preferences aren't even close to a "common equity" valuation. A VC round at $x valuation isn't remotely similar, economically, to a public co at $x valuation. This bet is more about whether the late stage VC bubble continues for 5 years than any notion of real value.
Isn't that exactly what the bet is? A bubble that never bursts is indistinguishable from real value. Remember that money is itself a bubble; its only value is that you believe other people will continue to accept it to give you the things you really value. The dollars in your pocket are just pieces of paper; the dollars in your credit card are even more nebulous, they're bits and bytes in your banks' computers. And y…
Wow, way to contradict yourself. You say it's indistinguishable and distinguish in the next sentence? A bubble is distinguishable this way: if the value of the asset comes only from selling it to someone else, it's a bubble. If the asset provides value without selling it, it isn't a bubble. Pretty simple right?
To the extent they go public, sure, those numbers are more reasonable.