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Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies

#171

Post by BAH20202030 »

hdctambien wrote: post #144
mcosta wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since long ago Facebook is too big to be adquired. Now even less. Who can pay so much money?

I believe he's referring to an acquisition by Facebook being an exit option, not an acquisition of Facebook.

Investor sentiment (as irrational as it sounds) is very important. The "apparent" failure of FB IPO along with the less than impressive performance of web 2.0 companies in the public markets have casted a dark cloud in the industry. Nothing has changed in the material sense, but this narrative is a great opportunity for investors to bargain for better deals.

Re: Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies

#173

Post by csarva »

nl wrote: post #72
anon808 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhhh yes the famous cash faucet that just needs to be turned on. Why would anyone that could have been making more money not made it before? Growth and profit are not mutually exclusive.

Growth and profit are not mutually exclusive True. But if you are constrained by your team (ie, you can't work on everything at once, which Facebook says is their biggest constraint) and you have plenty of easy money from investors, why would you try and profit now and risk another service taking your audience when you could possibly build something that can profit for years to come?

Constrained by your team? I can see you making that case for Instagram with only 12 people, but according to Yahoo Finance, FB has about 3500 people. Not one of them is thinking about how to increase revenues? And they don't have enough engineers to try out some of the ideas?

Re: Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies

#174

Post by scootnetworks »

Asserting that the decline in Facebook's stock price post-IPO has generalizable implications for early stage companies is helping the tail to wag the dog.

I agree with Fred Wilson that Facebook's present valuation should be a thrill to its early investors, not a chill http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/06/some-perspective.html.

It is natural to see personal meaning in well known events. Venus is passing in front of the Sun right now. Seems like a good time to call some investors.

Re: Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies

#175

Post by gopsig »

agotterer wrote: post #147
po wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's because investors think that one of the few routes to 'exit' a company and cash out your investment just got closed down, at least in the short term. That increases the risk of investing and therefore lowers the valuation.

In the next few months Facebook will create over 1000 new millionaires. Is it to much too assume that many of them will get into inventing, which could actually cause the opposite affect of what you're suggesting where there is even more money available?

The number of millionaires created and the amount they have available to invest are directly related to the stock price. If the price is low, shareholders won't sell, so there won't be new cash to invest in other startups.

Re: Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies

#176

Post by silentscope »

pbiggar wrote: post #113
silentscope wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

catty

They're trolling, the best response is calling it out.

I was calling the comment above me catty, which it was. I'm not trolling, but trying to convey that sharp sarcasam doesn't really ad much to a conversation. If people want to downvote me instead of the sarcasm, that's cool (I just don't necessarily understand it).

Re: Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies

#177

Post by Nelson69 »

pbiggar wrote: post #77

When I saw PG's email, I thought this was a self-fulfilling prophesy, even if it was only seen by YC founders. But now that every has seen it - it will be in Forbes and TechCrunch soon no doubt - it seems almost certain. If just YC founders see it, then they'll take less money, and get lower valuations, etc, leading the tone of the valley. But if everyone sees it, investors will close their wallets, people will decla…

I don't like this attitude. Sending that letter out is the honest thing to do. If you're gearing up to try and raise money, that is some important insight, your business is potentially in the balance right now.

I've been trying to wrap my mind around the FB IPO for a while now. FB was ordained by the media. It was the next great Silicon Valley company, Zuck is the new Gates/Jobs/Dell/etc.. All the hype was about "biggest ever." There was very little real criticism, there were some doubters but nobody expected the stock to perform like this. FB was/is a legitimate Google competitor... I think in some circles people were skeptical about the value of social and its real 'value' but still, nobody was predicting this. It was going to climb up to $70 and then settle in around $45-$50, that's what everybody wanted and expected.

To me, it shows that the investors have already closed their wallets. Maybe it shows something worse. Talking about it legitimizes the concerns people clearly have been having already but that doesn't mean they weren't there already or that it's suddenly worse. It may accelerate some things by making for less stupid people that aren't in the know but it was already happening. The stock market has done well the last 4 years but I don't know how many other indicators show that the whole economy is doing well and I think a lot of people (think not elite web hackers) would think or say we're still in the great recession, employment is still in the 10% range (maybe higher depending upon who's spin you want to take to heart) they're still sorting out mortgages and all that ilk, who knows how useful all the people coming back from the wars are I'm sure they've got some emotional issues but who knows when they'll surface, what percentage of college grads have no jobs? and then you've almost certainly got to unwind the Euro from Greece and who knows how that's going to work. Worse, if it goes pretty bad, then it's probably bad for the whole world and if it goes really well then the uncertainty could continue as there might be pressure to boot other countries out of the EU rather than bail them out.

Re: Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies

#178

Post by chaz »

jayzee wrote: post #32

So here is an idea for an email feature/gmail plugin: 'Semantic Scramble' Basically, any sensitive email that you send to a bunch of people is automatically scrambled (retaining original meaning/correct grammar, just a small shuffling of words) so that each person gets a unique email. Easy to find out who leaked it. You could add a similar unique jitter for sensitive photos/images...

Wouldn't this be easy to defeat by changing words around yourself before distributing? It would either match to someone else's copy of the email, or not match anyone at all. It would need to be highly resilient to a lot of tampering, which doesn't seem reasonable for relatively short documents like emails.

Re: Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies

#179

Post by pbiggar »

silentscope wrote: post #176
pbiggar wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're trolling, the best response is calling it out.

I was calling the comment above me catty, which it was. I'm not trolling, but trying to convey that sharp sarcasam doesn't really ad much to a conversation. If people want to downvote me instead of the sarcasm, that's cool (I just don't necessarily understand it).

Sorry, miscommunication. waveform was the troll, not you (though I dont think adding single word replies ever adds to the conversation on HN).
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