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Founder Friendly

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Re: Founder Friendly

#21

Post by HNNoLikey »

abstractoutlook wrote: post #16

I am glad this whole charade of investors pretending to be founder friendly is finally getting over. There isn't / has never been such a thing as "founder friendly". Investors pretend to be friendly so that they can convince entrepreneurs to take their money. It's not their true nature, just something you need to do to get into the right deals. Investors are always worried about their reputation, not character - if y…

> Most of them have never built a company before and have no clue what it takes to really build a successful startup (sorry, just because you sit on a board doesn't mean you understand the hard work, tears, daily ups and downs, personal sacrifice it takes to build a business)....

Couldn't agree more with you. There is one VC who echoes these very sentiments. Vinod Khosla never hires someone in his firm (especially those that sit on startups' boards) if they have not been entrepreneurs. When he does hire non-entrepreneurs, they don't sit on boards and within 2-3 years they're expected to go out there and do/join a start up before they can be allowed back at KV.

His logic being that, one cannot truly empathize with what an entrepreneur is going through without having started a business of their own or being at a start up during its infancy.

Re: Founder Friendly

#22

Post by HNNoLikey »

I think that it is incumbent upon an entrepreneur to apply they same magnitude of rigor (if not more) when conducting due diligence on investors as investors do when deciding whether to invest. This is, sadly, something that most entrepreneurs overlook due to eagerness to take up financing.

Re: Founder Friendly

#23

Post by logicallee »

falala1 wrote: post #8
thesausageking wrote: post #6

For those wondering about the allusion to Hatching Twitter, it describes in detail how, when Ev was CEO, Fred and the board told him he was doing a fantastic job and while secretly meeting with Jack and coming up with a plan to push Ev out and bring in Dick Costolo as CEO (with Jack under him). Here's a quote from the book after Ev was told he was out with a vicious quote from Fred: Williams, stunned, picked up the p…

This is a great example of how a company was undone by greedy VCs. A little history lesson. The founders of Twitter really believed in a vibrant ecosystem for Twitter. They gave the developer community a slew of APIs, gracious quotas, and support. The ecosystem thrived and created dozens of major companies that made Twitter truly useful. The user numbers grew as well because those very same companies marketed their n…

>This is a great example of how a company was undone [...] , if Twitter went along with their founders vision it could have been much bigger over time

For anyone wondering why parent uses "undone", "could have been much bigger", at a time that Twitter is a household name, the President tweets, people hold public conversations over Twitter, and list Twitter handles instead of their emails.[1]

It's because Twitter is "only" an $11.9 billion company by market cap, whereas Facebook is at $492B or 44 times bigger. I can't think of any other metric by which Twitter isn't a resounding success story.

[1] https://levels.io/hoodmaps/ - Very bottom "I don't use email so tweet me your questions."

Re: Founder Friendly

#24

Post by ckastner »

logicallee wrote: post #23
falala1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great example of how a company was undone by greedy VCs. A little history lesson. The founders of Twitter really believed in a vibrant ecosystem for Twitter. They gave the developer community a slew of APIs, gracious quotas, and support. The ecosystem thrived and created dozens of major companies that made Twitter truly useful. The user numbers grew as well because those very same companies marketed their n…

>This is a great example of how a company was undone [...] , if Twitter went along with their founders vision it could have been much bigger over time For anyone wondering why parent uses "undone", "could have been much bigger", at a time that Twitter is a household name, the President tweets, people hold public conversations over Twitter, and list Twitter handles instead of their emails.[1] It's because Twitter is "…

As a metric, popularity can be misleading.

Take Hollywood, for example: few things nowadays are as ever-present as motion pictures, but the total box office revenue for 2016 was around $11bn [1]. That's about 19 days worth of revenue for Apple, going by their last quarter [2].

Just because you see it everywhere, or everyone talks about it, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a huge moneymaker.

[1] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/2016-box-office-record...

[2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/05/apple-reports-second-...

Re: Founder Friendly

#25

Post by hoorayimhelping »

>The VC industry is highly competitive

VC 'industry?' Please Fred, VC's don't produce anything. It's very charitable to call the class of people with access to money and the desire to lend it out under very favorable terms to company founders an industry.

Re: Founder Friendly

#26

Post by discombobulate »

thesausageking wrote: post #6

For those wondering about the allusion to Hatching Twitter, it describes in detail how, when Ev was CEO, Fred and the board told him he was doing a fantastic job and while secretly meeting with Jack and coming up with a plan to push Ev out and bring in Dick Costolo as CEO (with Jack under him). Here's a quote from the book after Ev was told he was out with a vicious quote from Fred: Williams, stunned, picked up the p…

He's there to make the business work. It's not a charity.

Re: Founder Friendly

#27

Post by logicallee »

ckastner wrote: post #24
logicallee wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a great example of how a company was undone [...] , if Twitter went along with their founders vision it could have been much bigger over time For anyone wondering why parent uses "undone", "could have been much bigger", at a time that Twitter is a household name, the President tweets, people hold public conversations over Twitter, and list Twitter handles instead of their emails.[1] It's because Twitter is "…

As a metric, popularity can be misleading. Take Hollywood, for example: few things nowadays are as ever-present as motion pictures, but the total box office revenue for 2016 was around $11bn [1]. That's about 19 days worth of revenue for Apple, going by their last quarter [2]. Just because you see it everywhere, or everyone talks about it, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a huge moneymaker. [1] http://www.hollywood…

I'm shocked you consider a tiny little $0.8t company like Apple to be a "huge moneymaker". Last year alone, which "hasn't been kind", just the top 25 oil companies made $2.6t in revenue¹: so what you call 19 days of revenue they made every 36 hours; in the year they made enough to buy Apple at its current market cap with its staggeringly high P/E multiple of 17.91, in its entirety 3.2 times. Just because everyone talks about them doesn't make Apple a moneymaker. Get some perspective. /s

Seriously though, I think you're being totally unreasonable. :) $11 billion is huge revenue for movies. That's not chump change.

¹ https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2016/05/26/global...

Re: Founder Friendly

#28

Post by elmar »

TrobarClus wrote: post #5

> But there is another important participant in the VC/entrepreneur relationship and that is the Company the entrepreneur creates and all of its stakeholders; the employees, the customers, the suppliers, and even the community around the Company. The stakeholders are - the employees! The customers! The suppliers! The community! He makes it sound like that anarcho-syndicalist commune in Monty Python and the Holy Grail…

> He makes it sound like that anarcho-syndicalist commune in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

It as been successfully done at Valve

http://hbhblog.blogspot.pt/2013/03/valve-steam-anarcho-syndi...

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/varoufakis_on_v.htm...

Re: Founder Friendly

#29

Post by evgen »

logicallee wrote: post #27
ckastner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a metric, popularity can be misleading. Take Hollywood, for example: few things nowadays are as ever-present as motion pictures, but the total box office revenue for 2016 was around $11bn [1]. That's about 19 days worth of revenue for Apple, going by their last quarter [2]. Just because you see it everywhere, or everyone talks about it, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a huge moneymaker. [1] http://www.hollywood…

I'm shocked you consider a tiny little $0.8t company like Apple to be a "huge moneymaker". Last year alone, which "hasn't been kind", just the top 25 oil companies made $2.6t in revenue¹: so what you call 19 days of revenue they made every 36 hours; in the year they made enough to buy Apple at its current market cap with its staggeringly high P/E multiple of 17.91, in its entirety 3.2 times. Just because everyone tal…

If we get to lump all of big oil into one pool do we do the same for all of tech? The largest oil company, ExxonMobile, had only $3.5b more in revenue last year than Apple. Then again, you don't get to buy things with revenue, you need profit to pay for expensive baubles. Apple made as much profit in their "weak" (Q3) quarter of 2016 as Exxon made all year.

Re: Founder Friendly

#30

Post by ckastner »

logicallee wrote: post #27
ckastner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a metric, popularity can be misleading. Take Hollywood, for example: few things nowadays are as ever-present as motion pictures, but the total box office revenue for 2016 was around $11bn [1]. That's about 19 days worth of revenue for Apple, going by their last quarter [2]. Just because you see it everywhere, or everyone talks about it, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a huge moneymaker. [1] http://www.hollywood…

I'm shocked you consider a tiny little $0.8t company like Apple to be a "huge moneymaker". Last year alone, which "hasn't been kind", just the top 25 oil companies made $2.6t in revenue¹: so what you call 19 days of revenue they made every 36 hours; in the year they made enough to buy Apple at its current market cap with its staggeringly high P/E multiple of 17.91, in its entirety 3.2 times. Just because everyone tal…

The point was that popularity can be a misleading metric.

Twitter might be ubiquitous (a household name, as you said), but just like Iron Man, its popularity is not proportional to its financial success.

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