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If you'd please review the site guidelines and not post like this, we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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VCs are scared when they should be greedy
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Re: VCs are scared when they should be greedy
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(Context: I'm a successful serial entrepreneur, but never on the fundraising side) My experience is that the best investment opportunities are counter-cyclical. During a down economy, talent is cheap. Competition is low. It's easy to build a growth business which explodes when the economy enters a growth stage. It's also cheaper, more focused, and more efficient to have 5 people work for 5 years than 100 people for 1…
Have you looked at TinySeed? But they don't operate at a Series A scale in terms of cash deployed per investment. I suspect that the power law of returns in VC model requires really large outsized returns that cannot be achieved Without an all or nothing model.
Outsized returns can be generated, just in due course.
Blowing $500M is great for building an Amazon or an Uber -- if you require a lot of hardware or logistics. It's useful in a 4-way rat race where it's first-past-the-goalpost.
I tend to prefer deep tech, where I build something hard (or relatively hard) that's never been built.
A company like Bose has $3.2B in annual revenues, 58 years after founding, and I believe they've never raised external capital. That's because they have a big pile of unique technology. Contrary to their image, they do a lot of work which is not speakers (and which you've likely never heard of), from architectural acoustics to government.
TinySeed looks to fund small, niche SaaS companies, mostly. Most of the stuff they fund, more or less anyone with SWE background could build.
For developing hard tech, I'd pick $10M and 10 years over $200M and 2 years, any day of the week.
Re: VCs are scared when they should be greedy
#253Re: VCs are scared when they should be greedy
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a hard time picturing uber failing. I take uber all the time, all my friends do as well, how can it fail?
Because it still isn't profitable and maybe never will be. I would still use it if it cost more -- hell: I'd probably use it more as I'd feel better about it ;P -- but a lot of people wouldn't as it is already a borderline-luxury for a lot of people. They continue to claim they are "drawing closer to profitability" -- as recently as a couple months ago, after reporting their first quarter earnings (which happened to…
With the amount of money that went into expanding and growing as fast as possible I can imagine why they have not been profitable
Re: VCs are scared when they should be greedy
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Instead of our engineer talent pool working on things that matter, such as managing climate change, thanks to (in part) a16z they now work on overheating the planet with lame monkey jpegs. We are in proto-idiocracy.
> Instead of our engineer talent pool working on things that matter, such as managing climate change, thanks to (in part) a16z they now work on overheating the planet with lame monkey jpegs. We are in proto-idiocracy. This statement assumes the following axioms: - The engineers that go to work for such startups are capable of devising/deploying solutions towards climate change: Some engineers & researchers may be abl…
This is something that breaks my brain as a young ambitious software engineer... the problems of the older days, so red tape, lack of infra, access to capital, and all the other problems have still not been resolved after hundreds of years? to the point where you are forced into the digital world to start a business.
there's something wrong with humans, let alone the way we handle policy, economics etc