Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who don't have it."
Although, to be fair "cynical observation is often called cynicism by everyone" too.
Cynically circular.
AngelList acquires Product Hunt
271–280 of 280 posts
Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt
#272Finally some light at the end of the tunnel as Product Hunt badly needs to optimize their front-end - it's the slowest popular site today!
I've found this too. Big fan of the site, daily visitor and congrats to the team but it is unbearable to browse on my iPad.
Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt
#273The impression I got from AngelList was that the lights were on, but nobody's home. Every time I tried to use their web site, I would encounter a comedy of errors, and trying to work around each problem would reveal yet another. I wrote several detailed bug reports to their support email address, and nobody ever bothered to reply, let alone fix the bugs. Do they even have any full time web developers working there an…
> Automatically forge first-person email pretending to be from their users in order to virally promote themselves.
This is my biggest problem with AngelList, along with their crappy hackathons. I open my mail and they mailed me to connect to some candidates and also cced them. Then you have to reply to them when they ask stupid questions. And it randomly chooses which companies to pick. And most of the time they connect only the new users to employers just to get more and more users on their websites.
Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt
#274Don't understand the negativity. What Ryan and Product Hunt did was incredible. So many people wanted to create an alternative to Hacker News and Reddit for product people. Everyone else failed but they figured it out. That's awesome. Product Hunt personally helped me in my goal of becoming a independent app maker by showcasing my app https://www.producthunt.com/posts/focus . As of tomorrow I'm full-time indie (YES!)…
Question about your Mac app -- these blocker apps seem to be a dime-a-dozen, but I don't understand how people think they're effective. People have so many mobile devices now, just because I block my Macbook doesn't mean I can't waste time on my iPhone/iPad, or use another computer. In the end, it's pure will that is the best means to stop distraction, no app will solve the problem.
I keep all my distractions on devices other than my work machine, out of my reach. Mindlessly slipping into a browser is many times more easier than standing up and going for a "leisure place".
Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The acquisition price was around $20 million, according to numerous sources familiar with the terms." http://www.recode.net/2016/12/1/13802154/angellist-product-h...
Interesting because according to crunchbase their $6M round with a16z was at a $22M Val. With a follow on debt financing, that indicates to me that they might have taken a down acquisition. Of course that was 2+ years ago. So if it was a 20M acquisition that means that the last two years of growth [2] wasn't good enough. [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/product-hunt#/entity [2] https://www.google.com/trend…
I guess because there wasn't too much growth for two years now? More or less stable after the main explosion of growth in early 2014.
Interesting to see the trend chart. At least PH kept their numbers over the past two years.
Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's absurd that you think PH was doing anywhere close to that revenue. The sale price to me is baffling, even if it was stock. You're not buying revenue, you're not buying valuable technology IP, and you're sure as hell not buying a world-class team that innovated and built some rocketship product. So how do you explain it? Maybe the fact that it was bought by one of their investors is a start..
Is it crazy to think that a website with 2.8MM uniques/month could make could make $280,000/month? I honestly don't know the numbers for a media companies, referral programs or direct resellers. There's also some obvious alignment between the two companies so maybe it was a much larger multiple than I would have expected. The team absolutely managed to build a product that has captured the attention (in many cases da…
It's not absurd just looking at the numbers. But looking at the actual site, then yeah it seems absurd. They weren't exactly doing that much to push revenue. I doubt they did 6 figures a month.
Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) An investor isn't marking a 1x as a win. Locking up their LP's money for many years to return 1x isn't making anybody happy. 2) AngelList isn't giving PH investors/employees $28M cash, or $20M cash, or whatever the figure is reported as. They are very likely giving them mostly stock, stock in a private company with an unknown valuation. Probably only enough cash to cover the taxes (10-20%). The 20M figure is pulle…
20-20 hindsight works both ways; it's easy to see both obvious failures and successes once we know the results with certainty. For Google, I don't think it was certain at all that they would succeed and there was a real chance they could have failed. Their first business model was selling their search engine to enterprises via hardware boxes, which grew very haltingly. In fact it wasn't until Google came across Overt…
Nice hindsight review of Google. Often overlooked.
Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is AngelList getting this 12M? According to Crunchbase they've raised 24M total. Also why the heck would the board approve spending such a massive chunk of cash on an acquisition which seems rather speculative (IE it isn't an obvious merger like GrubHub-Seamless or DraftKings-FanDuel)? Additionally, why would the VCs prefer cash to shares in AngelList? VCs are in the business of putting money into rising compan…
Crunchbase shows AngelList's funds raised at $400M - there were 3 follow-on rounds with undisclosed amounts after their $24M Series B. (I have to revise my estimate of AngelList's valuation up and my estimate of the percent ownership of PH founders/employees down after this - with $400M raised, they're almost certainly worth at least a billion, and Hoover's equity share would be worth I certainly can't speak for a16z…
Since that $400M funding is a misunderstanding and not what they raised. What they raised is mostly $24M, then there's no way they are giving $12M cash out to buy PH, no?
Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it off-topic? In my ~7 years on HN, I've only had comments detached as "off-topic" twice, both times in the past week and by you. Is HN just getting more heavy on moderation?
Although your question was well-intentioned, you inadvertently triggered a subthread that had nothing to do with the topic at hand (Product Hunt). Also, the point you were asking for clarification about happened to be made-up bullshit. That term isn't in wide use in SV; rather, the commenter was fabricating things. It would have been better to mark that comment off-topic rather than yours, since the rot started there…
No, I'm pretty sure sctb is a little to heavy-handed with this off-topic detachment bullshit.
He also detached my comment in which I responded directly to a statement that somebody made, but not the statement itself which. Both my comment and the statement were about the same exact thing.
Original statement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13064089
My response - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13064489
Re: AngelList acquires Product Hunt
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although your question was well-intentioned, you inadvertently triggered a subthread that had nothing to do with the topic at hand (Product Hunt). Also, the point you were asking for clarification about happened to be made-up bullshit. That term isn't in wide use in SV; rather, the commenter was fabricating things. It would have been better to mark that comment off-topic rather than yours, since the rot started there…
No, I'm pretty sure sctb is a little to heavy-handed with this off-topic detachment bullshit. He also detached my comment in which I responded directly to a statement that somebody made, but not the statement itself which. Both my comment and the statement were about the same exact thing. Original statement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13064089 My response - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13064489
It's not always obvious where to snip those threads, and yes, you have a point about that one. Whatever point you had, though, you more than ruined with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13100359. That's the kind of thing that will get you banned here, regardless of how good your point was.
So, how about we be a bit more careful about snipping threads, and you be a bit more careful about following https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html?
Edit: I see that we've had to warn you several times before. If you don't want to be banned, you need to change your ways on HN. I'm not going to ban you in this case because the proximate cause was something we did. But the pattern is something you need to work on.