"Google came along three years later and kicked Yahoo's ass"
ha ha.. its cool to read it from Y!ou.
and a very cool article. great points.
The Hacker's Guide to Investors
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: The Hacker's Guide to Investors
#32I remember a few years ago Paul was proclaiming that as the cost of starting a company keeps going down, VCs will become extinct. It is interesting to see how the perspective is changing. Now Paul says you need investors to gain advantage over competition even though, oftentimes, a startup needs very little to make a product that people want.
You need publicity to make people aware they want your product. If you are not famous (or have a famous investor, like ycombinator), publicity costs a lot of money.
Re: The Hacker's Guide to Investors
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
While seeing News.YC grow is fantastic, it's a little disheartening to watch the community loose its "small town" feel. It seems that as things become bigger, the comments become more anonymous and users loose their sense of social restraint. This is actually why I left reddit. As the site grew, I became increasingly frustrated that anything I said contrary to popular opinion was mercilessly downvoted & derided, rega…
From the web site's perspective, karma is a mechanism for internal calculations, and is in no way a measurement of your intellect or morality (?) or whatever else. And karma can't be turned into money for you, so why bother at all? :) That's why a possibility of being downvoted never stopped me from commenting, be it reddit, slashdot, or YCnews. One lesson that I learned from reddit in particular, is that if you are…
Karma reflects what the other users of a system think of you. So it can be meaningful to the extent other users are good judges.
Re: The Hacker's Guide to Investors
#34Great essay, Paul.
There are indeed a lot similarities between Vcs and women behaviour patterns. (angels are more like asking a good male friend for some borrowed money...simple, direct, no hiding terms...)
Take the "investors" from the subtitles and replace it with "women" and the information is going to work just as right.
I will think more on your points..
thanks again
MJ
Re: The Hacker's Guide to Investors
#35is this is all true if it is so, so go and fuck your self with a water maloon
Re: The Hacker's Guide to Investors
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the web site's perspective, karma is a mechanism for internal calculations, and is in no way a measurement of your intellect or morality (?) or whatever else. And karma can't be turned into money for you, so why bother at all? :) That's why a possibility of being downvoted never stopped me from commenting, be it reddit, slashdot, or YCnews. One lesson that I learned from reddit in particular, is that if you are…
Karma reflects what the other users of a system think of you. So it can be meaningful to the extent other users are good judges.
Karma and all sorts of voting in general have a flaw: they reflect Average Joe's opinion unless, of course, you have a narrow social/professional group as your user base. The broader your group the lesser are standards of your social website unfortunately. Wasn't it one of Reddit's lessons?
That's why I think there are two types of winners in this game: those with good implicit ranking mechanisms (Google, Flickr) and those with good human moderation (Slashdot). Those based on explicit voting are taking the risk of being taken down by broad and unfocused masses.
Re: The Hacker's Guide to Investors
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Karma reflects what the other users of a system think of you. So it can be meaningful to the extent other users are good judges.
Karma and all sorts of voting in general have a flaw: they reflect Average Joe's opinion unless, of course, you have a narrow social/professional group as your user base. The broader your group the lesser are standards of your social website unfortunately. Wasn't it one of Reddit's lessons? That's why I think there are two types of winners in this game: those with good implicit ranking mechanisms (Google, Flickr) and…
Well there are a couple solutions. One, you could tabulate votes based on the karma of the users. So someone with higher Karma gets bigger weight. That will probably focus the discussionsa and submissions a lot.
Two, you could have interesting comments, based on people voting them up or down, and their replies.
Also you could do some kind of geomtric progression instead of linear, or combine that with the voter's own karma.
Re: The Hacker's Guide to Investors
#38Very inspiring, Paul. I'm so sad I missed the talk. Here's hoping you have a gig somewhere around the time of WWDC in June!
Re: The Hacker's Guide to Investors
#39best piece i've read about angel / venture investing in a long time. nice job :)
note: i'm one of a small group of ex-geek angel investors out here in silicon valley, altho admittedly i'm small fry compared to most others. i've done 5-6 deals averaging ~$25-50K, and only because i'm crazy and my wife isn't watching too closely ;) i was fortunate to be at PayPal from 2001-2004, but not so early that i'm rich enough to retire just yet... maybe someday.
enjoyed the article; keep up the great writing!
- dave mcclure http://500hats.typepad.com/
Re: The Hacker's Guide to Investors
#40What is 'fuck-you money'?
in most places, $5M or more.
however in Silicon Valley or New York, probably more like $10-20M.
(note: in some beach towns in thailand or se asia, FU money can be had for under $1M... maybe even a few hundred thou).
still working on mine, btw ;)
- dave mc