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Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

diegobasch.com

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Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#61

Post by wtracy »

jaggederest wrote: post #27
ianterrell wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$6MM invested with a 6% return provides a $360k pa lifestyle just living off the interest. That seems like quite enough for houses, spouses (well—maybe spouse; alimony could eat into that quite a bit), cars, and children.

Zero risk return is way below 6% right now. I'm not sure where you're going to find anything like that. Berkshire Hathaway is willing to guarantee you a $205,000 annual income from that sum in an annuity, which is not a bad deal at all, but it's not 'never worry about money again', it's just a really nice salary, and would be substantially depleted in the case of any inflation at all.

If a guaranteed six-figure passive income is not "never worry about money again", I don't know what is.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#62

Post by seiji »

jcc80 wrote: post #59

By now they have some traction: hundreds of thousands of users, some of whom are even real. I wonder what percentage of users are generally fake and how much some startups goose this number. Maybe adding in 5% worth of fake users increases an acquisition price. I'd imagine it varies by the type of app (CRM, social, etc) but that you'd probably have to get your next funding from the Salvation Army if/when you get caug…

There exist companies where you pay $100 and get 1000 to 10,000 people (read: south east asians) to sign up to your service.

CEOs have been invited to conferences to speak about their "sudden rapid growth." They never admit they are cheating. You can usually tell who does it because their traffic will abruptly stop once they realize the 100,000 one-time-login users in Singapore aren't virally spreading or clicking on ads.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#63

Post by wildmXranat »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #60
smattiso wrote: post #55

Anybody have any firsthand knowledge on how prevalent things like this happen? Seeing as how his company was acquired by LinkedIn, is he admitting this was his strategy?

a lot.

Concise, compelling and rich,- would read again.

But honestly, that sort of stuff rarely gets transcribed into Internet ink.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#64

Post by kevinpet »

horsehead wrote: post #40
bengl3rt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to live like a 20-something for the rest of your life, sure. Your cost structure changes as you get older and have things like houses, spouses, cars, and children.

Bullshit. I live on roughly $18k a year net. buy a house, maybe doubles or PERHAPS triples my housing allowance. Have a wife and kids and things, in total, probably triple. I don't think people understand how to not waste money any more.

I'd rather spend my time writing software then repairing my old socks. As a bonus, writing software makes me about 100x what repairing my old socks nets me per hour.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#66

Post by ricardobeat »

drone wrote: post #47
jaggederest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero risk return is way below 6% right now. I'm not sure where you're going to find anything like that. Berkshire Hathaway is willing to guarantee you a $205,000 annual income from that sum in an annuity, which is not a bad deal at all, but it's not 'never worry about money again', it's just a really nice salary, and would be substantially depleted in the case of any inflation at all.

Right now 10-year T-Bills are pulling about 1.65, and inflation is having a nice bounce between 1.7 and 3. Let's even it out at 2 - either way, yes, you're losing money on ultra-low-risk investments. All you can hope for is to reduce the wages of inflation on your balance sheet. BH annuity is not a bad deal, but losing 2% of your income a year will sound tolerable until about year 5... =) If you retire mid-twenties o…

You want to spend 50 years on vacation?

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#67

Post by smattiso »

drone wrote: post #47
jaggederest wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero risk return is way below 6% right now. I'm not sure where you're going to find anything like that. Berkshire Hathaway is willing to guarantee you a $205,000 annual income from that sum in an annuity, which is not a bad deal at all, but it's not 'never worry about money again', it's just a really nice salary, and would be substantially depleted in the case of any inflation at all.

Right now 10-year T-Bills are pulling about 1.65, and inflation is having a nice bounce between 1.7 and 3. Let's even it out at 2 - either way, yes, you're losing money on ultra-low-risk investments. All you can hope for is to reduce the wages of inflation on your balance sheet. BH annuity is not a bad deal, but losing 2% of your income a year will sound tolerable until about year 5... =) If you retire mid-twenties o…

Let's assume your investments keep up with inflation but no more, which is very easy to do. Then essentially you are just living off of your principle. 5MM goes a long ways. 75k a year (in today's dollars) will last you 67 years. That's more than most people make. I'd take that.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#68

Post by joshAg »

vertr wrote: post #8
bengl3rt wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, $6m really isn't that much these days. Might get you a nice house in the Silly Valley and a few years of living expenses, but that's not "set for life" money if you're in your 20s.

Are you serious? $6m sounds like more than enough to retire on at any point for most people.

assuming losing 30% off the top for taxes, taking 3% of the principle every year for "salary" is $126k. That seems like more than enough for me, too.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#69

Post by zacharycohn »

dougabug wrote: post #51
lukejduncan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm continually reminded of Neal Stephensons remark "I saw the best minds of my generation... writing spam filters." He talks a lot lately about how we've stopped trying to solve the really hard problems and instead are continually trying to sell digital "sugar water." *Source: https://plus.google.com/116416314233992548280/posts/NxCMjiQX... )

Truly defeating spam in all its guises (SEO, commercials, daily offers, junk mail) is a pretty difficult problem. How do you recognize cleverly concealed data? Spammers constantly adapt to spam filters and new/pristine communications channels which catch on precisely because they are relatively spam free. Of course, spam filters also evolve, this kind of runaway adversarial co-evolution is what leads to systems which…

By "difficult" he doesn't mean "technically non-trivial."

He means world hunger, building spaceships, developing new sources of clean energy, etc.

I'd rather have spaceships AND spam than no spaceships and no spam.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#70

Post by iosvpn »

lukejduncan wrote: post #38
diego wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's awesome to work on those problems. The point I was trying to make is that in this case the company has to choose between innovating for the long term, and solving urgent problems that mean lots of $ in the short term. Internal venture projects tend to be put on the back burner when your best engineers could save 50M by optimizing the hell out of your backend.

I'm continually reminded of Neal Stephensons remark "I saw the best minds of my generation... writing spam filters." He talks a lot lately about how we've stopped trying to solve the really hard problems and instead are continually trying to sell digital "sugar water." *Source: https://plus.google.com/116416314233992548280/posts/NxCMjiQX... )

Wait a second. Isn't Neil working on a realistic sword fighting video game? Kind of hypocritical, don't you think?
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