SemanticFog

5 ms·

1.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
VCs would happily invest in low risk, high-return investments -- that is in fact what they are looking for. But wherever there is truly low risk, multiple funding sources will compete, and returns will be driven lower. Companies that fit th
2.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
If you're working on a big idea that is slightly ahead of its time, then persistence can pay big dividends -- check out the story of Pandora ( http://www.businessinsider.com/pandora-story-2011-6 ). If you're working on a smaller, highly tac
3.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
This is the tech equivalent of being trapped in a Portlandia skit. You guys are taking his parody seriously...
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
Is this guy for real? Or does he transcend our limited notions of "reality"?
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
In general I think pay-to-pitch is highly suspicious, but I'm sympathetic to Graham Lawlor and Ultralight startups. He charges a small fee to cover expenses and make sure people are moderately serious. There's no way he's getting rich off o
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
On the one hand, it's kind of a classic dick move by Mark, pretty typical of his bloody mindedness. (He's more of a bulldog than Zinga ever was.) On the other, in any company as big as Zynga there are people who coast along and don't really
7.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
You're absolutely right -- RDBMSes were designed to solve problems with the nosql-type approaches that preceded them. The nosql bandwagon is blindly rolling into the past, where it will crash into the old problems of concurrency and consist
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
There's already artemisinin resistance starting in several places around the world, especially the Thai-Cambodia border, a very chaotic area with high endemic malaria. The main problem is that cheap medications are often out of date or have
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
Most vaccines are against viruses and bacteria. Malaria is a more complicated organism, a protist with many local varieties, and a tremendous ability to evolve around vaccines and medications in general. Natural immunity to malaria is often
10.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
There are so many ways to screw over a non-employee, minority common shareholder, you may well have no case here. For example, if the company hit a rough patch, it might have been recapitalized, with all current shareholders wiped out. Sin
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
Why change when you are hauling in billions of dollars per year, and there's nowhere to go but down? The mobile carriers are going to extract as many dollars as possible while they still can. The fundamental problem is lack of competition.
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
Comforting words from pg... If you start a startup, you'll probably fail. Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk.
13.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
The real story might be that his product just isn't as good as the competition. It took 10 seconds of searching to find https://www.igradeplus.com/ , which on the surface looks like a much better offering. He seems critical of his customer
14.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
@pg I think you should consider that your portfolio company is possibly not telling you the whole truth after they screwed up in a major way. I have no idea what happened -- just asking you to consider the possibility, which you seem to rej
15.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
They have every right to promote their differentiation. Speaking as someone who lives in a great part of Manhattan and is often out of town, I've never used AirBnb because I don't trust their verification. I will definitely look for a compe
16.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
The most important reason to move to EC2 is flexibility -- do you need to quickly add servers, then later turn them off? If you have very predictable needs, and already have dedicated servers running, then there's no clear reason to change.
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs had awful pay, about $15K/yr, but it was a chance to break in to the business. One grizzled
18.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
1x is still 1x -- if you don't get over it, the common shareholders don't get paid. In a pool as big as YC's there will be plenty of examples.
19.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
You'd be surprised. The ones that raise the most money also have the hardest time getting over the preferred total. The purchaser will take care of the employees it wants, but other common shareholders often end up out of luck.
20.
by SemanticFog 15y ago
If YC holds common shares, then you need to adjust the expected value down quite a bit. On any exit that isn't a huge win, non-employee common shareholders are by far the most likely to get short end. The expected value is probably 10-50% o
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
If Java could be redesigned from scratch, with no concern for backwards compatibility, it would probably look a lot like C#.
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
I say this as a person who has read thousands of resumes and hired hundreds of people at multiple startups: Your record will hurt you badly at places you don't really want to work. It will help you at the places you want to be. Make it clea
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
Please let them hire some decent people to handle communications to AWS users! And we won't complain if they also get some engineers with world-class expertise in network attached storage.
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by SemanticFog 15y ago
Chrome used to crash frequently for me on multiple Windows 7 64-bit machines, but it runs rock solid now. It turned out the problem is that Chrome auto-updates flash, and their software frequently crashes on 64-bit windows. One one computer
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by SemanticFog 16y ago
We had consistent serious problems related to EBS for a several-month streak about a year ago, and I heard almost identical stories from other EC2 users around the same time. Instances with EBS attached would suddenly become completely unre
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by SemanticFog 16y ago
In his example, the company is profitable from day one. The question is deciding how much those profits are worth -- ie, valuing the company. PE ratios and comparable company valuations are two standard ways to assess the long-term value of
27.
by SemanticFog 16y ago
This guy is math challenged: >Let's do some simple math here, folks. Assume you bought an entire company that had $100 in revenues and 50% profit margins. And that you paid just two times revenues, or $200. It would still take you four
28.
by SemanticFog 16y ago
It's impressive that YC helps founders succeed by putting them through a short but intense program. It's even more impressive that YC helps founders succeed by rejecting their applications, and motivating them to try harder. The latter is a
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by SemanticFog 16y ago
These definitely happen all the time. Another thing to watch out for is for unfilled seats that can change the board dynamic. If multiple parties have to agree on the board seat, then an intransigent investor can maintain an advantage by ne
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by SemanticFog 16y ago
I think the problem is lack of a clear data element that captures what you need. The current vote up/vote down system blends a lot of factors together, which is valuable for some calculations, but not the one you're looking for here. I sugg

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