chakkop

4 ms·

1.
by chakkop 10y ago
Hi Uiri - excellent summary. To add: Ratchet - when companies raise a down round, investors who invested at a higher valuation get issued additional shares. This effectively adjusts the price/valuation they paid. The number of shares i
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by chakkop 10y ago
I agree with you: it is a long book, with more problems than can be enumerated and discussed here, but key amongst them is the idea that inequality--the Gini coefficient--matters above all else, and particularly matters more than the absolu
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by chakkop 10y ago
Maybe more correctly: the vast majority of humanity was equal in its wretchedness, poverty, ill-health, and violence; the vast majority of people led miserable, hungry, precarious, uninteresting lives. Again, I'm not saying we've
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by chakkop 10y ago
Nearly every assumption in this argument of Piketty's is flawed. Is it only the rich that have capital? What about human capital? What about creative destruction--the entry of new market players? Don't the rich (and their children
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by chakkop 10y ago
I think the historical record is against this. Specifically: before the liberal revolution--the liberal idea that all humans are equal, which was truly revolutionary--it would have been unimaginable for a member of the peasantry to even cla
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by chakkop 10y ago
Agreed with you and k-mcgrady. I think maybe we will need to use more and more 'hacks' that make us aware that it's already reasonably good. FWIW, Benjamin Friedman ('The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth') has
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by chakkop 10y ago
I'm curious - does anyone else think that the equality that matters is equality in material outcomes? I think that would be such a boring world. The real equality that matters is equality in dignity as human beings, equality before the
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by chakkop 11y ago
GM Michael Stean lost to Cyber 176 (a mainframe 'supercomputer') in 1977 (at blitz). AFAIK this was the first time a computer defeated a GM; they began defeating IMs and experts some ten years before that. Kasparov himself lost to
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by chakkop 11y ago
Basically don't overestimate how much the 'adults' understand. There is a huge amount of hand-waving, FOMO, leaps of faith, etc... by VCs when they make (and manage) investments. When things work, they are explained ex-post f
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by chakkop 11y ago
But all too common on the buy-side, e.g. in PE/VC, and even most public equity investors.
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by chakkop 11y ago
I think the skills are OK. I find the average personality type I encounter in finance a bit abrasive: one-dimensional, sharp-elbowed, too full of certainties. I worry that this might be a general phenomenon in the corporate world :/ (o
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Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?
67 points by chakkop 11y ago|66 comments
13.
by chakkop 11y ago
This is an error in the article, and the responses above are incorrect. 'Ten on thirty' means $10 million invested at a $30 million pre-money valuation, with a post-money valuation of $40 million. This means that the $10 million a
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by chakkop 12y ago
Here's what's scary: both could be right. Each interprets and constructs meaning from various gestures, actions, words, etc., through their own lens, especially retrospectively. For example, guy and girl go out to dinner, have a g
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by chakkop 12y ago
A nice effort, but it is jarring to see a simple word misspelled (twice) in the Arabic text in the headline image, a result of which is that instead of 'Print' the text says 'Follow' (specifically: instead of "Ittba
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by chakkop 13y ago
They can and they do. Here are some ways: 1. Management makes a share issuance, diluting all existing shareholders by X%. Management then turns around and distributes shares amongst themselves. Something like this can happen if management h
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by chakkop 13y ago
A few comments: 1. The scenarios illustrated in the piece seem horrible but are biased. Consider this: a VC invests $20 million in a business and acquires 50% of it, valuing it at $40 million post-money. Assume the remaining 50% is owned by