portman

7 ms·

1.
by portman 3y ago
I mean, N=3, but I've made decent money on smaller exits. The relevant metric is not exit price, it's ratio of exit price to pref stack; i.e. raise $40M and sell for $50M, founder is worse than if they raised $2M and sold for $10M
2.
by portman 3y ago
I believe the author made a simple math error. Economic returns of VC-backed companies follow a power law distribution. This means that the vast majority of the returns for the VC are at the "fat head" of the distribution. The &qu
3.
by portman 3y ago
I had not realized that PG and his family moved to England. I also recently moved from California to England, so would be fascinated to learn more about the genesis of PG's move. (As an aside: I sometimes hear my kids late at night try
4.
by portman 5y ago
Wrong stock. That is the share price of an unrelated chemicals company. UKG is privately held.
5.
by portman 5y ago
>> then you should launch a payment processor that serves the market Checkout.com was most recently valued at $15 billion.
6.
by portman 5y ago
Sincerest form of flattery. Plenty of room in this market for all players.
7.
by portman 7y ago
Grow really fast. It’s fairly one-dimensional: if you are growing at +50% month/month, then you will be able to raise substantial rounds with minimal dilution. If you are not posting exponential growth, then you will likely give up mor
8.
by portman 7y ago
I have a year-old startup and this is the first major Internet outage we've had to deal with... was really awesome to have your play-by-play and definitely changed our incident response (for the better!). Thank you so much.
9.
by portman 8y ago
Quick note about secondary financings. Not targeted at you per-se as much as the large quantity of HN comments that seem to not understand the nuance. You can't include primary and secondary financings in the same total, because you wo
10.
by portman 8y ago
Fascinating to read, thank you. “There are more soldiers in that board there than doctors” is one of the original comments!
11.
by portman 8y ago
akharris -- Any pointers on the most polite but firm way to defer speaking with investors when you're not ready to raise? We just raised Seed, and get 5-10 inbounds per week asking about Series A. I usually write something like: "
12.
by portman 8y ago
Meta: I urge you to post this again in a few days. Very sad to see it never “got heat” and its reach was limited. I think this is one of the more valuable posts this year and wish more folks had seen it.
13.
by portman 9y ago
also $1.25MM x 3% = $37.5k Not $45k It is difficult to trust the calculator when arithmetic errors exist in the prose.
14.
by portman 9y ago
It may have started equal at founding and changed over subsequent rounds. I know of a case where 4 founders started equal and differed by order of magnitude by the end.
15.
by portman 9y ago
I had VIN #150,000 18 months ago, and they crossed 200,000 in May 2017 so it’s likely sitting at just shy of 300,000 right now. The 150k figure you are citing is US only (where there is a race to 200k when the federal credit expires).
16.
by portman 9y ago
Isn't this particular test susceptible to confounding effects? Traffic fluctuates day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month, so how can you be sure it was the presence-or-absence of ads and not something else? If you randomize at th
17.
by portman 9y ago
It's a beeswarm plot, linked in the footnotes: https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/6526445e2b44303eebf21da3b662732... As such, the x-axis is a metric about the population , not the individual. I happen to use them a fai
18.
by portman 9y ago
> The electric drivetrain, when coupled with a vast supercharging network... I took that to mean that the car exclusively refueled on Superchargers, so the fuel cost was $0. That is a legitimate apples-to-apples comparison to the ICE veh
19.
by portman 9y ago
Not sure if it's related to load, but whenever I try it on a long-tail site (i.e. not one you would have precached) it comes back with information about google.com instead of the domain I'm on.
20.
by portman 9y ago
Commercial air travel will serve just shy of 4 billion departures this year, with about 40 million flights. You are correct in the ratio (1:100) but I think you mistook departures for flights and extrapolated 2 orders of magnitude too far.
21.
by portman 9y ago
>> Slack will also let employees and other shareholders sell equity to investors as part of the deal Translation: partial liquidity for founders and early employees.
22.
by portman 10y ago
Charge Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian, and anyone else who has 1MM+ followers. Charge them per tweet. They are the true economic beneficiaries of Twitter. (Like any software company, offer lower pricing to charities.) Use that cash to get rid
23.
by portman 10y ago
According to Google Trends we reached "peak Google" in 2013: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Google What's actually happened is that fewer people are using search engines as the
24.
by portman 10y ago
Can anyone from New England comment on why Vermont and New Hampshire are so different? Demographics and weather are similar, so surprised to see that Vermont is highly negative and New Hampshire highly positive.
25.
by portman 10y ago
>> after that incident Tesla put out an update preventing autopilot from being set for more than 5mph over the speed limit. That's not correct. I routinely drive with autopilot set to +10mph over the speed limit.
26.
by portman 10y ago
Also, I take it to mean 21% use a client-side A/B testing framework. You could be performing A/B testing server-side and it would not be detected using this approach (which ultimately boils down to greping the HTML for known strin
27.
by portman 10y ago
Comcast's cable business generated $435/subscriber in the most recent quarter. That's $800 in two quarters let alone two years. There is significant revenue opportunity in video. Apps are the new video. Music and iCloud are
28.
by portman 10y ago
Article is actually titled "Tesla Shakes Up Market for Lithium, Other Metals" which is less sensational and more accurate.
29.
by portman 12y ago
Does anyone know why this exclusion exists? Excluded from this list are companies that were majority-controlled by an institutional investment firm at one point. I presume this is why Supercell ($3B valuation) is not incl
30.
by portman 12y ago
I suspect they have already started to do so. <anecdote> Every morning I drive in the HOV lane of the 101. Waze and Google Maps give me traffic-based ETAs that are about 20 minutes longer than Tesla's. And every morning, Tesla wi

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