Y Combinator's Altman: What I Worry About in Business [video]

I am not sure what you mean? The citations I included, I agreed with and included them to substantiate my claim, which was:

It is not dumb or irrational to get to $1b, I disagree with Sam there. This allows you phenomenal free marketing, exposure, access and capital. It is rational to continue to take money and increase your status as the market is placing a huge premium on reputation and hype. I do think a horrible equity structure would be a bad compromise to make, but given that these markets are private your value is basically your old valuation (which prices in extreme future growth) and your status/pr/exposure. So depending on your value you can fake your way onto the unicorn list.

PLS Logistics is a inc 5000 company, I do not know the valuation. I suspect it is much less than the article I cited stating the dropbox deal terms >$10b. To be clear, the article, which I agree with, states this is well overvalued, but the "price" is around that number by the market. Box stock has liquidity, less uncertainty (known financials), more enterprise customers (stickier) and is valued less. I think storage is a bad business to be in and it is likely in the twilight of 2016 price parity is reached between SSD and HDD drives, a terabyte SSD can be had for $300[0]. Consumers can use free solutions like google and apple, or a 256GB thumb drive and enterprise companies will migrate to locked down internal private networks.

Regardless, freemium and non-monetizing service companies are in bad shape. Investors and founders have an incentive to get their pseudo-value up, and I was addressing that point. Status, in a market with limited transparency or liquidity, is passing as capital and given the rate hike that is coming and the likely failure of a few of these companies creationg a series A crunch, it wouldn't be unwise to cash that status in for currency.

If you were referring to my other comments about the Samwer bros. I apologize for the long winded spiel above. Those were really bad punny jokes and allusions to Bloomberg not editing the story and referring to it as 'Y Contributor' which sounded like a knock of version of YC.

edit: If you meant that the: > It's an arbitrary number of digits in base 10 numerals.

I disagree in that, much like in a Casino, the value is def. not realized until you walk out. That amount of arbitrary digits when that bell on the IPO day, will make them anything but arbitrary. Having that number start high and go up is good, and even if they are loosely based on something, people will used past values as a benchmark, at least initially. By then some wil have cashed out. Depends on what others are optimizing for.

Digits aren't wholly arbitrary, but they will become important.

[0]http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-in-a-free...

Business fundamentals are really important, while not the only thing, that are a critical aspect of longevity.

Ideas are less important than execution.

Porter's 5 forces model provides some basic criteria for evaluating competition. If you provide something easy to copy and the barriers to entry are low, it could be a good idea but not a great business. In one of Sam Altman's lectures the "when to expand internationally" question is brought up. I don't want to misqoute it, so I won't. The context might have been the Samwer bros, but he gives some good insight.

Again an italian restaurant opening up on the blog right next to another isn't going to complain that someone steals their idea even though they sell more or less the same products.

Furthermore Rocket Internet takes ideas that haven't yet come to Europe. People do that all the time just very few have been so successful as the Samwer Brothers.