Fred Wilson on the StackOverflow Investment | Hacker News Reader

Fred Wilson on the StackOverflow Investment

avc.com

24 pointsjavery9 comments

Good luck and congratulations. That said, I think they should have stuck to StackOverflow itself. Being THE site that programmers use for Q&A could eventually make millions per year in profit, with high quality sponsorship. It's also a site they can genuinely be in to. I don't see them being passionate about fashion or car Q&A sites.

Now they're stuck on the VC train without a repeatable formula. They had the power to get thousands of programmers coming to one site, and just as importantly, linking to it from hundreds of high pagerank sites. That's why they've done so well with SEO. It's a picture perfect SEO-driven site.

Now they're going to struggle hard to build up a single new site as successful as SO, let alone dozens.

Not that I think it's a mistake from Fred's perspective. The VCs can afford to roll the dice, and it's not risky compared with many startups. They're betting that Joel/Jeff can figure out a repeatable formula, maybe they can.

Depending on how this all shakes out, the issues that you touched upon may be an opportunity for somebody else to fill any void created.

Does anyone know where the habit of writing $6mm instead of $6m came from? Is there some ambiguity in writing $6m that I'm not seeing?

It comes from banking. In that context, $6MM stands for the Latin "6 mille mille," or "6 thousand thousands". $6M seems natural for those used to SI units (6 megadollars), but I have heard that in some financial circles that may be taken to mean "6 mille" (what we would call 6k).

It's all probably moot, the average person uses and understands them as interchangeable, I'd imagine.

And to avoid a confusion between a US billion (10^9) and a UK billion (10^12).

Errors of 3 orders of magnitude used to worry bankers once upon a time.

Possibly to avoid the confusion of long and short number scales?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

M means 1,000. So MM is one thousand 1,000s or 1,000 X 1,000... which is 1,000,000.

While I understand this convention, I personally hate it. Mixing roman numerals and SI units is just dangerous.

(Didn't Mary Meeker vastly over/under-estimate CPMs on YouTube or something like that a few years ago because of this very reason?)

Congrats to USV and Stack Overflow. (I also participated)

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