Operating Manual for VC Firm Bloomberg Beta | Hacker News Reader

Operating Manual for VC Firm Bloomberg Beta

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77 pointspravj23 comments

One of their investment paths is "Beacon":

> We believe that there are exceptional individuals with great ideas who likely have the skills to build a company but lack the network or personal financial means to get started. So we will invest a small amount of capital -- $50K (for roughly 2% of the startup idea you pursue) -- to support very, very early-stage founders explore an idea, validate a key hypothesis, or build an early prototype.

https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Manual/blob/master/1%20-%2...

Just a hunch, but it's likely something close to 100% of said individuals will have a (pre-existing, not a result of reaching out specifically for this investment) network to connect them the "right way" for the money. That's just the way this industry works. It's exceptionally rare for someone without connections to make any headway.

They pretty much say that in this document.

> If we don’t know you ourselves, we prefer if someone we trust knows you.

I believe Marc Andreessen has said the same thing in the past. When he was accused of elitism, he said:

"That is my test of whether this person is a true entrepreneur. If they are, they will find a way, by hook or crook, to get to someone who knows me"

It’s a good test for whether when the entrepreneur needs to close a big sale they can get connected to the purchasing decision maker.

What's not elitist about that statement?

I think what he's saying is, if that stops you, you weren't going to get very far anyway.

It will obviously be easier to draw Marc's attention from a high socioeconomic stratum, but as a VC it's not in his interest to make it completely impossible for anyone. At least that's the way I read it.

Also something similar in the manual!

> If you don’t know how to find us, figure it out.

That is likely true but would they settle for 2%, probably not. 2% is a very small price to pay for essentially a years time of one employee. The startup I am working on has spend roughly 55k over 18 months and have a prototype that is on par with tools I had seen used commercially in my previous positions.

That's great! Beacon is a separate, experimental type of investment we started recently. For these, the terms are straightforward ($50k on a $2M post-money SAFE). This is different than our typical Seed investments, which are much larger checks and target much higher ownership percentages.

If either are opportunities of interest, many of us on the team can be reached a variety of ways (email, twitter, LinkedIn).

Thank you for the positive comment! I will keep Beacon in mind.

It'd be nice if a majority of websites were exposed like this: if you wanted to save an article or blog-post for example, you could just fork it into a repository. What's saved is just the original text, or anything that has a flat representation. Then you could edit and re-publish with changes; I think this is more in align with how knowledge works, sort of an implicit graph with splits and merges.

The basic idea is to separate the content from how it's rendered (html, css, js). How content is rendered can be a repo-by-repo decision. Benefits of this is better portability of data and easier way to organize things on the internet: you wouldn't have to web-scrape with some type of dom parsing heuristic library since the content is readily accessible.

It's also feasible in implementation: plenty of people are publishing via Github pages and Jekyll; I just haven't seen the ability to fork posts yet. Bloomberg Beta definitely could've done this for their website.

Even better, they do share templates of some (I guess) of the legal documents: https://github.com/Bloomberg-Beta/Investment-Documents

Very useful if you are into that stuff.

The average investment of $500,000 is way too small IMO. That's less than the salary of one L5 (or L6?) engineer at Google.

1. 100% - FANG employees are indeed known as potential bad fits for early stage startups! Beyond asking for salaries multiples over international norms, which many teams are better off hiring vs 1 FANG type, they also often risk needing to overcome other critical bigco weaknesses: unready for the ups-and-downs, weird tooling, used to large org support in tools and distribution, must unlearn prioritizing tech / scale / reliability over hustle & iteration, and more. Startups may be a big leap for you and too much of a cultural mismatch. Which is OK! RSUs are great and you'll do fine, and good to realize now what it means to take a leap! If this is too much, equity shiftz to salary by Series A / B, and a few co's raise a lot in seed so already do that dilution trade off.

2. 500k is a lot for pre-seed and fine for the common case of a 1-5M seed party round, which is generally 1-2 leads + various smaller checks. Interestingly, w/ softbank floundering and us economy prepping for a recession, I expect seed rounds to back down -- current is 2-5X over just 5-10yr ago.

(Disclaimer: founder that works with them and has to think about this stuff professionally)

L6. That’d be a high L5. I think the median total comp for L5 is around $350k.

kind of funny that they all have twitter and linkedin links, but no github

Connection is always needed to progress

> We've moved our entire web presence to GitHub to become even more transparent. Here, you can see how things have changed over time, propose improvements, or even take our ideas and make them your own..

Sorry but to me this is screwy. Why do I have to spend time navigating github to find basic info about the firm if I am just curious? Why is it beneficial or implied that anyone who is anyone knows the secret handshake of finding what they need by finding it in this manner? Why is it not possible to have transparency with a 'normal' website and then if there is a reason point people to github?

From wikipedia:

"Bloomberg Beta consists of six full-time employees: Roy Bahat, Karin Klein, James Cham, Shivon Zillis, Morgan Polotan and Shaina Conners. Bahat was previously the President of IGN Entertainment and was the chairman of Ouya Inc. until June 2015."

The github site says nothing about who these people are either. Sorry they are not 'well known enough' to present this way. This is not 'everyone knows who Bill Gates is'.

Example: https://github.com/KarinK

This is not transparency it is the opposite.

There are links to each of their twitter/linkedin/blog and other relevant pages listed next to their names in the section "Who we are".

You can't do pull requests on a normal website. IMO, it is a nice experiment.

They're part of an insider club, if you're an insider you'll know who they are.

These are the kind of people wear their graduation rings upside down so you'll feel the chunk of metal in the handshake.

If we don’t known them, we need to get in touch with people they may know. who we most likely don’t know either, esp if the circle is small and keeps helping friends of theirs.

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