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Comment by bowsamic | Hacker News Reader

I think they should get a reasonable return. Deno has a lot of hype and Node has a lot of cultural weight, as does Ryan himself. Not sure about unicorns though! It does not seem like a unicorn product, but I'm not a VC

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You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing. They will force the square peg through the unicorn-shaped hole - or kill the company trying

> You don’t get $21M from investors for nothing.

Do you think that investors see every company that isn't a unicorn as "nothing"? I think you're living in a fairytale

They do, but that's not a bad thing. Sequoia invests in companies they think could be worth multiple billions.

If Deno reaches 30% of the impact of Node, their company could be worth billions.

In the meantime, we get a better open source runtime because they have money to build it out.

a startup could be worth billions only based on the fact that investors continue throwing money at it

there are lots of companies, which are technically "unicorns", but haven't even got any revenue yet (Rivian and Nikola come to mind)

The VC model is not built on 10x exits. Later rounds, sure, but series A is definitely looking for larger multiplier.

If you're a venture capitalist, this is in fact the model.

If they’re expecting a unicorn why are they funding Deno?

VCs see a tiny chance that it can be a 100X return. So raising $20M at say a $50-100M valuation now, that means betting on a $5B+ exit. In return for getting money to take a shot at that level of artificially-fueled revenue growth, the founders are willing to cede control of the community to professional financiers. As others wrote, that's the VC model: make a ton of these bets, and as long as 2-4 turn out, the lottery winners pay for the bankruptcies.

Given every big company uses JS, and thus many SaaS VCs have JS in their annual set of thesis bets, it's reasonable that Deno got picked by a top group given their team & growth. Same story with npm, netlify, etc.

I wish the team luck in hitting significant revenue in the next 9-12mo, as that will determine a lot of what happens to the community. A lot of pressure & culture change to work through!

Maybe they see a chance of it but they cannot seriously expect it

EDIT: the comment I responded to was completely rewritten and replaced with a different one. Please don’t do this

The main base expectations are that out of all of Sequoias bets, some will become $5B+ co's, and for the next 18mo, deno can grow headcount with salaries unrelated to sustainability

Some people involved might expect more, and I'm sure hope for more, but I'm a language designer & CEO, not a mind reader :)

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