My Experience Wednesday in SF

secondbreakfast.co

24 points·secondbreakfast··5 comments

Hey, I drove through SF for the first time in over 20 years Wednesday morning and it was quite pleasant…at 3am.

Only saw three homeless people, checked myself before I went into full combat driving mode, Baghdad style, on the 101 because something set me off and didn’t hit one of google’s robocars even though I really, really wanted to.

Good times for all apparently, maybe it was the rain.

> People are burning millions a month. Capital markets don’t exist

What does "capital markets don't exist" mean here?

It means it is difficult/impossible for startups to get additional lending

All startups have a runway. Let’s say 12 months. You hit your metrics, hire, gain customers, go back to investors and get more money. Your valuation goes up, your shares get diluted (smaller slice of a bigger pie), you get another couple million and your runway resets. You do it again.

Now imagine the capital is gone. Not just the investors you know, not just the ones you’ve heard of. There’s no capital to be had for anyone for anything.

So your runway doesn’t reset when the money runs out you have to fire everyone and shut the company down.

The line is hyperbole, meant to evoke terror and despair. Or maybe all the money dried up. Or maybe the answer is somewhere in between. (There’s still money, but it’s cautious money and half the startups in existence now won’t be in a year)

It reads like a passage from a William Gibson novel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com