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VC for Hackers

chimeracoder.github.io

27 points_pius12 comments

This is pretty awesome. Wish this had been around a few years ago. I've pretty much "reverse engineered" these concepts by following HN discussions...

Could someone explain the "Your main differentiator is the market -> raise venture" vs "Your main differentiator is your advantage -> not raise venture" thing better?

Sure, this would be more clear if I had the audio to go along with it (which I should probably post too).

Basically, many (not all) successful venture-backed startups are creating new markets for themselves. Google wasn't successful because it was the best web portal - Google was successful because it rendered hierarchical web portals irrelevant. They created a new market that obsoleted an existing one.

In other words, if you're creating a market, you have a huge potential for upside. If you're entering an existing market with a superior product, that's possible, but more difficult.

These are all rough rules of thumb, of course, not hard-and-fast criteria.

so from a VC's pov, a company that could create a new market has more potential upside than one that could take over an existing market? ...seems a bit counter-intuitive because for an existing big market you know exactly how big it is, so there's no "market size related risk", whereas for a new market, there's a big risk that it will turn out to be a very small niche market. Isn't the optimization being made for something like [upside]/[risk], even if it's an intuitive estimate of course, with an important component of the [risk] being market related?

Your link does not seem to work

Author here. You can scroll through the slides with the keyboard (press 'page down', the right arrow, or the down arrow).

(The slides were generated with go.talk/present: http://godoc.org/code.google.com/p/go.talks/pkg/present)

ok, thanks :)

Thanks! I've seen quite a few of these presentations and have never been able to get them to work. Naturally, I want to scroll with my trackpad and this works up through Slide 3. I didn't know you could use the keyboard to actually load more slides. I wish they'd fix this in the presenter software.

Author here. I prepared these slides with go.talk/present[0]

If you see any issues (mistakes, things that need to be added), feel free to submit a pull request! https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/vc-for-hackers

[0] http://godoc.org/code.google.com/p/go.talks/pkg/present

I found it very unsettling that there is no way to know how many slides were left -- I know that's probably github limitation, but maybe worth inserting summary/progress slides?

Slide 8 uses the acronym "ROI" but doesn't define it.

Return On Investment (ROI) is very widely used, including in the general press. He probably thought it unnecessary to define.

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