Tell HN: Paul Graham on TC50 panel, streaming live | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Paul Graham on TC50 panel, streaming live

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47 pointsJayNeely26 comments

This is incredible! I have 800 cable channels and absolutely nothing like this.

I didn't watch earlier because I don't watch video at work. But rest assured, I'll be watching for the rest of the night. I guess dinner and Monday Night Football will have to wait.

I've only been watching for a little while, but some first thoughts:

- Public speaking lessons and practice may provide some value, but the best public speaking will come from your absolute conviction about your product and market.

- I finally get Twitter. The sidebar is fascinating.

- Hire a panel of experts (just like here) and do this privately. Several times. Keep doing it until you have it nailed. By the time you do it publicly, there should be no surprises.

- Make your screens dead simple. The more you have, the longer it takes to understand. The longer it takes to understand, the higher the risk you lose your audience before your window closes.

- Don't make fantastic claims. You'll just look silly. Let your product make your claims. (I understand that this is a fine line between confidence and silliness.)

- Have a sense of humor. What is this, a funeral?

- On one hand, the presenters are great. Lots of hard work and dedication went into all of this. They should be proud of themselves.

- On the other hand, the longer I watch, the more I think, "I can do that!" Time to get off my ass and launch something.

You seriously have 800 cable channels?

My father has 900+ with Dish Network and he didn't ask for it. It's not unusual for them to require you to buy extra packages if you want one small fringe one. Try getting Arabic channels with Dish and see how much crap comes with it.

Agree on the public speaking idea and it has parallels to sport: The best athlete's are confident because they know they are the best prepared, not because they've practised being confident.

PG hit the SeatGeek guys with a good question.

Q; "Surely you must know the average variation in ticket prices over a month."

A; stall stall stall... "we don't know."

I thought his question about why they weren't using their technology to make money from buying underpriced tickets themselves was much more damaging.

The SeatGeek founder's answer to the question you're referring was actually much more useful than it seemed when you look at it in context. He was able to say that ticket prices for baseball games varied by 40%, on average, over a month... for sold out games.

Although pg seemed dissatisfied with this response, and was looking for ticket price variation for all games, why should the SeatGeek guys know that? It's not important to their business, because their service is only valuable when there's an active secondary-market for ticket sales, in other words, when tickets for games are rare, which most of the time is because they're sold out.

I think it would be important for them to know it, because the market for the non-active games might be a large part of the $15B market number they quoted -- meaning that SeatGeek is targeting a smaller market than they think. Also, getting people to purchase their tickets on SeatGeek might be a sort of impulse function based on the deviation of the ticket prices; if there is a low variation on most games, people won't be motivated to play the market.

I sell tickets on the secondary market, so I'll answer for them. They aren't doing it because it's risky and the margins are small. Probably the least risky thing they could do with ticket trading is monitoring ticket listings in real time and buying ones that are listed below the prevailing market price, for events that are expected to have an increase in prices over time. However, 85% of events decrease in price as it gets closer to the event, until the last 48 hours which are harder to predict. Of course, the most money is to be made from buying from Ticketmaster at face value before events sell out.

Also, the secondary ticket market is very sensitive to momentum, so if SeatsGeek did a lot of trading they could unintentionally move the market in ways that cancelled out their profit.

They can make more reliable money from the affiliate fees on their sites. The prices for sold out events may vary by 40%, but the sites like Stubhub and Ticket Network take another 20% which makes it very difficult to flip tickets for already sold out events.

Something that often works better is short selling tickets for events that haven't gone on sale yet -- the price will crash down to the true market value after the market has more than a few tickets available.

There are a lot of reasons, but here are the two largest:

1) We've modeled how much we could make as a "hedge fund". We think we could turn $500k into another $500k in a year. We'd need to raise money to be able to do that. The upside for the business in its current form is far larger. This is an industry with huge transaction fees--a "round trip" transaction of buying and then reselling a ticket on StubHub will cost you at least 30-35% of the purchase price. Just because you can accurately forecast prices doesn't mean you can become an instant millionaire.

2) Buying and selling tickets is a far cry from trading stocks. You have to hire a staff to actually open envelopes, manage the physical inventory, deal with individual buyers, make runs to FedEx, etc. There are thousands of brokers out there who have mastered these logistics, whereas we have no experience with them. So we'd prefer to serve as a platform to enable all those brokers to make money, keeping a cut for ourselves.

"PG just destroyed the SeatGeek guys"

I'm not sure the dramatics are called for.

Agreed. Edited

We cited the variation is for sold out tickets. That's the segment of the market that we deal with.

We have the data to figure out this number, it just wasn't a stat I had on the top of my head since we focus on sold out events.

Why this probably smart guys are talking like cars salesmen? There are a few things I'll never understand about US.

Smart guys, but not the smartest. I think you'll find the smartest guys rarely talk like cars salesmen.

Regarding Refmob:

I like the idea as a solid business to business model. But couldn't this better be accomplished as a white label application? The focus on twitter and facebook seems like a mistake to me. Not everyones' business has customers on fb and twitter. Also as Tony pointed out, seems unnatural and quite spam-tastic. Combine that with me having to go to refmobs not very attractive (imo) participation site and I just don't see myself allowing my company to be represented like that.

White label, fully brandable, in-site or standalone dead-simple referral management system.

Track and manage referrers, refer-ees, campaigns and analytics.

Now you've got my attention.

@apsurd - thanks for the mention. You are spot-on about the white labeling - we do offer the ability for a company to host the referral page describing the offer on their own site with their own branding (rather than RefMob's.)

Also, with respect to Facebook and Twitter - all we are trying to do is make it easy for people to refer their favorite business to their friends (not anonymous people) and share the referral bonus with them. They don't have to use FB or Twitter - for example they could just share the link to the referral page on their blog, or on a card, however they like. -Don

I'm really surprised at the negative reception to TheSwop, given all the traffic we see on here constantly with programmers looking for marketing/business people, and vice-versa, and the recent "revelation" that website developers probably aren't very good graphic or UI designers.

Curious. Why ustream and not justin. I thought justin.tv was a funding recipient of YC. No?

Techcrunch 50 is Techcrunch's event not YCs

Thanks. Watch the broadcast, ask a question, get modded down.

Notice ustream is a paying sponsor of TC50. No coincidence there.

[Edit: pg's back on now.]

That's just creepy.

Sweet...is there any way that we'll be able to go back and watch the broadcast from the beginning of the day (it's already 6 hours in)?

If you look below the main video, you'll see thumbnails for several others... these are each segments from earlier in the day.

Paul Graham's panel just started at around 6:00 PM EST, though. (15 minutes ago, as I post this.)

I'll check them out, thanks.

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