SandersAK

It's a hard problem, but BART's issues come down to a bunch of fiefdom infighting among different counties.

Paris and London have pretty fantastic transit.

SF and the bay area in general have done an astonishingly bad job of updating mass transit to handle growth. I used to live in NY and thought the MTA was stupid and short sighted, but since moving here, they come off as geniuses compared to BART etc.

This article is kinda insulting. Panels and conferences suck when they're homogenous. They're banal and uninspiring because the perspectives are all too similar.

The reality is that they didn't work hard enough to find good quality presenters that represent the actual world we live and work in - one where people approach problem solving in myriad different ways that stem from their own history and experience.

tl;dr - if you can't find women, POC for your conference, you didn't look hard enough.

We at Beacon (beaconreader.com) agree.

We've focused on this for the past 18 months and have helped journalists and publishers get more than $1m in funding for quality journalism projects.

I wrote about this as well a while back: http://www.beaconreader.com/blog/the-reader-writer-relations...

Hit me up if you wanna chat: adrian at beaconreader.com

Was just looking for something like this. Will definitely hit you up!

Not trying to be snarky - but the way it's worded in the post makes it seem like it's the norm moving forward but also included for all YC companies:

"But starting in the Summer of 2014, we added a pro rata provision to our standard investment documents, and starting now, we're going to aim to support all YC companies in future financing rounds by doing our pro rata. We will try to do this for every company in every round with a post-money valuation of $250 million or less."

if you are a YC company, they own a percent of your company (usually around 7%). If you raise additional funding later, this will dilute every shareholder's percentage down to accommodate the new investor.

Traditionally YC did not have Pro Rata, which is the right to basically participate in the new round, to retain their original ownership percentage.

Scenario: YC owns 7% New investor comes in and buys 20% YC dilutes 1.4% (which is 20% of their shares)

With Pro Rata, YC could participate in the new round up to 1.4% of the total price of the company to maintain their 7%.

Why this can be important: VCs are like beautiful but often panicky gazelles. They are easily spooked, and find comfort in the direction the herd is going.

If an investor in a company in the previous round doesn't reinvest, this may look bad and cause them to back out.

If YC invests in everyone's Pro Rata, it means that there'll be no apparent signal for the gazelles to act on. They'll hafta rely on their own judgement (crazy, I know.)

an announcement internally would have been nice...

This was written in a time before things like the Ice Bucket Challenge. It was inconceivable to think of that as powerful content that would generate millions of unique views.

Content is king, but what Gates could have never guessed was what type of content.

I didn't see a box saying "anyone who has a myopic entitled view of the world, and has spent their life reaping the benefits of discrimination while blindly passing off attempts to move forward because such attempts strike deep at the core of their own anxiety about their self-worth and the foundation of their success" on there so I think you're good.

I have to say that AeroFS is a company I've always admired from a distance. They don't raise that much money, they don't make a fuss, and they just keep growing.

Avalon is a no name? That's new to me.

If you're half white can you use the license half the time?

It's got graphs so it's definitely scientific.

Yep, I don't disagree with this. I don't know what the answer is. My dream is some mix of US risk taking coupled withe European humanism... but that got us the UK and that's not my idea of a good time either.

I'm not bitching about France. I lived there and had a company. And yes, I agree, most of what I'm saying extends to europe in general. But if you look at innovation centers for the tech industry (and for companies in general) it isn't France / Europe.

Also, if you don't think that companies like Orange (which has an infamously high suicide rate) doesn't treat its employees like expendable assets, you're kidding yourself.

Lastly, I dunno if you're being sarcastic, but actually France is a terrible place for new fashion trends and has been since the late 60s.

A huge part of the large French fashion brands appeal is based on tradition and capturing that lost time / place when style was timeless (ie Chanel, Hermes).

Most of the best young fashion designers leave France to London, NYC etc.

I dunno about anywhere else, but in America these are definitely not standard. In CA most tech employees are at-will.

if your plan is to just vacation in France for 6 months and hack on a prototype, do it. But that probably applies to anywhere in the world.

If you want to set a business up and live in France forreals, then don't do that, and read below.

tl;dr - france is not a culture celebrated for its high risk profile. it celebrates its past and culture, things it wishes to preserve. everything else suffers because of this.

Moving from US to France all of your costs are going to go up. It's really hard to get French people to adopt the latest trends. Historically things are very conservative with the benefit of the doubt erring on the side of the status quo.

Any legal, gov't, or bureaucratic issues you think you have in the US, you can multiply by 20 if you set up in france.

The whole taxation system in France was never designed to deal with risk-heavy entreprises. If you employ someone, you must budget for paid vacation. To employ them at all, you need to draft either a CDI (Contract Duration Indeterminée)which means basically that you're employing them for life, or CDD (Contract Duration Determiné) which means you employ them on short term contract only. So either you marry them or you can't promise them much upside.

Having lived in France for four years trying to start a company, I can say, without question, this would be the worst idea for anyone who is serious about starting a company.

Most french LEAVE france because of how byzantine and insane the laws are towards companies (let alone startups).

Ah the poor, yes, I forgot about that monolithic entity. Individualism you say? All these poors want to be individuals? Well that doesn't make them very individual now does it?

The ivory tower is a strange place.

huge rogue-like fan. spent too much time with binding of isaac, wayward souls etc.

never seen that subreddit tho, thanks!

is this like a sup'd up version of Hoplite?

because I'm into that.

dunno if the brand stuff matters that much tbh, but I'm all for more Hoplite.

It's important to distinguish the business model of publishing journalism from actual journalism.

The News Industry is dying. But the creation and effective dissemination of important information is thriving.

But the analogy doesn't break down. The value is in owning the medium. This is exactly why entities like comcast don't want to become dumb pipes. yes it is better for everyone if they do, but in their shorter term interest, it's much better to own the high value stuff.

Don't go to meetups. Don't go to conferences until you have some leverage. Take the network you have now and find one or two clients that you can provide tremendous value for. Spend a lot of time with them and hone what you have to offer into a very compelling service.

Once you do that, then focus on a slightly larger client or network that is connected to your accounts.

It's a grind. There's no shortcut.

Investors (and the team) were looking at the wrong numbers. In apps, it's basically all down to having meteoric growth week over week. It can't be based on spikes as this was.

Taking money off the table in a B makes sense for the founders, and I can't blame them for leveraging their situation.

Ultimately this falls on the investors for biting on hype, and not having a deeper understanding of the product (and it's potential)or the founders (and their potential).

edited for clarity.

Between friends I think you're right.

But the discussion here is a pitch to investors (or YC). The point is that you need to be very deliberate and explicit.

The questions asked are very focused on sussing out not just what the product is, but if the founder has a clear and concise vision of what makes it super valuable.

In this case, presenter gets really rattled, and ends up defending all these weird edge cases because PG is throwing him off (on purpose).

Lots of people have great ideas, and even great products, but as PG says at the end - if you can't explain precisely what your product does, it speaks not only to issues of the product, but to the team that runs it.

And OF COURSE, that doesn't mean it's the only indicator of success, but it's a good sign.

But more importantly than being able to pitch, Kyle demonstrated something far more valuable - the ability to pursue his vision doggedly year in and year out until he built something people wanted.

thought it'd been on what.cd for years?

Tl;dr: Luthiers and violin makers brute forced fluid dynamic discoveries with knives and an inability to perfectly reproduce their wares.

It definitely varies. We started our corp entity in 2011 and founders didn't take a salary till 2014. Needless to say, I have a lot of credit card miles.