andrew_null

I am the author of this blog post - good points on this from a financial perspective. I can tell you were building financial models for a living, because you think ROI is the most important question for entrepreneurs ;-)

For startups, the most important things are good products and good markets. Successful angels and VCs know that, and will invest based on product and growth, NOT financial metrics. Thus, in very few VC pitches will you ever see stats on ROI or payback rate, that's more something you'd seen in the accounting or I-banking world. (I know this from personal experience, having spent the last year at a silicon valley based VC and seeing dozens of pitches)

So if entrepreneurs are primarily focused in the world of products, features, etc., then the key thing is to figure out the metrics that measure how these products tie to external market value. So things like conversion rates in funnels or cost per acquisition become super important, because the features are the steering wheel to your revenue engine. As a result, the spreadsheet model is mostly focused on things that are granular enough to relate to product and functionality, rather than things like valuation multiples or ROI or other overly-broad financial metrics.

Grr! Damn you Tony Wright! ;-)

actually direct response and branding are about 50/50 these days online because search has been kicking so much ass. You cab find these numbers on the iab.net site

Causation != Correlation

Maybe companies with higher financial performance tend to add more women board directors later on, as they grow in employees and revenue.

er, parking garages?

I work on Sand Hill and there's very very few garages around here. Just lots of open parking lots all over the place.

Also the culture here is to leave the fancy cars at home and drive a high-end (but not exotic) german car to work. In fact, tons of guys drive Priuses. Not too many bentleys - it'd be considered too crass.

What do you think Google is doing when they auction you as a click to the higest bidder?

Or what do you think Priceline is doing when they auction you to the highest bidder for a hotel or airline?

In the scheme of things, Search is really brilliant because it's upstream to EVERYTHING transactional. That's the key to controlling the stream of users coming in and out of transactional places on the internet.