andrewchoi

Sorry if this is a silly question, but what are "toasts"?

I was under the impression that it happens at 0:40, when he pulls the left hand off the stride pattern. When it comes back in, the beat is corrected.

The switch happens around the 0:40 mark, for those who may have thought that they missed it (as I almost did)

Unsure if OP is the maintainer, but a quick point: Benchmarks without any indication of underlying hardware don't convey a huge amount of information.

After I fail a challenge, the screen disappears too quickly for me to continue looking at the challenge and figure out the correct solution. Is there a way to enable feedback or solutions?

Doesn't Coltrane (as the most prominent musician to have a religious movement inspired by him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Coltrane#Religious_figure) qualify more so as the high priest of jazz?

Sorry if this is a silly question, but by "algorithm agility" do you mean abstracting away the algorithm into some module?

2 hours and no reference to the relevant XKCD?

http://xkcd.com/910/

Is this a new kind of holy war? First we warred on what platform to run, then what we run on the platform, and finally how we display what we run on these platforms?

Isn't that what Summly was supposed to be? The startup founded by the 17 year old that got acquired by Yahoo for a chunk of change?

Isn't that what SOAP is for?

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/1172/

One of the takeaways of the article for me was that it's a small subset of all mosquito species that are conveying this disease. I'm not an ecologist, but wouldn't the elimination of one sort of (disease vector) mosquito lead to a different (non-disease vector) species taking over the niche in the ecosystem?

I would assume they would be in the keynote?

EDIT: just checked: only hardware they unveiled in the 2013 keynote was a Google Play Edition Galaxy S4, but in 2012 they introduced the Nexus 7, among other things.

Unlikely, but possible.

Exactly; my first thought when reading the article was an escrow service. Reducing counterparty risk is exactly what they were designed for, right?

Sorry if this is a silly question, but is this simply the Heartbleed bug? Or is this a different memory leak bug?

When they introduced ORCFile, I was kind of hoping that the next iteration would be the URUKFile.

In God we trust; all others bring data.

I would assume that the write assumed that "online collaboration tools for businesses" is a single market, and ostensibly both companies can be said to sell products in that space, but yes, I agree that it's less than apt.

Thanks for the info, I knew something was a bit off!

I can't speak for the PE side, but VCs aren't investing their own money. They have limited partners (LPs) that provide the money, and expect returns on it. This LP money goes into funds (vehicles to make investments out of). Each fund has a limited lifespan (the company I work for has fund lifetimes of around 8-10 years). This means that all of the money should be returned to investors over that time period. Since VCs can't make all of their investments at the beginning of the fund (for many reasons, chief among them scarcity) they need to show returns in an even shorter timeframe.

The bootstrapped founder, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily need to exit the investment in those 8-10 (or shorter) years. There are, of course, serial entrepreneurs for whom that is their goal, and for them (as the article points out) their incentives are aligned. For "lifestyle company" founders (not meant to be disparaging), an exit may not be necessary at all. The key differences are time horizon and exit.

Nitpick: VCs are optimizing for % return, not on an dollar return basis.

I would say that the risk profile is not irrelevant: if you're betting that 1/10 of your investments are returning your fund, then just one miss is the difference between a good year and "I don't have a VC firm anymore". Compare that to betting that half of your investments are returning your fund: one miss is the difference between a good year and an "ehh" year.[0]

That's true; when you compare both of them to a 30x, the difference between a 1x and 0x is small. But what I'm saying is that at a $15m investment, very few VCs expect to see a 30x, and when you compare it vs. a 3x or a 5x acquisition, the difference between no money back and your 1x liquidation pref paying out is much larger, proportionally.

The same power law may apply, but you see more of the tails in when you have a much larger sample size. If there were just as many $15m investments happening as $20k investments, you'd see the same result, but there aren't.

Off-topic: are you the same Scott Klein I talked to over the summer re: statuspage.io?

[0] Of course, that glosses over different probabilities of success and failure, but what I'm trying to say is that VCs are risk averse.

The difference is that YC isn't investing $15m into companies, they're investing $20k. The corresponding valuations for the companies that they invest in is $1m on the high end (20k / 2%), not $100m. The risk profile for different check sizes is vastly different.

I agree, especially in light of the preference structures that she mentions (and that I believe are industry-standard). But these arguments seem to lead to the conclusion that you shouldn't be an LP, not that you shouldn't take venture money. The only way that this becomes an issue is if the VC has enough of a stake to run their own decision making and executing process, and that (as I understand it) is the line between VC and PE.

What I'm saying is that there are very few VCs that are hoping for a 30x on one investment to make up for 9 failures. It's an order of magnitude difference, which I think is nontrivial.

If it was a general point, it would have been fine, but the difference between a $100m --> $300m company and a $100m --> $3000m company are huge.

Just some examination of the math:

If the VC firm is taking 15% of your company for $15m, then you've got a valuation of $100m. As far as I know, the "We all know that nine out of ten startups fail" applies to all startups, not the ones that are being valued at $100m. Also, I think very few VCs are investing $15m into a company that they expect to have a 90% chance of failure. You're looking at more of a 3-5x on some of the deals to carry the consistent 1-2x that the rest of the portfolio is returning.

I don't disagree with a lot of the points in the article, but saying that a VC firm with a $150m fund is betting the farm on one $15m investment exiting at $3bn should raise some eyebrows.

Good to hear! I was thinking of doing something similar, but no reason to duplicate effort

Mattermark is fairly new, so I doubt that many companies would have had a concrete track record of success.

Perhaps a more appropriate word is "rebalancing"; I'm sure that the code has been refactored to some extent, but the balance issues are what are salient to this article.

Somehow the blue is more soothing than the yellow/red that the original had.