il

Some of those 80% might be successful businesses and even exits that make the founders rich in the $20M-$50M range, they just don't have enough traction to be venture-scale startups.

Or let's put it this way: 80% of startups will not reach $100M in revenue. Does that sound so bad?

I don't see any reason for the doom and gloom here. Series A funding isn't a lottery with a random 1 in 5 chance. The 80% of companies struggling to raise Series A are the ones without meaningful revenue or user traction. Why do they deserve to get funded?

A $1M seed round should be more than enough to get a SaaS business cash flow positive or get a consumer product to a meaningful user base. If you have failed to get there on a seed round, the answer isn't "give me more money", it's "the market is telling you to try something else".

$1M can be 2 years of runway. That's a long time to figure out what you need to do to get to product-market fit.

Most successful businesses don't have anywhere near that level of funding and are still able to make money on more constrained resources.

Most banks will give you a check scanner you can feed checks into at home to deposit them.

Given the typical anonymous MO, an attempt is probably submitting a form with SQL injection, scanning for a common exploit, etc.

Note that all of the above policies are considered mainstream in the United States.

If you believe in direct democracy, many states have numerous initiatives on the ballot. You can always vote on those and leave the rest of your ballot blank.

Have you been to San Francisco? Nobody's getting arrested for that here. No double standard, some laws are enforced more than others. This is about property/violent crimes, not snitching on victimless crimes.

The key distinction here is between wealth and income. Most angel investors are funding startups from their existing wealth(i.e. funds from a previous exit) rather than income. And any income they do get is probably taxed at the capital gains rate. As far as I know, Obama wants to raise taxes on income, not wealth.

Yes, but then the expected value is less than getting a job.

This post is based on so many false assumptions that it's meaningless. Most small business owners/bootstrappers are NOT millionaires, most are just barely scraping by. Less than 3% of small businesses make $250K or more in profit.

(http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/09/boehner_c...)

So if you consider "failure to make over $250K" as failure, 97% of small businesses are failing.

This might be differet for unsophisticated investors, but I've never seen an experienced technology investor invest in anything other than a C corp.

In any case, investors don't want losses to flow through to them. They want losses carried forward to reduce the company's tax liabilty in the future.

This doesn't apply to startups, which are always set up as C corporations.

Most businesses are set up as S corp or LLC to avoid our broken corporate tax system/double taxation. The high corporate tax rate obviously encourages entrepreneurs to pass profits through to themselves rather than keep it in the business and grow the company.

Since MongoHQ is profitable, empirically, yes.

Don't know. Doesn't really matter. I suppose I'm more the blue pill type. As long as my dreams/goals/experiences feel authentic and rewarding, it doesn't really matter if they're a product of social conditioning.

A lot of it is luck. I'm so lucky that the activity I enjoy most, building up a business, happens to also be highly valued and rewarded by society.

This kind of angst is definitely a first world problem. Go travel and see how most people in the world really live. You'll find a new understanding.

Have you spoken to anyone about possible depression symptoms? I think it's all a matter of perspective and attitude. Most of the things you see as negatives seem to me as positive aspects of society. Come on! Most of us reading Hacker News have really great lives! We're in the top 1% of the world's population with wealth, freedom, leisure time, etc. Don't complain...go out and explore the world!

It's silly to assume that everyone's dreams are dead. Some of us are actually living our dreams every day.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

Caltrain is a monopoly because there's not another competing train running alongside it that can take you to the same place.

I think a big part of the value of Clipper to Caltrain is to increase revenues from people who forget to tag off. You're looking at this from an engineering perspective, but not from the business perspective. Breakage is a huge revenue driver for many industries(think of gift cards), and a monopoly like Caltrain is a great fit for implementing a system like this.

If it were that easy to identify good ideas/teams then venture capital as an asset class wouldn't have consistently negative returns.

To put it another way: If you think you can identify winning ideas/teams with even 50% accuracy, then drop what you're doing and raise a fund, because you're going to be the most successful investor of all time.

The lesson here is that the worst time to raise money is when you need it. Your answer to "What will happen if this round doesn't close?" should be "we'll keep growing at 20% a month instead of 50% a month if we got funding" rather than "we need this round to come through to keep the company alive".

Windows 7 on the rMBP defaults to 2880×1800 resolution.

You can prove this empirically. TC publishes dozens of posts a day- are there dozens of billion dollar companies being created daily?

Why do you care about TechCrunch coverage? It's a great blog, but it's just a blog. TC coverage won't make or break you. You'll probably get more traffic from this submission to HN than a TC post.

It's mostly about demonstrating that you're making something people want and getting traction. So just focus on that.

Check out adzerk.com

For me it's more about perspective and locus of control. Everyone always says that success is a mix of effort and luck. I agree, and I think I've already gotten more than my fair share of luck. So I can't complain about bad luck, bad economy, etc. If I succeed or fail, it's 100% because of my decisions and actions.

It's like being in love: you can't describe it, but you'll know it when you feel it.

Aren't those all examples of things that you do have a great amount of control over? I personally feel like I've already won the lottery for all of the things I have no control over: living in a wealthy country, not having to worry about food or water, being reasonably healthy and having access to healthcare, etc.

That wouldn't make a difference. When a company is failing, investors are always first in line to get their money back, and in this case there's a lot of investor money to be paid back before anyone else sees a dime.

I can only speak for myself, but if a YC or 500 founder I don't know emails me, I'll make helping them in any way I can my top priority.

I am not altruistic by nature, so this is done purely for self-serving reasons:

1. Everyone I've met through YC or 500 is absolutely brilliant at something in their field. I usually end up gaining much more wisdom than I share.

2. Top tier funds like YC or 500 are very selective, so I know anyone I meet with has a nontrivial chance of being one of the world's top entrepreneurs in a few years. It pays to get to know them before they are famous.

In short, meeting with someone endorsed by YC or 500 is guaranteed to be worthwhile. That removes a lot of risk in choosing to invest time to help them.

Everyone is hoping that they will be Facebook, not that they will be acquihired by Facebook. Acquihire is Plan B.