jm20

Bam is also unmedicated bipolar. As in he sought help, got medication, and then decided to stop taking his medication.

Most of his other issues likely stem from this.

Including percentages for startup stock grants is tricky. You have things like common/preferred stock, liquidation preferences, subsequent rounds causing dilution, etc. that the average employee doesn't usually understand. At best it's very confusing and at worst you have actual legal liability issues.

And I would never want my employees to value their stock based on our 409a price, we (like all startups) do all we can to keep that number as low as possible!

*and the people running it. The brand comes from the success of the companies which comes, in large part, because of the partners and network.

You won't find a better group of truly qualified, highly accomplished people giving advice to startups, holding talks for cohorts, etc. in any other accelerator anywhere, period.

The better title would be "How I made $2B on an educated $300k bet" because even the best startup investors will tell you that investing that early is essentially betting.

And early-stage help and intros are crucial for startups - between YC and Garry's network I'm sure a ton of that contributed to their success as well. At the end of the day still a bet, but just saying.

Yes any semi-experienced investor will immediately screen for active users vs signups, and if they find out you’re trying to game the numbers it’s usually a dealbreaker.

My guess would be eventually the fines rack up to the point where it becomes a more serious offense and more drastic measures are taken. Also, a lot of the enforcement measures likely do not fall under the umbrella of "prosecution."

I'm not sure if driving without a license can ever be escalated to a felony, but I'm sure they can do things like impound the car, etc. That would never involve the DA unless it was challenged in court

This article’s title is a little misleading, because the whole thesis seems to be “you can’t build enough muscle to compensate for a bad diet.”

This is probably true, however you absolutely can out-train all but the worst diets, if you’re crazy/fit enough. It would mostly happen through cardio, HIIT, and sports however, not pure weightlifting.

If you were to play two hours of full court basketball a day (with intensity, not walking up and down the court), and combine that with a weightlifting routine, you could probably eat whatever you want without gaining much weight. The problem is most people’s bodies would break down with that kind of activity level.

If the Stripe leadership wanted to exit and be set for generations they could’ve done it years ago. I agree it could be a revenue boost to prepare for IPO but this isn’t some personal greed thing

There’s a big difference between “millions of dollars” and “relying on a third party vendor for payments.” I don’t know of many sub-$1B companies that implement their own payments infrastructure...

There isn’t a single business model out there that can survive a 90+% reduction in customers. That categorization is absurd. It would be like saying if Google can’t survive a sudden reduction of 90% of people using the internet it should fail.

You can say what you want about bailouts but saying a “business model is bad” because of a once in a lifetime disaster is ridiculous.

I really hate that this argument keeps popping up. There's plenty of reasons to hate bailouts or airlines or anything else, but who the hell could have predicted the world was going to shut down like this in 2015-2019? We were in one of the biggest bull markets in the history of the United States, business was good, and the companies used some of that money to buy back stock. People make it sound like they were buying back their stock as they were cutting flights and laying off employees. No business is going to hoard 50 billion dollars in an emergency fund for a pandemic that cuts 90% of revenue, that's just absurd.

The reality of the situation is that these airlines employ a lot of people and enable even more commerce and economic activity through their operation. You can disagree with a bailout all you want, but if they go under, the economy most likely suffers by a lot more than $50B.

They make a good counter-example to the point of playing a different game. If you want to get rich, there are other ways to get there without having the worry about the attractiveness factor.

Attractiveness has always affected opportunities afforded to people and other people’s perceptions of you. This is not just in tech. Hell, it influences elections! This is just human nature and has been studied extensively. It’s just trendy to bash Silicon Valley for this, because, you know, everyone on Wall Street is wearing suits for the comfort factor...

However, I think there’s an upper bounds on where that matters, and I think it mostly matters when climbing the corporate ladder. If you look at the richest men in the world, most are not supermodels.

The moral of the story - if you want to play the game you have to play by the game’s rules. Otherwise, play a different game.

> riding electric scooters after a few pints is about as much thrill as I get these days

You're literally advocating drunk driving. Whether or not you're driving a car or a scooter, this is dangerous, illegal, and you should never do it. You're endangering yourself and others.

We have a decently popular kids app, Kodable, that helps kids learn to code. While this is something we’re mostly already in compliance with and have never actually included ads, I worry about the analytics.

We use anonymous analytics to track things like user completion through level funnels. Nothing nefarious about it, if one of our levels is too hard for kids and there’s a big drop off from one to the next, we want to know about it and tweak it. I worry how this will effect stuff like that, but I also wonder how you can even differentiate “proper” analytics usage.

Correct, you don't just "gift" them more equity, you have to pay more (usually a much higher per-share price) to keep that equity.

A lot of smaller/early stage/seed startups actually do this. It's a restricted stock grant. And for the people saying they don't do it because of taxation on an illiquid asset, this is why 83(b)'s exist. They let you pay the full tax on a stock grant at time of the grant, not time of vesting.

You get a 409A valuation to establish the Fair Market Value of your stock. That valuation isn't based on the same criteria that investors use, it is much more rigorous and based on income, cash in the bank, etc. You could very well have a company raise money at at $10MM cap and be "worth" less than $1MM. If you grant someone stock at that price, their taxable income will be negligible - usually only a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and then they don't have a giant tax bill at the end.

You still have to pay capital gains, but that only applies when you sell the stock, so you have the money to pay it.

I can only imagine the amount of bug reports, real and false, that a company of Apple's size must receive on a daily basis. Is there any company at that scale that can reliably filter through all of them to find actual, critical bugs quickly?

It simply isn't as easy as saying 'flag all reports with 'security vulnerability' in the submission for priority.' That could still be thousands of reports in the 'priority' queue, most of which some person would need to manually investigate one by one.

This has actually been around for a couple years now. It is so good, in fact, that we actually require new hires at Kodable to read this as part of their onboarding, since it describes how we operate and make decisions as a company so well.

This is really only an issue with low-margin licensing subscriptions like Spotify and Netflix, where they would lose money on every purchase if 30% of their margins went to Apple. While I definitely think there are some problems with the App Store, the fact is that it is so easy and streamlined for people buying apps that it’s worth the 30% for the vast majority of developers.

Most lead investors at the series A level look to take a board seat, and spend a lot more time per-company than at the seed round.

There's a finite amount of time in an investor's day, and somewhere around 20% ownership of a company is, for whatever reason, considered the magic number where it's worth it to spend that much time with them (through assistance, board meetings, etc).

We've had a pretty popular kids coding app in the App Store for about 6 years now (Kodable). We've never remotely considered having ads and never will, and from the article it sounds like this heavily skews towards the ad-heavy Google Play store.

From my experience most of the big name kids app developers do not put ads in their apps (almost never on iOS), although I can understand why developers do.

Whether you like it or not, they work. There are two things that are always going to be true about this - kids are going to download lots of free apps (because it is easier than asking parents to pay), and they are going to accidentally tap on ads. The developer doesn't care if the user will actually purchase the product being advertised, all they care about is the click. That's just the way PPC advertising incentivizes developers. The only way around this is strictly limiting advertising for games targeting children. That has to come from the App Store moderators (Google, Apple, etc).

Don't forget, Scrolling 3.0 is only available on this year's New ScrollBar(tm)

Odds in a lottery are uniform and do not account for personal attributes. Assuming 1 ticket per person, anyone that buys a ticket has an equal chance of winning. A 98 year old grandmother has the same chance of winning as a 21 year old man.

Odds of starting a successful startup do not follow the same rules. There are a small number of people with the skillset/connections/etc to start a successful startup and thus have a very high chance of success, and a large number of people without those attributes, and thus a very low, if not zero percentage chance of success.

Exactly, if you're at the point where you're sending 1 million emails a month you're either spamming people or you don't care about the difference between $100 and $900.

~50% of the top 10 companies in the world by market cap (Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) were all started by founders aged 30 or younger. The rest are companies that are over 100 years old (or merged from ones that were) and Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. I'm by no means saying you can't do it when you're older, but when you're a VC in the business of hitting home runs, it is just hard to ignore that fact.

It's also hard to ignore the fact that the 'sexiest' companies in that list are the aforementioned 5 started by young founders.

YC does not invest in multiple competitors 'in the hopes that one will pan out'. They just don't use competition as an exclusionary criterea like many VCs do. They invest in founders first and ideas second. When the idea is a secondary metric, inevitably you end up with competitors. Sometimes they even end up with competitors anyway, just because the founders pivot.