2,912 karma · joined August 19, 2010
Pretty decent for everyone else- especially founders, assuming they've got a significant stake in the remaining money.
Unfortunately, none of the online courses I've seen teach this.
A ton (I'd guess 80%+) of Yelp's traffic comes from Google / Bing search. Maintaining / growing that traffic is probably a substantial driver of their decisions.
Because the cost of building a startup is going down, and assuming the opportunity lies in early stage investments, VCs are going to have to make more early stage investments than they are now.
VC operating expenses are covered by a 2% management fee levied on assets under management. This incentivizes VCs to create megafunds so that they can have proportionally mega salaries.
Seed stage investments come at a totally different operating cost.
Seed-stage investing is pretty hard with a megafund because they are so expensive operationally. VCs would much rather write a 50M check in a growth round for 33% of a company than a 100 $500K checks for 5% of each company. They might have to talk to 20 companies for the growth rounds to make 1 investment, but they'd probably have to talk to thousands to make the 100 investments in seed rounds. That means they need a bigger staff and that 2% model won't work.
In fact, I've heard VCs say that the only reason they write small checks in seed rounds is so that they have a strong relationship with the founders and pro-rata rights if the company happens to blow up.
I suspect that VC salaries will go down like crazy, and they'll be forced to rely on carry for the funds earnings. Which is probably a good direction for VCs to go.
Chris Dixon outlined the problem here too: http://cdixon.org/2009/08/26/the-other-problem-with-venture-...
- Bitcoin is all over the news
- Capital Access Network, Kabbage, etc are at multi 100M valuations
- Stripe and Braintree are running around at multi 100M vals.
- Simple and Green Dot / Loopt have done plenty in the PR circuit re their latest banking products.
- Kickstarter / Indiegogo are very much mainstream.
- Square is a PR machine at some 4-8B valuation (AFAIK)
Wealthy pet owners will spend an irrational amount of money on their dogs in almost the same way that wealthy parents will spend anything on their kids.
I don't own a dog, but every person I've spoken to who does has told me that this is awesome and $99 is pretty small relative to what they spend on their pet. (Granted, most of these people have a reasonable disposable income that they're willing to spend on their dog.)
So I'd really love it if the people commenting would disclose whether they own a pet or not. I suspect a lot of the skepticism is from people who don't own pets.
TownSquare is hiring full-stack web engineers in San Francisco, CA. We are a well-funded stealth real estate startup. You would be our 7th team member.
We're looking for smart hackers in the Bay Area who:
* Can code across the full stack (we're rails, angularjs, postgres / redis). You'll be helping build the product from the ground up.
* Are eager to learn new technologies.
* Have great product intuition.
* Are excited about the real estate space.
Email me at kapil at townsquare.com and we'll chat.
Here's why I'm so excited:
1. Shloosl solves a small but acute problem that nearly everyone in the country has.
2. It's a big FU to a fragmented and unevolving couple billion dollar industry. I don't want to find a locksmith or go to Home Depot. I just want a duplicate key. And I don't care whether I pay $1.50 for it or $10 for it.
3. It's going to have some interesting implications on physical security in society. Locks are already useless to any unskilled criminal with a $100 lockpicking gun. But now, any clown with an iPhone can take a picture of a set of keys and have a working copy sent to anyone in the country within days. I certainly hope the security industry responds with something good.
I'd like to think the solution is a better kind of lock, but I don't know. Credit cards have been vulnerable in the same way for a while, but the networks or merchants essentially insure fraudulent transactions so it hasn't resulted in a real problem for people.
Either way, I'm looking forward to trying this out this weekend.
Side note: NPS questions should be on a 10 point scale, and the actual NPS should be the % of promoters - % of detractors instead of a straight average.
* Hand holding through a new, high-risk process
* A scapegoat in case something goes wrong
It'd be cool if they built an API over this and allowed for crowdsourced displays, almost like how Google accepts designs for their homepage logo.
We went through that at GiftRocket. We launched with the premise of geo-located gift cards. Of those who tried, many had bad experiences. But they gave us enough direction to kill the GPS component and turn GR into a well-packaged online way to send money as a gift.
Funny enough- PB told us to do this before we launched (the same way PG identified the issue for Seatgeek).
Don't think there's a formal connection between him and McAdoo.
2. From a sartorial standpoint, no one should wear the Eldredge knot, ever. From Reddit:
"I understand that a lot of people think it looks cool, and it'll attract a lot of attention, but not in a good way. You won't be that guy who's really well dressed, you'll be the guy with the funny tie knot."
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