paragpatelone

I think it is a bold move. In their situation it seems like the right move.

I am seeing a lot of sentiment on HN that feels sorry for VCs. VC already get paid above 200k/year; no need to feel sorry for them.

People should feel sorry for the founders & the employees who did all the work. Now if they get liquidation, then that is good.

Who cares if it's bad for VCs. They already get paid over 200k+ in carry every year for over 10 years. They are also not investing their own personal money.

I also think another factor is over the past 10 years, there has more investor money thrown at early stage startups. That just means that it harder for companies to break out. Due to that fact I am not sure accelerators even YC will provide much more advantages.

I think they already had revenue and they were profitable before taking the money https://www.inc.com/profile/messagebird. Maybe their growth in terms of revenue and profits, really got investors excited. However they do have to payout telecoms so that revenue may not mean too much.

I am curious why they decided to join YC? Was it a ego thing. What proof do they have that their service is better than Twilio?

Oracle is not going to win, not matter what they do. Oracle is built on selling costly products and services versus operating in a low margin environment.

1.) Amazon has a much higher bar for hiring talent, than Oracle does.

2.) Amazon is internally use to being frugal, and so pricing wars are not going to hurt them. Oracle is use to charging a arm and a leg for their products.

3.) Amazon shareholders are already use to the company not being profitable, where as Oracle shareholders are not.

"What keeps this going is that each VC thinks they're better than average"

Another thing keeps them going is that the VC Partners get a nice salary for 10 years. Many of them will make more money than many C-level executives. I don't see a downside in being a VC.

I am always curious about who are the LPs are and the slide deck KP used to raise more money. What was the deciding factor in the LP committing more money. Is it because there are no other options for LPs to make a decent return (close to zero interest rates).

"His self-funded experiment could end with Hotz humbly going back to knock on Google’s door for a job."

The biggest thing here IMO is this is self-funded. Any startup trying to do what he is doing in this environment would have raised $50 Million, hired 100's of engineers from top notch schools, become accepted in YC, and have Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, Sam Altman and all singing their praises.

Kudos to him for being self-funded.

Great comment.

Yea so Chamath is not doing anything that is innovative. Carriers are already doing it.

I am sure he may have something up his sleeve. But how exactly is Rama going to compete, are they going to acquire real infrastructure or build cell sites? It will be pretty costly to build something from the ground up or to acquire customers from Verizon or AT&T, just ask T-mobile and Sprint.

Unless they have some game changing wireless technology than I don't see it happening and investors may as well put their money down a black hole.

BI says "Part of his plan involves installing microcells in customer's homes to blanket the nation, but also making it as easy as buying a cellphone to sign up for it. Another key to the plan is a portfolio of zero-rated apps that won't cut into your data, Palihapitiya said."

^That does not sound like a very good plan. Carriers like AT&T and T-mobile already have microcell options, and most people won't opt for it especially if other people get use the microcell at the cost of the person's personal bandwidth with their ISP.

What is Zero-rated apps? Isn't it similar to what T-mobile is already doing with their video and audio streaming; whitelisting Apps that will not count against data. Most carriers also have WIFI calling.

That auction that he wants to participate in, isn't that for low band spectrum like 600Mhz. That is good of extending coverage but will not increase your download speeds. Carriers like to have both low band and high band.

There is a bubble at the seed stage. There are tons of people (accredited investors) investing that stage and tons of incubators/accelerators to help introduce those startups to those investors.

Platforms like Angel list are helping fund allot more companies at the seed stage by having syndicates.

Now even non-accredited investors will be able to invest in startups[1]. So the seed stage is bubbling up.

http://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2015/10/30/sec-...

People like Swisher and Sacca are trying cast Dorsey has Jobs 2.0 and they are dead wrong. Jobs was a extreme outlier and there is no pattern matching on that.

I hope they realize that Twitter is a software company. There is very little cost to making changes versus the changes A hardware or hardware/software company would have have to do.

T is for Tesla

His biggest issue was this "Two of Mr. Price’s most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises."

If he was going to double the salary for the new hires, he should also doubled the salary of everyone else too. Whatever pay gaps existed still should be there for the best employees not to get demotivated.

If he had done this and told his employees not to tell people on the outside. He would have been in a much stronger position.

I wonder how far their valuation can go before they go public.

$100B, $200B, $400B?

The competitor that his hiring the best people in terms of skills and values (values that aligned with the companies core values); given everything else is equal will be much better off.

Companies have to be very careful how they define cultural fit. If they leave it open, it can impart personal bias that are not at all beneficial to the company.

Maybe "value fit" should be used instead of cultural fit. Do your values align with the core values of the company.

The top NYTimes comment below illustrates some of the warts of a "cultural fit".

"Hiring managers who would never in a million years describe themselves or even privately consider themselves to be racist or sexist or ageist commonly use cultural-fit criteria to perpetrate racism, sexism, or agism in the workplace. I was recently in a meeting with two other managers to compare notes on a group of candidates whom we'd all just interviewed for a mid-level job. My top pick was a supremely well-qualified 45-year-old black woman who outscored all the other candidates on the skills test, was the only one to arrive on time for the interview, and was the only one who dressed professionally for the interview. It's a corporate job in Midtown. She was poised, amiable, and direct during my conversation with her, asked well-informed questions about the work and the company, and she was also the only candidate who sent a thank you letter after the interview. The other two hiring managers - both of whom, incidentally, were white women who were wearing Black Lives Matter pins - didn't think my top candidate "would be a good fit" or "feel comfortable." We hired a young white guy for the gig. He fits in the gang really well at happy hour, but his job performance is extremely poor. My two managerial colleagues have scheduled a meeting for next week to discuss what we're going to do about him. The good candidate is working for someone else now."

Do most YC companies follow this balanced approach?

Not really sure what Mr. Noto brings to the table besides trying to sell the stock to institutional investors and others on wall street.

I don't want to discount Mr. Noto, however I really don't think he can turn twitter around. They need someone who can think ahead into the future, take bold risk, actually be in the office every day.

Compared to Facebook I just don't see Twitter "Moving Fast and Breaking Things", not because they don't have the talent; but they just lack a clear direction.

How do you guys compare to HackerRank?

Depends on what you mean by success. If you mean being a profitable bootstrapped business there are probably tons of companies. Companies that went on raise series A and beyond some companies might be out there.

However I have feeling success for YC is having a company become a Unicorn. The question to ask is which startups that didn't get into YC are now Unicorns.