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Slava wrote a postmortem five years ago - I'm curious if he looks back at it and feels any different.

I was an early RethinkDB user - we probably had one of the largest RethinkDB clusters in production by 2013 at an ad network.

I've gotten to know some early folks at MongoDB pretty well over the last year and RethinkDB has come up a few times. I think the answer comes down to a pretty boring one: MongoDB just got there a bit faster, raised a large sum of money, advanced their product greatly with the purchase of WiredTiger[0] and marketed the hell out of the space. The differentiation point for another document database in 2013-2016 was really limited.

The product they built with such a modest amount of funding was nothing short of amazing. I'll always have a special place in my heart for RethinkDB

[0] https://www.mongodb.com/press/wired-tiger

Just a few thoughts from my experience of fundraising:

> How much should we aim to raise and at what valuation?

You don't generally get to pick your valuation up front: you tell an investors how much you're raising and the lead investor prices the round based on deal heat and a bunch of other pseudoscience. If you have enough interest, i.e. competitive term sheets, you have leverage to negotiate the terms that dictate the valuation: % of ownership and amount of the raise.

wrt to the amount to raise, the classic advice is to figure out what your next milestone is and try to model what it will cost to get there and then raise it. The smarter move is to just find out up what's market for seed deals right now and ask for that.

> - How to show financial projections in a field that evolves at such a breakneck speed?

There are plenty of templates online that do this for you. IMHO, find someone who knows what they're doing and pay them a couple grand to do it well (there's a plethora of former bankers and consultants who will gladly do this). All models are wrong, but a model can quickly tell an investor you know how the game is played.

> Should we prioritize local (Europe, Switzerland) investors or North-American ones?

I'm in America and mostly pitched US base funds, but I did pitch a few funds outside of the US and don't think it was the worth the time. The US has the highest concentration of the the biggest, most prominent, best connected funds looking at the best deals - I'd just focus on them.

I shared an office and an apartment with Kyle in 2010 and I have vivid memories of him routinely talking how bad the state of password managers was at that time. I've been a happy customer since 2017. It's been surreal watching the BitWarden team do what they have over the years. Congratulations!

> but otherwise obviously makes no sense, it's antithetic to the very idea of a business.

How does it NOT make sense? The purpose of a business like this is not to generate some short term profit. These are winner-take-all markets - they're playing for complete and utter domination of an entire product category.

Their Q1 revenue grew 37% YoY - how on earth would you care about profit over what they doing here? They should keep hitting that as hard as they can.

There's also a stigma against this path.

I went to a community college for two years (it was free), and then transferred the University of Florida to finish my degree (a fine public R1 university by any standard), paying exactly $0 for my degree. I know people who followed that same path and went on to top tier law schools, medical schools, bulge bracket investment banking, etc.

Now I can look back and be grateful that I got a great education for free, but I was, and still am slightly embarrassed by saying I went to a community college.

I now live in NYC where I'm pretty sure people can do almost the same thing with the SUNY school system, and come out with an undergrad degree for like $30k (still a lot, but most folks I know paid $100k+ for undergrad degrees that are not substantially differentiated from the path I did).

The software industry as a whole needs to be more diligent with status updates.

Our Snowflake clusters were failing connections for 30 minutes before this was acknowledged, all while their status page was reporting no issue at all.

> But I think, other than the onset of Covid, and the last 6 months, I haven't seen an overly negative messaging.

But that is exactly when they could and did do the messaging - if you were out there saying VC is drying up from July 2020 to December 2021 you would have looked like a moron; but the negative messaging was very apparent the months prior and after that window.

It is absolutely in investors interests to paint a narrative of economic downturn - they are bidding to buy something, and they want to buy it at the best price they do so.

I'm not saying that is unscrupulous - that's how dealmaking works, but it is very real.

The government. I worked for the US state department for a couple of years by way of a major consultancy. Not sure you can get any more boring than that. And you'll make a solid six figures doing maybe five hours of work a week!

The argument is that keeping the price low requires inhumane practices, but providing human practices doesn't command a price that would offset the overhead of being more human? That doesn't make sense.

I think I pay $8 a dozen for Vital Farms eggs. My assumption is that a lot of that price is for whatever overhead is required to run things a bit more humanely than the average.

This is off topic but as someone who grew up in a household that made their living selling things in markets, where prices were openly negotiated, I just want to share a thought:

While you're absolutely allowed to express that a product may not be worth a price, it seems tactless to make such a comment on a thread where the founders are announcing their product. I understand you're replying to someone who feels the product could command a higher price, but to say you're double guessing the price just seems like something you should keep to yourself.

I can only imagine the amount of work this team puts into crafting these translations - similar to how family put a lot of work into the goods they sold.

> Thankfully HN hasnt dropped in quality on that front unlike reddit.

I've heard these sorts of shots taken at Reddit since I started using it in 2011 (I was late to the game) and I'm fascinated by it. I use Reddit every day and am in constant awe of how it is populated with such a wide breadth of people with such a strong passion and expertise about virtually any subject I enjoy.

Many times a week i type "reddit <some topic I'm curious about>" and the top threads/comments are almost always someone with better knowledge on that subject than anything else I can find on the internet.

It's just funny how everyone's perception is different, but I think Reddit is a modern marvel.

We've already started placing the bets across a dozen or so accounts to bypass this. That wasn't the point of the story.

lol

It only works for one sport and requires analyzing a ton of historical data and prop bets from all of the books.

yes, so the question is what would he/she change about how it is advertised in the US (or I guess in new zealand)

This is exactly my point. I'm not against outlawing casinos (i think you should be able to do pretty much whatever the eff you want with your body and money).

BUT if we are going to allow them, should we allow them to only let people play when they lose?

The decision to let them exist is as arbitrary as the decision to allow them to only play when they when.

we've started spreading the bets across lots of different accounts. the issue is we don't know which leg of the bet is going to be the one that profits, so you run the risk of one account winning too frequently and getting flagged.

If we did that same thing in person we would need a lot of random ass poeple. But it's definitely something we've considered.

casino and sports books are the same thing and are the unusual product I am describing

I'm pretty Laissez-Faire about things, but a recent interaction with gambling is making me reconsider:

My friend got a lot of free credits from the major sports books and wrote some code that he felt could generate a profit. We all threw in a little bit of money and let the program do what it does. Within a month we started doing 1k a day in profit on 3k wagered. Right as we approached 30k in profit, every major book limited our maximum wagers to pennies on the dollar, effectively making the system worthless.

So this product exists when the customer loses money, but ceases to exist when the customer makes money. It's sort of an odd product in that regard.

> Gambling, and gambling advertisements, are deliberately designed to hook people to it as an addiction.

> Only 25% of Americans regularly gamble

> and just 2% of gamblers produce 50% of industry revenue.

Very interesting. Do you have sources for these?

How about fast food or unhealthy food/drinks? And would you change anything about how prescription medication is advertised?

> there's a lot more need for people who understand the data and data systems of a company and how to analyze that data than someone who can write some code

(discloser: I run a company that builds software for data professionals, so I have a bias)

This is a very interesting topic I spend a lot of time thinking about.

I don't think, in the aggregate, there will be more positions available for folks to "analyze data" (i.e. data professionals) than positions for those that "write code" (i.e. software engineers).

Software has been infused into virtually every industry - that is to say most companies are "technology companies" - the global labor market for software engineers reflects that.

BUT I do think we are in the nascency of data and data analysis (ironic since we closing in on a century of being in the "information age") and the number of folk s doing this professionally is about to grow astronomically.

If you spend enough time, like I do, talking to companies and seeing how they handle data, it's almost staggering how few companies get this right, and that the bigger the company, the worse the effort. Sometimes I cannot even comprehend how big of a wave is coming towards the shoreline.

:facepalm: of course!

> and how Apple gets away with telling a whole generation of phone purchasers that they were holding it wrong.

Okay. I'll bite. What does this mean?

I hold my iPhone 13 the exact same way I held a Nokia brick in 2003. What did Apple tell us?

Did the mushroom trip enlighten you? Did it change how you view the world? Were you worried about a bad trip?

I've thought a lot about this recently: what type of person is subject to a greater amount of variance in the outcome of something due to good/bad advice than a founder?

Other professions with the potential for drastic upticks of success or net worth (e.g. a professional athlete, an entertainer) are so standardized that the advice to follow is pretty much down the center of the fairway.

Given the complexity/uniqueness of a company and its market, almost any piece of advice given to a founder is at best inadequate, at worst, gravely detrimental.

Paul Buchheit had a slide at founder school that read something like "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Over generalization" - I have no idea if I interpreted it correctly, but most advice I've received (and thought was great at the time) ended up being wrong. The people giving me the advice weren't being malicious - they were just looking at my problem with _their_ life experience and abstracting it a very general way.

And the worst part is - and I say this with a lot of experience - when someone else's advice was wrong, you can't blame them, you can only blame yourself.

I've never bought an NFT - but do people actually look at block addresses to validate things like this?

I just read https://networked.substack.com/p/web3-i-have-my-daots and there's a cute analogy about buying the Mona Lisa, but only getting a record written in some obscure room saying that you own it, i.e. you never actually take possession of the Mona Lisa. You can tell people you own it, but they have to go the obscure room and verify your ownership. Who would do that, for literally anything, especially a jpg?

I forget the name of assets that designed merely to show wealth (e.g. a Hummer), but those work because everybody sees you with that asset, constantly. For NFTs to work in the long term, you would have to expect people to validate authenticity of these things.

edit: Veblen is what I was looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

> Likely as a result, they had a sophisticated IP licensing and commercialization operation

Because UF fucked up the Gatorade deal so badly.

I went to UF and worked for a seed investment fund that spun technology out of UF's research labs (and later one of their portfolio companies).

Their research to company pipeline is a beast because they're deathly afraid of making that mistake again.

> Those are two separate things. I think once can do the first without doing the second.

I'm just explaining how we do it at our company?

> I used to work for financial traders. Some people tend to treat everything as a commodity. That's not the kind of culture I want to work in.

This has become nonsensical.