There isn't a winner and there likely won't be one (at least not for a long time). Tabular will likely be acquired by Snowflake and the two industry behemoths now back their own formats, and each will treat their own as a first class citizen.
1,324 karma · joined October 31, 2011
And that is exactly why it is now my favorite movie. A lot of movies have moved me, but this thing did something I didn't even know movies could do.
I try to do what I can to put something in the world that is not garbage.
This is an incredibly good point. I, myself, left BigCo to launch aforementioned startup, and mentally, I was accepting that if went to zero (it did) at least I was spending the prime of my career doing what felt like the most meaningful thing I could be doing. I did not, however, create my recommended operating agreement or get the buy-in of my wife.
As it relates to this article, a $1B+ company generally has product market fit and the founder has taken $10M+ off the table, which is more than they would have made in a regular job over a ~10 year period. The authors concerns don't apply in that situation.
I agree that they should explored other options to see if the dog could have been given to another owner in an environment better suited for a pitbull. I don't know that one exists, but if you choose to own a pitbull, you hold that responsibility when you decide to disown it.
There is no significant causation related to a founder's marital status.
> Don’t be fooled, older founders have considerably more assets and a wealth of connections in their industry, as well as older more independent children. This offsets the wife and family effects.
> No, because there are a lot less older founders than younger ones. So when you extrapolate from the data it will seem that having a wife and kids is a negative for a founder’s chances of success.
These are the the confounding variables you were looking for. Older founders _are_ more successful and it has to do with, among other things, the experience and connections they have, and that people are more risk-averse as they start families.
_Coincidentally_, the likelihood of being married increases as one's age increases, which is why you see fewer but more successful founders at the ages they are more likely to be married.
My suggestion to anyone in a serious relationship that is starting a business:
Cofounders often layout an operating agreement when they start a company. A founder and their spouse should do the same: layout your expectations (time, money, opportunity costs, life responsibilities) and frequently have open and transparent conversations about if each party is still comfortable with the arrangement.
Hearing the author see his pivots and realizing he would cut off his arm before folding the company (hyperbole, I know) signals he is probably crossing the line of what would have been put in the operating agreement.
A good technical founder is forgoing $500k+ a year in comp for a high-percentage chance of nothing. That has an immense effect on a relationship. Watching a spouse who is that committed and failing has to be absolute hell.
Would pointing you to the dozens of publicly traded companies with open core models "prove you wrong"?
Regretfully, I can think of dozens of {tools|processes|concepts} I treated as "fidget toys" rather than critical things to be learned and mastered. It fucking hurts to think about it.
This comment is the right attitude and I hope to think of this often. Thank you.
Personally, I find notifications in Slack to be an anti-pattern: a lot of teams expect someone to just "pick up" the incident based on their availability or expertise and _maybe_ the resolution is documented. Assigning direct responsibility by component and on-call schedule appending the RCA reduces the time-to-resolution and overall toil of the process.
Some vehicles have gotten insanely expensive, but the real dollar cost per mile of a safe and reliable vehicle has never been cheaper.
We're getting flooded with products that are just thin veneers over ChatGPT, which is fine. But some products require clearing a massive R&D hurdle. Sharing what you are working on, building a list of interested folks, and onboarding them when the time is right is critical for 'hard tech' products, even ones using AI.
Some of my favorite products were ones I learned about before launch. I was even an important beta tester to one of them.
I'm amazed at the amount of seed deals being done around "X with AI" where X is an established area of software.
The bet is that a new startup will be able to deliver a better product than the incumbent players (often established companies with large adoption and distribution).
Of the many I've looked at, the hurdle the startups will have to clear seems to be massive compared to the incumbents being able to build these "AI powered" features.
Exchanges are a group of public companies. Each company has a market capitalization, calculated by the number of shares * the share price.
Apple's individual market cap is greater than the aggregate market cap (sum of all companies' market caps in the exchange) in many other exchanges in the world.
It means what we already know: Apple is a very large company (it's the largest public company in the world).
The economic climate has changed, but there are more problems to be solved today than ever before.
Jumping up to public markets, I thought this was an interesting insight yesterday from Jamin Ball at Altimeter:
> There's now only 3 cloud software companies trading >10x NTM rev. Snowflake at 15.2x, Veeva at 10.8x and Cloudflare at 10.5x [0]
:O
[0] https://twitter.com/jaminball/status/1653482586054987776
I'm not sure that this author or Carta as a whole is trying to suggest private markets should be performing better right now. We're all painfully aware of why this is happening. These reports are usually just presenting the raw data.
> I'm less interested in "how bad is the state of venture capitalism" right now and more interested in "when is it roughly expected to get better/be less bad again"?
An analyst's report for any asset class (real estate, public equities, etc) has to start with the cut and dry numbers. But they do sprinkle in a bit of guidance using the data:
"There are signs of a venture spring. Valuations from seed to Series C ticked up from recent lows. Median round sizes mostly stabilized. But these green shoots were overwhelmed by the decline in total rounds across all stages."
Putting aside the fact that is terrible way to determine the rate of pay for anyone, let alone every single person in a company - how on earth did they come up with such a lower number for such a high cost of living area?
No VC is telling companies to just to wastefully hire people they don't need. That wastes money and creates friction and bigger problems inside of a company.
They do tell you to hire aggressively, and you often present them with a model that shows _how_ you will use the money you raise, and sometimes you hire too many people on accident. But no VC is pounding their fists on the table telling founders to explicitly go hire people that aren't needed. That's directly against the interest of both the founder and the investor.
The most fascinating part of this whole story to me is just how few checks and balances there were in this company. Even without a board, did major investors not get his quarterly financials? If the leaked balance sheet was any indication of their level financial engineering capabilities, it's hard to imagine there weren't major red flags through most of 2021.