2,703 karma · joined February 14, 2008
http://walterchen.org
http://smalter.org
http://twitter.com/smalter
walter at idonethis dot com
mostly used it in small companies with 1-2 devs where it helps to get another pair of eyes on it. also, helpful as career development / learning for a junior dev.
happy to answer any questions.
how did you settle on the positioning as being for marketplaces?
sounds like this would be useful for any company that has a feed, search or recommendations like any retailer or publisher.
if it used to be 6-12 months and $500k+ to start issuing cards, what does it look like now with a product like lithic?
would love to hear from any devs who have been building in the card space.
republic is an angellist spinoff: https://republic.co/help/how-is-republic-part-of-a-family-of...
here are 3 key points:
1. gumroad experienced major covid tailwinds. whereas the company's five-year compound annual growth rate is 37%, it grow 94% from 2019 to 2020. they've been profitable since 2017.
2. gumroad's core customer base is creators making less than $10k/yr. gumroad is best positioned as an entry point for novice creators to start selling quickly and easily online. as creators cross the $10k/yr threshold, they become a churn risk because all-in-one products like kajabi and podia offer a more fully-featured product at the same price.
3. at the campaign's $100m pre-money valuation, gumroad will need to grow 40% yoy for 10 years to return double digit IRR.
check out our report for a full breakdown of financials, competition and more: https://sacra.com/research/gumroad-android-creator-economy/
trydoji.com
problem: let's break down this problem of shareholder illiquidity generally.
- hiring: it's hard for private companies to hire against FAANG because the latter offers liquid stock comp. we created a calculator that shows the impact of this https://sacra.com/research/startup-recurring-liquidity-calcu...
- retention: employees bear the financial burden of illiquid stock because they often have greater liquidity needs than early investors and founders (who are able to take some off the table earlier). employees are the last to get liquidity because they're farthest from the money. check out our report on this https://sacra.com/research/tender-offer-pricing-data/
- admin: i've talked with CFOs who have to deal with one-off requests for secondary sales and it's an admin pain.
solution: companies have taken to running tender offers, often bundled into the latest round of financing. you could say that the tender offer is the incumbent in the 'liquidity solution' space that cartaX is trying to dethrone (though to be clear, carta has its own tender offer product).
what's different about cartaX? 2 things: (1) it has a market dynamic with competitive pricing and (2) T+0 settlement because carta has write access to the cap table.
there are a few important players in the 'liquidity solution' space otherwise that are big players as well:
- angellist recurring transfers: https://angellist.com/blog/recurring-transfers
it doesn't have competitive pricing, but angellist has made it a quick and simple process which puts 1 line item on your cap table (angellist)
- nasdaq private markets: https://www.nasdaq.com/solutions/nasdaq-private-market
companies like asana and coinbase ran auctions via npm. they have market-driven pricing but they do not have T+0 settlement. also, they mainly use npm as a feeder into listing on nasdaq, so they are less incentivized to promote the growth of the private markets generally (contra angellist and carta).
- forge: https://forgeglobal.com/solutions/companies/forge-company-so...
taking more of a services oriented approach as a liquidity solution by working with companies.
for more on this stuff, read https://sacra.com/research/the-privately-traded-company-seco...
the upshot: cartaX is a liquidity solution for private companies, but because the solution comes through a competitive pricing in an auction, it creates this additional risk around not being able to know and control the price. this giving up control is hard for private companies who are used to controlling their cap table, price, scarcity of their stock, etc.
One thing that sucks about working at a startup is that the equity is illiquid until a liquidity event like acquisition or IPO.
There's been a rise in "recurring liquidity programs" where startups offer employees the opportunity to sell stock on a recurring basis. It's a big employee benefit where otherwise employees are stuck with illiquid stock that they can't sell if they need to buy a house or car.
We wanted to quantify how a recurring liquidity program can increase employees' liquid comp so we built this calculator.
If the company makes a certain percentage of an employees' shares available to be sold, say 15%, and the company is growing quickly enough, employees can make liquid comp on par with FB within 3-4 years and still have the upside of the equity they hold.
Would love to get thoughts/feedback on this!
per https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...:
17602 says, "It shall be unlawful for any business that makes an automatic renewal offer or continuous service offer to a consumer . . . "
where 17601 defines a consumer as "any individual who seeks or acquires, by purchase or lease, any goods, services, money, or credit for personal, family, or household purposes."
We built Keysheet using Python/Django running on top of Airtable as the database.
We decided to do that because Airtable gives you a bunch of stuff for free for adding and managing the content side. That made it easy for my friend who knows crypto but can't code to execute on curating the content while I built out the site.
We made Keysheet to help non-technical people understand crypto through the lens of expert reviews. The problem is that 99.9% of the population can't understand crypto from a technical perspective. We want to help people develop “taste” instead.
You can't rely on institutions in crypto because there aren't many meaningful ones, making it hard to tell charlatans from legit projects. Our curation narrows the set of people who you can 'trust' and then you can take a deeper dive to learn how they think.
It's still a work in progress, but we'd love your feedback on what works and what could use improvement!
that's why psychopaths win, but that's also why "nice" people get walked all over.
As advertised, it's not a self-aggrandizing "mistakes" post that points you at the end to the author's next venture. It's full of the kinds of things that keep me up at night.
It reminds me of something similar that happened to me: I was running Adwords for the first time. The dashboard wasn't showing that any of my ads had run, and it kept telling me to up my bid amount. I kept upping it and upping it, and I wasn't seeing any ads running. I said screw it and forgot about it.
When I happened to look at the dashboard 3 weeks later, I had blown $6k on Google ads. I had to get my team together and tell them what happened and apologize. ($6k was a lot of money to us.) Like Seth, this hurt a lot because I paid myself less than anyone in the company to save money.
Seth, if you're around the iDoneThis office at Great Jones and Bowery, hit me up. I'd love to buy you a drink.
He listened and engaged, but said, look, send me an email, I read every email I get. Cool to see that play out with a positive outcome for this guy.
Last year, we found out that a group of folks at Shopify were using my company's product, iDoneThis, when Tobi Lutke (CEO) emailed me about a customer service issue. They were by far our highest profile customers and we were super amped to have them. We thought, how cool would it be to visit Shopify up in Ottawa, get to know them and see how they were using iDoneThis?
I emailed Tobi and basically invited ourselves up there to visit with them. He not only said yes, he got excited, told me that he thought it was an awesome idea and that he wished he'd spent more time with customers in the early days of Shopify. They made space in their office and everyone on the team made time to talk with us, and we ate lunch and hung out with them and talked iDoneThis and Shopify for a week!
My co-founder and I were blown away by how good those guys are. Meeting the team was the kind of experience where it's just like, man, those guys are really good at their jobs and they're doing it their way. The culture had a distinctiveness and authenticity that made the concept of "culture" real to me. Shopify is an original. I joked that we had to leave Silicon Valley and go to freezing cold Ottawa, Canada, to learn about how to start a company.
And we became friends--I still play Starcraft with one of the engineers there and email and hang out with others when they visit the states. Because of the Shopify guys, we have a bunch of Ottawa-based companies that use iDoneThis and when we raised a round, Tobi invested in us, too.
Our visit counts up there as one of the best learning experiences as a company and it opened my eyes as a founder to what entrepreneurship could mean.
We work with Yokum Taku and Jesse Chew at Wilson Sonsini, and they've been awesome.
Because I'm a former lawyer, I started out our relationship by scrutinizing every bill.
I stopped when I realized that we were getting an amazing deal. We have only paid 1 legal bill in 2 years and we haven't been bugged at all about it. Our legal bill is being subsidized by your Airbnbs and the like. That's the luxury of working with a great startup lawyer that works with top startups.
fyi, josh is also the author of many blog posts that've appeared on hn: http://notes.unwieldy.net/.
cuban's argument wasn't that he was lucky or the timing of his sale was a coincidence--nobody thinks that was the case--his argument was that he never agreed not to trade on the confidential information.
there's no guilty/not guilty/innocence distinction here because this wasn't even a criminal case, it was a civil case.
in addition, the statement "the government didn't prove insider trading" is tantamount to the statement "mark cuban did not commit insider trading" because the case boiled down to a disputed question of fact, and what actually happened is unknowable.
in texas gulf sulfur, the defendants were officers at the company. they were directors at texas gulf sulfur and they were trading on texas gulf sulfur stock. they have a fiduciary duty to the company that a stranger doesn't have.
that's what the judge in carpenter is referring to. if you acquire the info by virtual of a fiduciary relationship, you aren't free to trade on that info. in texas gulf sulfur, they had the fiduciary relationship to the company because they were officers at that company. not so here.