solve

List of petty whining voted to the top of a show HN thread, as always.

Never change HN, never change.

If your stock is worth $0, then can I buy it from you for $1?

If you hold stock on a stock exchange that closes down every night, is your holding worth $0 overnight while it's untradable?

If you invest in a startup where you're not allowed to liquidate for 5 years, and then it eventually sells for millions, was it worth $0 for the entirety of those first 5 years?

If your exchange only allows you to trade once every 16th of a second, is your position worth $0 during those 16th of a second gaps?

A finance writer that actually knows what he's talking about, and it's here on HN. This is nice.

Imagine "VCs brazenly talked to founders". Would that even be news? No. They do that constantly with impunity.

If there's any doubt, never side with the VCs.

Really helpful. Best comment of the year.

That is actually how trademark already works, if you have enough money. E.g. well funded brands like Coke, Google, Facebook, can easily use trademark to retroactively remove rights to a name from anyone who wasn't actively using it for some non-squatting purpose - within certain trademark and legal scopes.

Doesn't matter if someone simply owned property with that name prior to the trademark. The test is more complex than that.

It's squatting because:

Workbetter.com

Try going to the domain.

Trademark law probably says yes.

Forcing squatters to have to file a trademark to retain their squatted domains would improve the squatting situation 10000x.

Clearly the current Workbetter.com owner is squatting the name.

Where did I say that companies survive for an infinite amount of time? I didn't say anything like that at all.

The goal is to maximize the predicted expected value of the stock price, based on all possible sources of value captured by the company, over an effectively infinite time horizon. Absolutely nothing else takes priority over that, except a few risk controls.

The word "need" should never be said in this context. Maximizing expected value of the stock price through whatever means necessary is all that matters in this context.

There is no requirement to meet profitability within a human lifetime. The timescale is effectively infinite, in many cases, and particularly the highest value cases that professional investors focus on. See Amazon, see NYC apartment rental costs versus purchase costs, etc.

What's the simple formula for valuing a company? Nonsense, no simple formula should ever exist, if the markets are functioning properly.

What's equally disgusting is that all of these VCs are upset that the more sophisticated, harder working, more data-driven investors, who used to only be on wall street, are now moving to the earlier and earlier stages, taking away the easy money that the top VCs have enjoyed for so many years.

No more VCs sitting on the beach while collecting fat checks from their carry percentage and toying with companies, sometimes even hurting companies for their own personal enjoyment, at the expense of the LPs.

VC is changing fast, and today's VCs are very upset about it.

Imagine if we used the word "investments" instead of "loans" for these government bonds. One word change and everyone's perceptions would drastically change.

That's the theory behind it. The reality can be quite the opposite.

In my experience, tech workers in the US generally have fewer job stability problems and have a much easier time finding decent work in the first place.

Lower competition - my favorite lie that I hear told in every EU country. EU is not lower competition from the entrepreneur's perspective. Anywhere in the EU is vastly higher competition.

- Unless you're doing a hyper-local product, you're competing on the global scale.

- The ratio of active investors versus serious entrepreneurs is far, far worse in France than in Silicon Valley.

- Getting good people in France to join your startup is very easy. Getting the absolute best people in the world, that's tough. Not because they don't exist in France. It's because the absolute best people want to leave France. Top talent wants to move to the #1 best place in the world for their industry, no less.

The lifecycle of a (non-lifestyle) startup anywhere in the EU is far harder than it is in Silicon valley, at every stage.

If the government continues to add serious benefits, and many other changes happen though, the balance could maybe start to shift.

Commenter: haven't most (maybe close to all) the returns in VC over the last, say, decade, come from exits of companies that never achieved real positive cash flows?

Fred: yeah. but i am celebrating that ones that did today.

So weird that for every piece of advice Fred gives on his blog, he says in the comments that he's not really giving advice, and just trying to balance out the people at the opposite extreme.

Exactly what I was saying. The map is terribly hard to interpret unless you can make a rough guess of how many people live in each tiny segment.

Shows percent change... but not the magnitude of the change.

Seeing a map that combined both percentage and magnitude to compute the colors (perhaps similar to the Tf–idf calculation?) would be much more interpretable. 50% of people leaving the middle of a forest doesn't really tell me much, versus 50% change in a dense city.

Before you disparagingly call it a "clone" and "not their main project", consider that free products often go on to crush their expensive first-to-market predecessors.

The strategy of first seeking to monopolize the user-base, and then afterward heavily monetizing it is a very well proven long term strategy by now. The overnight success of Slack and some other SAAS companies may give some people the impression that this strategy is suddenly irrelevant. It may not be.

At low-end jobs only. The high-end, most desirable, generally highest wage jobs absolutely do enforce a type of "no asshole rule" that prevents hiring these kind of people, and fires them fast if they're discovered later.

It's MUCH easier to find these kind of low-end people who are looking for work, since it's so much harder for them to get a job. That's the only reason they're so over-represented, versus how many there really are.

Note that sometimes entire cities become filled with bad-behavior people, as almost all of the good behavior people move to a different city. Look at whether your city has a high emigration (moving out) rate among top-performers in your industry. Do the most career ambitious people tend to move away from your city, or move to your city?

Love that. If they burn too many people, they have to create new questions.

We're talking only about the "in their own time" take-home types of tests. The type of cheating I'm talking about is outsourcing the problem or even just having a friend do it for them.

A take-home test has a 0% chance of being cheated on? Are you sure you're talking about the same thing here?

My rule for these - only do these tests in-person, on-site, and after after the company has invested a significant amount of their employees' time to interview you in-person.

Tons of companies hand out these "homework" tests to hundreds of people without having even the slightest intention of hiring them. F* that.

What are the penalties for trying to leave it? I think that that's the defining factor, for what we're talking about here.

The slavery-like dynamics of the immigration system is a surprising mismatch, versus the typical American business culture.

For comparison, I've spent time in a few countries where a slavery-like relationship with employers is completely expected and even supported by the employees. (Culture shock!) They imagine that it's the only way that businesses can function.

This isn't the type of business culture you want to live in, no matter the perceived benefits.

> You trade lack of VCs here for more competition for VCs there.

No, some places are just vastly better than others for certain things. Everything doesn't always just balance out as if nature forces there to be a balance.

"Everything balances out so here is equal to there" is one of the biggest lies that small towns tell their ambitious people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

In other words, lifestyle businesses, i.e. businesses that plan to direct nearly all profits and investment capital to the founders / employees / other expenses while the investors end up getting nothing (unless they do something extractive to the company e.g. via seizing control and extracting value for themselves via that) -- versus "non-lifestyle" where the company optimizes for a big exit through which investors can be compensated.

Remember, tech startups nearly never pay dividends. Making a ton of profit but no exit = good for founders and employees, big problem for investors.

> have shown what can be accomplished

That was never the proper question. The proper question is what's the relative difference in the magnitude & probability of success, between the different regions. This matters, because success is so extremely difficult to achieve in startups already.

> outcomes are more binary in the US - that's mostly a Silicon Valley cultural thing.

It's an investor thing, not a cultural thing. If the business doesn't reach an exit, then the investor (nearly always) gets absolutely nothing, no matter how many millions the company is profiting per year. Tech startups generally never pay out dividends. All that money goes back to the employees and other expenses. Nothing to the investors. Never exiting = equivalent to the company imploding as a completely failure, from an investor's financial perspective.

> stay domestic and contribute to building up the tech scene there.

If startups want to build up their ecosystem, the more effective approach is to go to where the money is, get the money, and THEN take that money and success back to their home community. Exactly as the Skype guys did for Estonia, or as many founders have done for Israel. #1 get the money #2 bring it back. 2 optimized steps, not a single step.

This small town concept of just guilt-tripping the poor desperate founders to never leave their home town out of loyalty simply hurts everyone. It's backwards thinking like this that keeps the smaller towns smaller and less successful.

No, don't quote out of context. That's ONLY if you already previously signed a contract with them, and that original contract specifically allowed them to make future updates without your permission.