wilschroter

This became one of the top 10 posts of all time on the /r/startups thread in 24 hours so I figured it might interest the community here.

I don't think Google would benefit from a YC-style approach. Google can afford to buy the winners because they have mountains of cash. They also can only invest the time in companies that have significant upside because the numbers they need to move the meter are so significant. YC is a different animal altogether. They use relatively small sums of money in hopes they will find a lottery ticket.

This is Wil Schroter @ Startups.co. I was a customer like many who got the same email and was disappointed. This is a great company that made some bad moves. I'm not defending that. But I will tell you - it is still a great business, although obviously with some serious challenges. Will this be an incredible uphill battle? Of course. But I believe in the company and I think it's worth it.

Sorta feel like there needs to be more teeth to this than simply guidelines based.

@SamA what more "severe" approaches did you consider and why did you decide they wouldn't work? This is a difficult challenge.

There's not.

It's taken.

If you get over your toes in operating capital it can absolutely happen. Think about a low margin business where most of the money just flows right back in operating costs. You only need a few months of mistakes to be in serious trouble.

@superplussed. I've played with both. My diet isn't awesome, and never has been, so I'm sure that doesn't help. But if I could choose being more focused or giving up chocolate Pop-Tarts, I'm at a point in life where I'm just going to enjoy my Pop-Tarts and deal with the consequences.

@mortdeus - I'm not saying for a moment I wouldn't prefer more concentration. I would also prefer to be 6" taller, have 20 more points on my IQ, and be attractive to women. But life gives you what it gives you.

The first one does $2 billion and has 13,000 employees now, so it worked out OK. Blue Diesel which became Ventiv - public, now private.

Just shot you an email. Happy to share/help.

(author here). The first 18 years of my life, particularly in school, were dreadfully plagued by ADD. I graduated at the bottom of my class in high school, went to summer school year after year, and was generally considered an awful student. I just couldn't concentrate and it was incredibly frustrating. It left me at a point where I really didn't think I had any capacity to do anything, and by 18 I hadn't even bothered to apply for college.

What I came to find out later, after I started a company at 19, was that if I could train my brain to sift out all the incredible noise, there was actually a lot of useful activity going on. 20 years later I finally feel I have a handle on it. I also learned I wasn't the only one. I wish I could sit down with so many more young ADD-laden students, founders and kids and help them along.

Congrats team. Very few people every make it to the finish line of an exit, and for those that do, you inspire the rest!

Given direct access to the most powerful person in the world, people on Reddit still act no differently. Yay consistency.

Let's first agree that none of us knows.

What if he did NOT profit? What if he lost millions of his own personal net worth? Would you consider him the opposite of a bastard?

There are very few instances where a company takes a complete header like this and the CEO gets paid handsomely. And how can you compare being in $40 million of cash debt and putting the company to ABC against selling a company in an acquisition?

Last week at this time it was popular to pile on Onlive's CEO to say "he fired everyone and stole the company!".

No one asked why he did it. The common thread was "he was greedy!"

That really pisses me off. We come to find out a week later that the company was days away from total insolvency and that structuring an ABC to deal with $40 million of debt was the only way to keep anyone's jobs. It's a brutally painful place to be.

Sometimes people do awful things for simple and awful reasons. But I believe that's rare. I believe some people are forced to do awful things that they would never otherwise do given the option. I think in this case people didn't want to know, or perhaps didn't care to know why it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.

I fear the media's growing lack of interest in the why.

For as many sales that exist behind closed doors with b/s valuations, here's a few guys who used standard metrics (sales, gasp!) for valuing their company and made multiple attempts to sell it properly.

How about this? Nice job guys. Congrats on sticking to your guns and getting the price you felt was fair.

I would have sold for less.

Until wireless earbuds show up, this is my solution.

None of these evolutions in funding happen in a vacuum. There will be new structures to accommodate crowdfunding investors as well as basic provisions.

Remember too that VC's fund an incredibly small number of early stage deals compared to millions of companies that get started each year. Not sure that companies that are heading in the venture funded track are necessarily the model for this.

This topic seems to get re-hashed every few weeks on HN. Sort of getting tired of hearing about it.

I think this advice is useful in just about all times.

Met Mike during a pitch @ Sequoia 10 years ago. Within 5 seconds he understood our business better than we did. You just don't find that.

We've built a robust platform that will allow the HN community (and others) to make investments together exactly as you're desribing. I spoke to Sam Altman about this a few weeks ago at lunch. We're less than a month from launching so if you'd like to talk to me directly about this please feel free to email me with my username <at> gmail and we can talk further.

I'm not sure how every aging generation is suddenly surprised that a previous generation is different in some way.

It seems ridiculous to assume that with all the major changes that have happened over the last 20 years that people wouldn't have different behaviors.

I get so annoyed when I see people pick apart an acquisition. I saw this same behavior for Gowalla, and then Mint before it. "They didn't make any money. They sold too early." They remind me of people that would be sitting at the finish line of a marathon telling the last people to cross "Boy, your time really sucked."

If you are one of the few entrepreneurs that has come far along enough to get to a sale - for any amount - I just flat out applaud you.

I have a really hard time with this. Yes, he's probably a fantastic founder and will do something great (and I hope like every other entrepreneur, he does).

But I hope that aspiring entrepreneurs raising funds realize what an incredible anomaly this type of capital raising is.

Heaven forbid we get a whole slew of entrepreneurs saying "I heard that you can raise money without a business". It's bad enough we have people running around trying to raise money for features, not even companies. This takes it back even further, which is probably fine for him, but not for the people I fear are going to take this to heart.

It's going to be interesting to see how companies themselves deal with the concept of having a slew of shareholders (fiduciary duty, reporting, etc.)

I'm saying that Techstars has only had 5 years to refine itself. HBS has had over 100. I would think by that definition alone HBS should be churning out better results!

How many $100m startups did Harvard produce in its first 5 years of founding?

If Facebook can grow to 750m users this quickly isn't it safe to say the infrastructure/adoption exists for another company to grow to that number even faster? Let's stop pretending it's the 80's and only one company can figure out how to rule a market (Microsoft).

Facebook, too, shall pass. We of the technology world should know this better than anyone.