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I'm just thinking about how many $500k to $1mm seeds could have helped founders get their ideas off the ground in lieu of these debacles. 17,700,000,000 17,70

I'm just thinking about how many $500k to $1mm seeds could have helped founders get their ideas off the ground in lieu of these debacles. 17,700,000,000 17,700 at $1mm 35,400 at $500k That's a lot of ideas getting fuel and a lot of people being put to work. Even if you filter through for high quality ideas and teams, this is still a better use of those funds. WeWork was a bad idea from the start. Uber is a great idea without a functioning (profitable) business model. As an entrepreneur, this kind of news drives me batty.

TremendousJudge 6y ago
I don't understand how the Uber business model isn't profitable besides mismanagement. Taxi companies all over the world are profitable, and Uber doesn't even have to handle the regulation that they have
- doublesCs 6y ago
  Here in London Uber is MUCH cheaper than black cabs.
- cc439 6y ago
  The reason Uber initially blew taxi companies out of the water is because taxis greatly limited their service to what was profitable and we're incredibly difficult to work with should you be outside one of their comfort zones. You could always count on Taxis near an airport or for an intra-downtown route but good luck getting a cab to pick you up at your house to take you to another suburban destination. It's not that they'd ignore your call because they sucked at customer service, it's that your call is only worth it to them if there's literally nothing else going on. Even then they might not show up if your request isn't going to end with them back in a profitable starting point for another ride.
  - jkhdigital 6y ago
    Exactly, this hits on an incredibly important point that gets constantly ignored in “disruptive” business models: if a particular market segment is “underserved” then it often means that there are poor cost economics in play. Sure, Uber can reduce those costs through algorithmic central routing and planning, but that only goes so far and some markets are just never going to be profitable to serve (at a given quality of service).
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    In civilized places, it was the other way around. Taxis exchange privileged position for certain requirements city demands them to meet as a part of city transportation infrastructure - requirements which include having proper insurance, servicing unprofitable routes, or adapting their vehicles for passengers with disabilities. One of the ways Uber saved money was by completely ignoring these market segments. But of course, the major way Uber "blew taxi companies out of the water" is through their ability to offer below-market-rate prices by losing money on each ride, thanks to unending supply of VC money.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      Uber definitely increased the availability and coverage of end to end car hire in my region. As far as I’ve seen, the evidence suggests that Uber is more equitable for geographic and demographic access.
  - raiyu 6y ago
    Yeah but from Uber's perspective they aren't paying drivers as salaried employees but contractors only for a completed fare. So Uber isn't incurring any overhead expense by having cars in less desirable pick up points, or having a car travel 10-15 minutes for a pick up before they can start a fare. Also keep in mind that the majority of Uber's revenue is from metropolitan areas, not rural areas. And in the metro areas there was a lot of convenience to be gained from their app and matching supply and demand side of the equation and a lot of those areas were underserved by the TLC and specifically car services because taxis didn't even operate there. So they actually took the pent up demand and created a better system. Now they are still grossly unprofitable, but not for the reason you cited here.
    - DebtDeflation 6y ago
      >And in the metro areas there was a lot of convenience to be gained from their app and matching supply and demand side of the equation Yes, people forget about the pre-app days when hailing a taxi involved finding a suitable street corner and sticking your hand in the air while often competing with others doing the same. And even in midtown Manhattan, perhaps the best-served area in the country, try hailing a cab during rush hour when it's raining. Taxi services have largely caught up and have apps now, but it was a nightmare for a long time.
  - drevil-v2 6y ago
    You are completely wrong. I worked for 3 years as a part time taxi driver in first world mega city while doing my post grad at University. Taxis are heavily regulated. If I had refused a fare, I could be taken to court. Especially if the passenger belonged to a certain category like disabled or children needing a ride home after school. This was pre GPS days so I had to pass 4 different computerised exams about the city and major roads. I had a through police check and had to display my taxi driver license on the dash. There was proper commercial driver & vehicle insurance that was automatically taken out the day's earning. There was camera in the car including infrared mode. There was a panic button to start broadcasting location, video and audio. Uber's advantage was completely ignoring any regulations. No insurance. No driver check. No driver safety infrastructure. And their best move was the marketing bullshit. Even now people like you spout the same talking points.
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      Their attractiveness - easy and clear payments. I put in my card and boom! Done! I see the number on the screen - I pay that number, not that number plus customary tips.(99% of the time completely unearned, BTW)
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >Taxi companies all over the world are profitable, taxi companies also don't have thousands of software engineers or sales people, they literally just drive taxis.
- basch 6y ago
  The model is profitable, the price point isnt. It's predatory pricing, sell at a loss to hurt and eliminate competition, when you prevail you own the market.
doublesCs 6y ago
> WeWork was a bad idea from the start. Uber is a great idea without a functioning (profitable) business model. What's the great idea? That you can call a cab using a mobile phone? That already existed before Uber. Or is the idea that you don't have to hire those people?
- rapfaria 6y ago
  I would never take a cab in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, but I take an Uber frequently. The really big difference for me here in Brazil, is that I can communicate to someone in case the route is bad, something is stolen, etc. Taking a cab is so ephemeral that I don't even have time to complain or ask for help.
  - doublesCs 6y ago
    In principle you could also do that with a cab company, right? So the difference is really that you trust Uber. If anything, it's not the idea that's great, it's either the brand or the quality of the service.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  This strikes me as a close analog to the old Dropbox "analysis": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Calling a cab with a mobile phone is miles apart from the ridesharing experience. With Uber or Lyft, I get an idea of when the car will show up, what the ride will cost me, I know they'll take my credit card, they won't tell me the machine is broken after trying my card-make me pay cash-only to find out the charge did actually go through, I won't get taken on a grand tour of the city to run the meter up, I won't be subsidizing the ridiculous protectionist racket that is the medallion system, I'll get a nice easy-to-use receipt for expense purposes, and the ride will probably be cheaper. I can also order a car for someone else and send them home on my bill with no hassles on either side (sending a babysitter home, for example). Since most of my rides are reimbursed anyway, I don't even care that much about the cost spread though it is nice to be prudent with the company's money as well as my own. Even if Uber were the same price, I'd prefer it over cabs. Because it's so much cheaper, I use it more often.
distant_hat 6y ago
As someone who has been on funding committees there is a logic for making a few large grants. Monitoring costs and efforts are far smaller with a small number of grants, so sometimes it is less work to give a few large grants than a lot of small ones even if you know that there may be more wastage.
socrates1998 6y ago
This is a good way to look at it. These investors are supposed to be the smart ones allocating capital to good business ideas. It's insane to me that anyone ever invested any money in WeWork. And I agree with Uber, it's a great idea, but they subsidized their rates to gain market share. Too bad they don't have a plan for how to actually increase their rates to a sustainable level without losing that market share. I think Uber failed in realizing that it's not that hard to create a clone of them.
eloff 6y ago
It has to do with the scale of capital. If these are YC scale $150k investments you'd need more than 100k investments. Which means maybe you'd have to vet 10m companies at a 1% acceptance rate (which is less exclusive than YC.) There aren't 10m seed stage companies, and the effort involved there would be insane. I still think you're right that they should have gone for more smaller investments to the greatest extent that it was practical. As you go for larger and larger investments there is less risk and less reward. Also a bigger chance of one mistake wiping out a huge chunk of the return. Warren Buffett also has this problem and why his investment returns trend down over time as the amount of capital at play goes up.
- petra 6y ago
  10m seed stage companies surely don't exist. Banks historically gave 10m loans, to businesses. And today we have really good knowledge management tools. So isn't it possible to build some process for that for seed investment ?
delfinom 6y ago
The idea of WeWork was fine (basically a modernized take on office space rental), the execution and management however was a shitshow/dumpster fire of money being pumped to keep it afloat.
pembrook 6y ago
WeWork is absolutely not a bad idea. Talk to regus, they’re running a profitable business doing the exact same thing (pre-covid). Also, Rides had already reached profitability at Uber (pre-covid). They are both totally viable businesses, post-covid. The mistake SoftBank made wasn’t investing in them, it was investing at a valuation that grossly overestimated the size of the opportunity, and how quickly they would see their return. Uber & Wework aren’t going to be Apple/Google market cap any time soon, if ever. And that was true pre-covid.
- georgeecollins 6y ago
  I am not trying to bash Uber, but statements like: >>Also, Rides had already reached profitability at Uber (pre-covid). Need to be taken with a grain of salt. There are so many ways to game accounting in general, and even more ways to game the accounting of business unit. So when they say Rides is profitable, it may be true, or close enough to be true to be so. But you should doubt. If a company has $14b in revenue and $8b in losses (2019) and a profitable unit like Rides. That means some other part of the company is lost $8b+. I am sure they spend a lot on delivery, and self driving cars, but do they spend that much. The reply to this will be "that involved a one time write down.." or some such. But when a company has never turned a profit, its hard to tell when the one time costs will stop. That said, I believe there is a viable business in Uber. It has just been overvalued.
  - pembrook 6y ago
    All companies use accounting to paint the picture they want for investors. The point is, ridesharing is a viable business. There are numerous profitable companies in Europe and Asia doing the same thing as Uber.
    - labcomputer 6y ago
      Others may be profitable, but I'm skeptical that Uber is. If you talk to many drivers, you'll find a common theme that "bonuses" make up a substantial fraction of their overall income (bonuses are things like "Drive XX rides in a week and get $YYY"). To my understanding, most/all of these bonuses are placed under the accounting budget (under the premise that these bonuses are intended to bring new drivers onto the platform), not the rideshare budget. So rideshare cost of operations doesn't properly reflect the true cost of operating the rideshare business, which means that unit economics are worse than they appear in Uber's reporting (possibly even negative).
zankly 6y ago
WeWork is a great idea -- commercial real estate landlords are often septuagenerian golfers who couldn't give a shit about anything. Turn a 5 year lease into a monthly lease with Internet and basic services is a great idea. It just tried to do too much.
srnvs123 6y ago
As a former founder working on the sharing economy/delivery space, UberEats will most likely fail, unless their ATG departments hit home-runs (~5% probability) The economics are impossible to sustain, and I've been on the ground first hand talked to over 1000 owners at restaurants, grocers etc. Every single one of them has a timeline to get rid of Eats, Doordash, Instacart etc. They're just waiting for the right time to build out their own systems. There was an enormous opportunity to help them build their systems out that I might pursue if my current venture fails.
- mikeg8 6y ago
  If you’ve spoken to so many owners that all want to ditch the platforms mentioned for their own systems, do you feel there is enough interested to justify a venture/product to sell to the owners that gives them the control they are after without having to figure out how to develop an application. Seems like a great opportunity
  - srnvs123 6y ago
    Yup, I was working on it myself, but shelved it to work on another startup right now. I wrote a complete system like a Shopify for small retailers integrated with delivery etc. But the code is locked in a private repo for me to get back to if my current startup fails.
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      You mean like ChowNow? They manage stuff like that. You do understand that the problem with food delivery isn't the online bit. It's fairly easy to manage the online bit. Expectation management is a big issue in food delivery business - that turns people away real easy. Miss delivery timing twice and people are much more likely to drop you. Get swamped with calls - people drop you. It's a hellhole of customer service. Building out a reliable delivery network - is not easy. The farther the delivery goes out - the more complex it gets. Out of all - Uber has the best solution to evaluate speed of delivery using a car... and OK for bicycles.
  - 6y ago
raverbashing 6y ago
I agree with some comments: WeWork is not a bad idea. Try signing a lease for commercial space and you'll understand why. It's a great arbitrage/cutting the BS opportunity. However it should have been run by someone more grounded in reality.
waynesonfire 6y ago
The transfer of this wealth doesn't preclude subsequent investment. It's not like they horded / burned the money.
malandrew 6y ago
Both types of investments are valuable because they cause different skills to be developed in the marketplace. All those $500k to $1M ideas, if successful, will eventually need to hire the kind of talent that honed their skills at companies like Facebook and Uber. WeWork I can agree on. Not sure what transferrable engineering skills one can learn and improve on at that company.
- ChicagoDave 6y ago
  There are a ton of solid engineers that have never worked for Google or Facebook. That’s a whole other kind of investor hubris.
rdiddly 6y ago
My usual self-torturing thought about numbers like these is "Just give me 0.006% of that" [one of those 17,700 millions] "and I wouldn't have to worry about anything forever." A million invested in safe boring things at 3% (which didn't use to be that hard to achieve... not so sure now) yields a basic income of $30k/yr that could pay rent & food in many places. Take the whole $17.7B and do that for the entire population (~17,700) of one of these towns in 2010: Arcata, CA Orinda, CA Central Point, OR Monroe, WA Tumwater, WA Make it "only" $500K each ($15K/yr) and now you're talking more like Hollister, CA Martinez, CA Los Baños, CA Keizer, OR Lake Oswego, OR Longview, WA Puyallup, WA But life apparently doesn't work that way!
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  How on earth is Arcata less expensive than Lake Oswego?
switch11 6y ago
If they can raise so much money, then perhaps honest people like us should focus on What skillset did they have that allowed them to raise so much money with a model that is not viable or sustainable And learn to raise money ourselves Instead of being batty, learn to raise money

TremendousJudge 6y ago

I don't understand how the Uber business model isn't profitable besides mismanagement. Taxi companies all over the world are profitable, and Uber doesn't even have to handle the regulation that they have

doublesCs 6y ago
Here in London Uber is MUCH cheaper than black cabs.
cc439 6y ago
The reason Uber initially blew taxi companies out of the water is because taxis greatly limited their service to what was profitable and we're incredibly difficult to work with should you be outside one of their comfort zones. You could always count on Taxis near an airport or for an intra-downtown route but good luck getting a cab to pick you up at your house to take you to another suburban destination. It's not that they'd ignore your call because they sucked at customer service, it's that your call is only worth it to them if there's literally nothing else going on. Even then they might not show up if your request isn't going to end with them back in a profitable starting point for another ride.
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Exactly, this hits on an incredibly important point that gets constantly ignored in “disruptive” business models: if a particular market segment is “underserved” then it often means that there are poor cost economics in play. Sure, Uber can reduce those costs through algorithmic central routing and planning, but that only goes so far and some markets are just never going to be profitable to serve (at a given quality of service).
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  In civilized places, it was the other way around. Taxis exchange privileged position for certain requirements city demands them to meet as a part of city transportation infrastructure - requirements which include having proper insurance, servicing unprofitable routes, or adapting their vehicles for passengers with disabilities. One of the ways Uber saved money was by completely ignoring these market segments. But of course, the major way Uber "blew taxi companies out of the water" is through their ability to offer below-market-rate prices by losing money on each ride, thanks to unending supply of VC money.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    Uber definitely increased the availability and coverage of end to end car hire in my region. As far as I’ve seen, the evidence suggests that Uber is more equitable for geographic and demographic access.
- raiyu 6y ago
  Yeah but from Uber's perspective they aren't paying drivers as salaried employees but contractors only for a completed fare. So Uber isn't incurring any overhead expense by having cars in less desirable pick up points, or having a car travel 10-15 minutes for a pick up before they can start a fare. Also keep in mind that the majority of Uber's revenue is from metropolitan areas, not rural areas. And in the metro areas there was a lot of convenience to be gained from their app and matching supply and demand side of the equation and a lot of those areas were underserved by the TLC and specifically car services because taxis didn't even operate there. So they actually took the pent up demand and created a better system. Now they are still grossly unprofitable, but not for the reason you cited here.
  - DebtDeflation 6y ago
    >And in the metro areas there was a lot of convenience to be gained from their app and matching supply and demand side of the equation Yes, people forget about the pre-app days when hailing a taxi involved finding a suitable street corner and sticking your hand in the air while often competing with others doing the same. And even in midtown Manhattan, perhaps the best-served area in the country, try hailing a cab during rush hour when it's raining. Taxi services have largely caught up and have apps now, but it was a nightmare for a long time.
- drevil-v2 6y ago
  You are completely wrong. I worked for 3 years as a part time taxi driver in first world mega city while doing my post grad at University. Taxis are heavily regulated. If I had refused a fare, I could be taken to court. Especially if the passenger belonged to a certain category like disabled or children needing a ride home after school. This was pre GPS days so I had to pass 4 different computerised exams about the city and major roads. I had a through police check and had to display my taxi driver license on the dash. There was proper commercial driver & vehicle insurance that was automatically taken out the day's earning. There was camera in the car including infrared mode. There was a panic button to start broadcasting location, video and audio. Uber's advantage was completely ignoring any regulations. No insurance. No driver check. No driver safety infrastructure. And their best move was the marketing bullshit. Even now people like you spout the same talking points.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    Their attractiveness - easy and clear payments. I put in my card and boom! Done! I see the number on the screen - I pay that number, not that number plus customary tips.(99% of the time completely unearned, BTW)
Barrin92 6y ago
>Taxi companies all over the world are profitable, taxi companies also don't have thousands of software engineers or sales people, they literally just drive taxis.
basch 6y ago
The model is profitable, the price point isnt. It's predatory pricing, sell at a loss to hurt and eliminate competition, when you prevail you own the market.

doublesCs 6y ago

> WeWork was a bad idea from the start. Uber is a great idea without a functioning (profitable) business model. What's the great idea? That you can call a cab using a mobile phone? That already existed before Uber. Or is the idea that you don't have to hire those people?

rapfaria 6y ago
I would never take a cab in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, but I take an Uber frequently. The really big difference for me here in Brazil, is that I can communicate to someone in case the route is bad, something is stolen, etc. Taking a cab is so ephemeral that I don't even have time to complain or ask for help.
- doublesCs 6y ago
  In principle you could also do that with a cab company, right? So the difference is really that you trust Uber. If anything, it's not the idea that's great, it's either the brand or the quality of the service.
sokoloff 6y ago
This strikes me as a close analog to the old Dropbox "analysis": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Calling a cab with a mobile phone is miles apart from the ridesharing experience. With Uber or Lyft, I get an idea of when the car will show up, what the ride will cost me, I know they'll take my credit card, they won't tell me the machine is broken after trying my card-make me pay cash-only to find out the charge did actually go through, I won't get taken on a grand tour of the city to run the meter up, I won't be subsidizing the ridiculous protectionist racket that is the medallion system, I'll get a nice easy-to-use receipt for expense purposes, and the ride will probably be cheaper. I can also order a car for someone else and send them home on my bill with no hassles on either side (sending a babysitter home, for example). Since most of my rides are reimbursed anyway, I don't even care that much about the cost spread though it is nice to be prudent with the company's money as well as my own. Even if Uber were the same price, I'd prefer it over cabs. Because it's so much cheaper, I use it more often.

distant_hat 6y ago

As someone who has been on funding committees there is a logic for making a few large grants. Monitoring costs and efforts are far smaller with a small number of grants, so sometimes it is less work to give a few large grants than a lot of small ones even if you know that there may be more wastage.

socrates1998 6y ago

This is a good way to look at it. These investors are supposed to be the smart ones allocating capital to good business ideas. It's insane to me that anyone ever invested any money in WeWork. And I agree with Uber, it's a great idea, but they subsidized their rates to gain market share. Too bad they don't have a plan for how to actually increase their rates to a sustainable level without losing that market share. I think Uber failed in realizing that it's not that hard to create a clone of them.

eloff 6y ago

It has to do with the scale of capital. If these are YC scale $150k investments you'd need more than 100k investments. Which means maybe you'd have to vet 10m companies at a 1% acceptance rate (which is less exclusive than YC.) There aren't 10m seed stage companies, and the effort involved there would be insane. I still think you're right that they should have gone for more smaller investments to the greatest extent that it was practical. As you go for larger and larger investments there is less risk and less reward. Also a bigger chance of one mistake wiping out a huge chunk of the return. Warren Buffett also has this problem and why his investment returns trend down over time as the amount of capital at play goes up.

petra 6y ago
10m seed stage companies surely don't exist. Banks historically gave 10m loans, to businesses. And today we have really good knowledge management tools. So isn't it possible to build some process for that for seed investment ?

delfinom 6y ago

The idea of WeWork was fine (basically a modernized take on office space rental), the execution and management however was a shitshow/dumpster fire of money being pumped to keep it afloat.

pembrook 6y ago

WeWork is absolutely not a bad idea. Talk to regus, they’re running a profitable business doing the exact same thing (pre-covid). Also, Rides had already reached profitability at Uber (pre-covid). They are both totally viable businesses, post-covid. The mistake SoftBank made wasn’t investing in them, it was investing at a valuation that grossly overestimated the size of the opportunity, and how quickly they would see their return. Uber & Wework aren’t going to be Apple/Google market cap any time soon, if ever. And that was true pre-covid.

georgeecollins 6y ago
I am not trying to bash Uber, but statements like: >>Also, Rides had already reached profitability at Uber (pre-covid). Need to be taken with a grain of salt. There are so many ways to game accounting in general, and even more ways to game the accounting of business unit. So when they say Rides is profitable, it may be true, or close enough to be true to be so. But you should doubt. If a company has $14b in revenue and $8b in losses (2019) and a profitable unit like Rides. That means some other part of the company is lost $8b+. I am sure they spend a lot on delivery, and self driving cars, but do they spend that much. The reply to this will be "that involved a one time write down.." or some such. But when a company has never turned a profit, its hard to tell when the one time costs will stop. That said, I believe there is a viable business in Uber. It has just been overvalued.
- pembrook 6y ago
  All companies use accounting to paint the picture they want for investors. The point is, ridesharing is a viable business. There are numerous profitable companies in Europe and Asia doing the same thing as Uber.
  - labcomputer 6y ago
    Others may be profitable, but I'm skeptical that Uber is. If you talk to many drivers, you'll find a common theme that "bonuses" make up a substantial fraction of their overall income (bonuses are things like "Drive XX rides in a week and get $YYY"). To my understanding, most/all of these bonuses are placed under the accounting budget (under the premise that these bonuses are intended to bring new drivers onto the platform), not the rideshare budget. So rideshare cost of operations doesn't properly reflect the true cost of operating the rideshare business, which means that unit economics are worse than they appear in Uber's reporting (possibly even negative).

zankly 6y ago

WeWork is a great idea -- commercial real estate landlords are often septuagenerian golfers who couldn't give a shit about anything. Turn a 5 year lease into a monthly lease with Internet and basic services is a great idea. It just tried to do too much.

srnvs123 6y ago

As a former founder working on the sharing economy/delivery space, UberEats will most likely fail, unless their ATG departments hit home-runs (~5% probability) The economics are impossible to sustain, and I've been on the ground first hand talked to over 1000 owners at restaurants, grocers etc. Every single one of them has a timeline to get rid of Eats, Doordash, Instacart etc. They're just waiting for the right time to build out their own systems. There was an enormous opportunity to help them build their systems out that I might pursue if my current venture fails.

mikeg8 6y ago
If you’ve spoken to so many owners that all want to ditch the platforms mentioned for their own systems, do you feel there is enough interested to justify a venture/product to sell to the owners that gives them the control they are after without having to figure out how to develop an application. Seems like a great opportunity
- srnvs123 6y ago
  Yup, I was working on it myself, but shelved it to work on another startup right now. I wrote a complete system like a Shopify for small retailers integrated with delivery etc. But the code is locked in a private repo for me to get back to if my current startup fails.
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    You mean like ChowNow? They manage stuff like that. You do understand that the problem with food delivery isn't the online bit. It's fairly easy to manage the online bit. Expectation management is a big issue in food delivery business - that turns people away real easy. Miss delivery timing twice and people are much more likely to drop you. Get swamped with calls - people drop you. It's a hellhole of customer service. Building out a reliable delivery network - is not easy. The farther the delivery goes out - the more complex it gets. Out of all - Uber has the best solution to evaluate speed of delivery using a car... and OK for bicycles.
- 6y ago

raverbashing 6y ago

I agree with some comments: WeWork is not a bad idea. Try signing a lease for commercial space and you'll understand why. It's a great arbitrage/cutting the BS opportunity. However it should have been run by someone more grounded in reality.

waynesonfire 6y ago

The transfer of this wealth doesn't preclude subsequent investment. It's not like they horded / burned the money.

malandrew 6y ago

Both types of investments are valuable because they cause different skills to be developed in the marketplace. All those $500k to $1M ideas, if successful, will eventually need to hire the kind of talent that honed their skills at companies like Facebook and Uber. WeWork I can agree on. Not sure what transferrable engineering skills one can learn and improve on at that company.

ChicagoDave 6y ago
There are a ton of solid engineers that have never worked for Google or Facebook. That’s a whole other kind of investor hubris.

rdiddly 6y ago

My usual self-torturing thought about numbers like these is "Just give me 0.006% of that" [one of those 17,700 millions] "and I wouldn't have to worry about anything forever." A million invested in safe boring things at 3% (which didn't use to be that hard to achieve... not so sure now) yields a basic income of $30k/yr that could pay rent & food in many places. Take the whole $17.7B and do that for the entire population (~17,700) of one of these towns in 2010: Arcata, CA Orinda, CA Central Point, OR Monroe, WA Tumwater, WA Make it "only" $500K each ($15K/yr) and now you're talking more like Hollister, CA Martinez, CA Los Baños, CA Keizer, OR Lake Oswego, OR Longview, WA Puyallup, WA But life apparently doesn't work that way!

selimthegrim 6y ago
How on earth is Arcata less expensive than Lake Oswego?

switch11 6y ago

If they can raise so much money, then perhaps honest people like us should focus on What skillset did they have that allowed them to raise so much money with a model that is not viable or sustainable And learn to raise money ourselves Instead of being batty, learn to raise money