4 ms·

Paul Graham’s ‘lowball’ accusation of Google Ventures

55 points by csmajorfive 14y ago

btilly 14y ago
For more discussion, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4486835 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4486835 which was posted previously. Here is a td;lr of this particular take on the topic. Google Ventures' low valuations are justifiable for the same reason that YCombinator's low valuations are justifiable - in addition to the money they are providing a tremendous amount of support to the companies that they invest in, and the value of that is bigger than the dollar amount invested. However Paul Graham may be biased because Google Ventures is a reasonably direct competitor. Most of that is reasonable. But my personal guess is that the final point of the article is entirely wrong. My personal guess is that Paul Graham is behind the scenes dealing with an unfortunate startup that ran into trouble due to the issue he's talking about, and thought it wise to warn others. Of course it is in nobody's interest for him to reveal which startup or the nature of their trouble. So we (hopefully) will never get the real story.
senko 14y ago
Wow, the hate. I don't know whether the author (or VB) has a beef with YC, but it sure looks so here. (I'm not running a startup nor am I especially into SV soap opera, but this piece speaks for itself).
- firefox 14y ago
  I got the same impression, and it's probably coming from the author who clearly doesn't really understand how incubators work.
mikeryan 14y ago
Wow what a shitty article. This whole thing is killing pg's first comment in the thread yesterday Just so everyone understands, I was not saying that Google Ventures is a bad investor and should be avoided. If we thought that, the email would have been a lot shorter. I was just talking about a structural problem that happens when you've already raised some money on a convertible note with a valuation cap, and an investor offers to invest at a lower cap From an author who obviously read that thread she's completely ignoring what he said with crappy statements like this: Considering this comes from a man who just asked his portfolio to blacklist an entire venture firm, this might read as a rather contradictory statement.
- Smudge 14y ago
  Ignoring the article's contents for a second, let's look at how clearly doctored the image is to make PG look insidious. Before: http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/paul-graham.jpg http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/paul-grah... After: http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/pg-lowball.jpg http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/pg-lowball.jp...
  - nikcub 14y ago
    Arrington hinted in his post that there is more to this story than is being revealed: > I also think VentureBeat should fully disclose any other issues they have that might be affecting their judgement about Y Combinator, but I’ll leave it at that. from: http://uncrunched.com/2012/09/07/turning-the-drama-down-on-y-combinator-v-google-ventures/ http://uncrunched.com/2012/09/07/turning-the-drama-down-on-y... this is starting to become so weird that I believe there must be more to it edit: that post has a HN thread that was just submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491894 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491894
  - arkonaut 14y ago
    What a contrast a zoom and filter can have on an image... The actual image is him intently/genuinely listening to what I can only suppose is a question from an audience member of some kind. And the Venture Beat cropped version is supposed to make it look like he's coldly calculating someone's demise.
    - Smudge 14y ago
      It's hard to tell, but the image has also been rotated, which makes it seem like he is leaning forward more intently. Click the little "compare" link on the TinEye result to see what I mean: https://www.tineye.com/search/b2e69b229df764bf6bd92bb4ca65f11170822d8e https://www.tineye.com/search/b2e69b229df764bf6bd92bb4ca65f1...
  - autophil 14y ago
    Oh frig. You should see CNN during election time. The obvious biases last election made my stomach turn.
naz 14y ago
But in talking with a slew of Y Combinator alumni from the past three years of YC batches, we found that Graham himself takes between 5 percent and 7 percent of companies for amounts ranging between $12,000 and $20,000. Those amounts aren’t any great secret; YC publishes approximations on its own site. But while the founders said YC insisted that these terms had nothing to do with their companies’ actual valuations, on paper, it made the startups worth between $228,000 and $287,000 on the high end. This is based on the faulty assumption that $12-20k is all you get for getting into YC.
- nvoorhies 14y ago
  Or based on an assumption that YC gets more than just equity out of the people that get into it.
jordanmessina 14y ago
In regards to the company complaining about pg's "valuation", if they felt they were far enough along to raise a priced round of funding, then why didn't they do that instead? Companies don't enter an incubator for the funding, so comparing that to true valuations is ridiculous. This is just a poor attempt at trolling YC and pg.
scdoshi 14y ago
This article written purely just to generate traffic. The author manufactured an 'investor battle' out of this? What?
- kapilkale 14y ago
  It's filled with outlandish statements... "We have to acknowledge the obvious: Both entities are here to make money from the labor and success of entrepreneurs, essentially operating in a predatory role."
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  It does read a bit like some classic Arrington from the early TechCrunch. Clearly it fills some need or it wouldn't get the traffic or attention that it does. Its like reading 'Dear Abby' to feel better about your own life. After a while you come to realize that its not 'real' in the sense its sensationalism for sensationalists sake, ValleyWag2. The only part that bothers me is that these kinds of people thrived during the dot com 'boom'. So their reappearance, like the swallows in Capistrano, seem to herald a change in the climate.
mirsadm 14y ago
This seems to have just gotten out of hand. How did this memo get "leaked" anyway? I don't think article is as negative as others are stating but it seems unnecessary.
alecdibble 14y ago
This article annoys me. Here seems to be the general structure: * Generalize PG's statement until it is basically irrelevant to the point he was trying to make. * Fill in a whole article speculating about the generalized interpretation of PG's comments. * Say what PG actually meant in the end without showing any indication that the author actually understood what he was talking about. * Paste a badly edited "primer" trying to explain the argument because the author obviously doesn't get it.
jvrossb 14y ago
How did this become such a big deal? Raising money, especially for the first time, is a stressful experience full of uncertainty. When we did it, one investor (not Google Ventures actually) low balled us and a lot of our peers. We were first timers and it freaked us out. PG would have no problem with writing "avoid Google Ventures". He didn't because that's not what he meant. It's simply about saying hey I heard that Google Ventures lowballs, if they do it to you don't freak out.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tvladeck 14y ago
>> Both entities are here to make money from the labor and success of entrepreneurs, essentially operating in a predatory role. What is this person doing writing for Venturebeat?
Ahmes 14y ago
Is it just me or does this author have an affiliation with TechStars? (For instance: see http://vimeo.com/5346690 http://vimeo.com/5346690)
- mmahemoff 14y ago
  She did an interview with another accelerator three years ago, that makes her biased against YC? She's a tech journalist who's done a lot of interviews.
pbiggar 14y ago
> The kicker, and the truly poetic part of all this, is, as Graham hints, that all these valuations are made up, anyhow. Of course they're made up, everybody knows they're made up. They are a response to market demand to invest in companies at that stage (especially ones that come out of YC). The same is true of companies entering Series A, IPOing, or publicly available. I'm surprised at VentureBeat's reporting here. If you're experts in "Venture", I would expect you to know that valuations are always made up, without needing PG to hint it for you.
tlrobinson 14y ago
"he’s trying to keep his money-makers from defecting to a competitor." This makes no sense. It was a private email to existing YC companies. YC has already make their investment, there's no "defecting" to be done.

55 points by csmajorfive 14y ago

For more discussion, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4486835 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4486835 which was posted previously. Here is a td;lr of this particular take on the topic. Google Ventures' low valuations are justifiable for the same reason that YCombinator's low valuations are justifiable - in addition to the money they are providing a tremendous amount of support to the companies that they invest in, and the value of that is bigger than the dollar amount invested. However Paul Graham may be biased because Google Ventures is a reasonably direct competitor. Most of that is reasonable. But my personal guess is that the final point of the article is entirely wrong. My personal guess is that Paul Graham is behind the scenes dealing with an unfortunate startup that ran into trouble due to the issue he's talking about, and thought it wise to warn others. Of course it is in nobody's interest for him to reveal which startup or the nature of their trouble. So we (hopefully) will never get the real story.

senko 14y ago

Wow, the hate. I don't know whether the author (or VB) has a beef with YC, but it sure looks so here. (I'm not running a startup nor am I especially into SV soap opera, but this piece speaks for itself).

firefox 14y ago
I got the same impression, and it's probably coming from the author who clearly doesn't really understand how incubators work.

mikeryan 14y ago

Wow what a shitty article. This whole thing is killing pg's first comment in the thread yesterday Just so everyone understands, I was not saying that Google Ventures is a bad investor and should be avoided. If we thought that, the email would have been a lot shorter. I was just talking about a structural problem that happens when you've already raised some money on a convertible note with a valuation cap, and an investor offers to invest at a lower cap From an author who obviously read that thread she's completely ignoring what he said with crappy statements like this: Considering this comes from a man who just asked his portfolio to blacklist an entire venture firm, this might read as a rather contradictory statement.

Smudge 14y ago
Ignoring the article's contents for a second, let's look at how clearly doctored the image is to make PG look insidious. Before: http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/paul-graham.jpg http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/paul-grah... After: http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/pg-lowball.jpg http://venturebeat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/pg-lowball.jp...
- nikcub 14y ago
  Arrington hinted in his post that there is more to this story than is being revealed: > I also think VentureBeat should fully disclose any other issues they have that might be affecting their judgement about Y Combinator, but I’ll leave it at that. from: http://uncrunched.com/2012/09/07/turning-the-drama-down-on-y-combinator-v-google-ventures/ http://uncrunched.com/2012/09/07/turning-the-drama-down-on-y... this is starting to become so weird that I believe there must be more to it edit: that post has a HN thread that was just submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491894 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491894
- arkonaut 14y ago
  What a contrast a zoom and filter can have on an image... The actual image is him intently/genuinely listening to what I can only suppose is a question from an audience member of some kind. And the Venture Beat cropped version is supposed to make it look like he's coldly calculating someone's demise.
  - Smudge 14y ago
    It's hard to tell, but the image has also been rotated, which makes it seem like he is leaning forward more intently. Click the little "compare" link on the TinEye result to see what I mean: https://www.tineye.com/search/b2e69b229df764bf6bd92bb4ca65f11170822d8e https://www.tineye.com/search/b2e69b229df764bf6bd92bb4ca65f1...
- autophil 14y ago
  Oh frig. You should see CNN during election time. The obvious biases last election made my stomach turn.

naz 14y ago

But in talking with a slew of Y Combinator alumni from the past three years of YC batches, we found that Graham himself takes between 5 percent and 7 percent of companies for amounts ranging between $12,000 and $20,000. Those amounts aren’t any great secret; YC publishes approximations on its own site. But while the founders said YC insisted that these terms had nothing to do with their companies’ actual valuations, on paper, it made the startups worth between $228,000 and $287,000 on the high end. This is based on the faulty assumption that $12-20k is all you get for getting into YC.

nvoorhies 14y ago
Or based on an assumption that YC gets more than just equity out of the people that get into it.

jordanmessina 14y ago

In regards to the company complaining about pg's "valuation", if they felt they were far enough along to raise a priced round of funding, then why didn't they do that instead? Companies don't enter an incubator for the funding, so comparing that to true valuations is ridiculous. This is just a poor attempt at trolling YC and pg.

scdoshi 14y ago

This article written purely just to generate traffic. The author manufactured an 'investor battle' out of this? What?

kapilkale 14y ago
It's filled with outlandish statements... "We have to acknowledge the obvious: Both entities are here to make money from the labor and success of entrepreneurs, essentially operating in a predatory role."
ChuckMcM 14y ago
It does read a bit like some classic Arrington from the early TechCrunch. Clearly it fills some need or it wouldn't get the traffic or attention that it does. Its like reading 'Dear Abby' to feel better about your own life. After a while you come to realize that its not 'real' in the sense its sensationalism for sensationalists sake, ValleyWag2. The only part that bothers me is that these kinds of people thrived during the dot com 'boom'. So their reappearance, like the swallows in Capistrano, seem to herald a change in the climate.

mirsadm 14y ago

This seems to have just gotten out of hand. How did this memo get "leaked" anyway? I don't think article is as negative as others are stating but it seems unnecessary.

alecdibble 14y ago

This article annoys me. Here seems to be the general structure: * Generalize PG's statement until it is basically irrelevant to the point he was trying to make. * Fill in a whole article speculating about the generalized interpretation of PG's comments. * Say what PG actually meant in the end without showing any indication that the author actually understood what he was talking about. * Paste a badly edited "primer" trying to explain the argument because the author obviously doesn't get it.

jvrossb 14y ago

How did this become such a big deal? Raising money, especially for the first time, is a stressful experience full of uncertainty. When we did it, one investor (not Google Ventures actually) low balled us and a lot of our peers. We were first timers and it freaked us out. PG would have no problem with writing "avoid Google Ventures". He didn't because that's not what he meant. It's simply about saying hey I heard that Google Ventures lowballs, if they do it to you don't freak out.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

tvladeck 14y ago

>> Both entities are here to make money from the labor and success of entrepreneurs, essentially operating in a predatory role. What is this person doing writing for Venturebeat?

Ahmes 14y ago

Is it just me or does this author have an affiliation with TechStars? (For instance: see http://vimeo.com/5346690 http://vimeo.com/5346690)

mmahemoff 14y ago
She did an interview with another accelerator three years ago, that makes her biased against YC? She's a tech journalist who's done a lot of interviews.

pbiggar 14y ago

> The kicker, and the truly poetic part of all this, is, as Graham hints, that all these valuations are made up, anyhow. Of course they're made up, everybody knows they're made up. They are a response to market demand to invest in companies at that stage (especially ones that come out of YC). The same is true of companies entering Series A, IPOing, or publicly available. I'm surprised at VentureBeat's reporting here. If you're experts in "Venture", I would expect you to know that valuations are always made up, without needing PG to hint it for you.

tlrobinson 14y ago

"he’s trying to keep his money-makers from defecting to a competitor." This makes no sense. It was a private email to existing YC companies. YC has already make their investment, there's no "defecting" to be done.