birken

33 ms·

271.
by birken 10y ago
1) An investor isn't marking a 1x as a win. Locking up their LP's money for many years to return 1x isn't making anybody happy. 2) AngelList isn't giving PH investors/employees $28M cash, or $20M cash, or whatever
272.
by birken 10y ago
Unless AngelList is teeming in cash, which they probably aren't, the deal is likely either all stock or mostly stock. So imagine AngelList internally values themselves at $500M (a number I just made up), to get to the 20M figure they
273.
by birken 10y ago
Links to the biased hit pieces please?
274.
by birken 10y ago
The NYT seemingly has written a well supported and fact checked story explaining how a verifiably false tweet from a person with few followers spread far and wide. What exactly is being pushed on the American people?
275.
by birken 10y ago
This is a good example of what not to do as a data scientist: draw confident conclusions when there is not strong evidence to support that in the data. First of all, an R-squared of 0.15 is nothing to write home about. That is telling yo
276.
by birken 10y ago
Wood Talk: http://www.woodtalkshow.com/ I see another commenter posted a different one so it seems the format of 3 people chatting about a topic is popular!
277.
by birken 10y ago
The type of podcast I'd like to listen to is if you got a roundtable of people in various roles (like a roundtable of all technical founders, or a roundtable of all first employees, or a roundtable of all solo founders), and then asked
278.
by birken 10y ago
And what do you think happens if you force those factory jobs back into the US with tariffs and then force companies to pay workers a living wage with benefits? The companies instead pay big companies and already highly paid engineers to bu
279.
by birken 10y ago
Quite the false equivalency. There have been clear situations where a territory has declared independence for reasons that were somewhat bigoted, racist and xenophobic (the confederacy), and many instances where a territory has declared ind
280.
by birken 10y ago
Having read basically every news article ever about the startup I was involved in, they get the most basic, easily checkable facts like: What year was it founded? What does the company do? Who is the CEO? wrong at least half of the time.
281.
by birken 10y ago
Reddit isn't the same thing. Reddit is a place for people to find interesting content and interesting discussions. If those discussions and links are being created by 500 people or 1 frantic person the end product is the same. Having
282.
by birken 10y ago
There are a few twitter accounts I follow who post some egregious infractions throughout SF. There have been some wins [1], but unfortunately I see the same types of violations by commercial vehicles posted over and over again and I think
283.
by birken 10y ago
Yes. Not too hard to confirm with a tiny little program: lockers = ['Closed'] * 101 for i in range(1, 101): for locker in range(i, 101, i): lockers[locker] = 'Open' if lockers[locker] == 'Cl
284.
by birken 10y ago
I can't speak for every website, but it is my experience that traffic to diverse sets of landing pages follows much more of a power law distribution than anything close to constant. This was true at Thumbtack (where we did these types
285.
by birken 10y ago
This is a very good basic A/B test, and while it is certainly way better than nothing and something that a lot of websites should try, I think there are some important caveats that I'm thinking of that aren't mentioned in the
286.
by birken 10y ago
I don't doubt the value proposition that is here, and I don't doubt that the authors of this blog post will make a great video and book about A/B testing that is helpful. This is fairly well trod ground though and for those t
287.
by birken 10y ago
First of all, the story doesn't mention anything about the size of the deal. Second of all, the company is selling after ~2 years. The average employee has probably been there for less than 1 year. Excluding the common stock of the f
288.
by birken 10y ago
Certainly before signing the offer letter. I created a website, Friendly Options [1], to act as a helpful ally is trying to extract this information from employers. It asks for a bunch of required information (# of total shares, strike pr
289.
by birken 10y ago
The reason is that the medicine might be worse than the cure. I don't like fraudulent accounting and securities fraud, so I'm glad we have the Sarbanes-Oxley law which helps to prevent it. However, SOX now makes being a public c
290.
by birken 10y ago
You are acting like the employee has no choice. If they choose to take a lower salary because of the allure of stock options, that is their choice. Nobody is forcing them to do this, and that employee can happily choose to work at one
291.
by birken 10y ago
You have no idea if people are being routinely "abused" or not. The original commenter's hypothetical is as follows (I've expanded a bit): A likely extremely highly paid employee is working at a company where they aren&
292.
by birken 10y ago
I just don't understand this argument. If you are working for a company and they wont give you this information, leave and join one that will. If you are thinking of joining a company, ask for all the stock option information. Ask fo
293.
by birken 10y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the idea of grinding it out for another 4-5 years to grow from $1B to a bigger potential outcome was a lot less exciting to the person with 10% fully vested than it would be to the person with 40%. Based on m
294.
by birken 10y ago
As a preface, I'm as employee friendly as it comes for options and I've been through the ringer on this whole option process. I don't think it is fair for an employee of a private company to be upset that they can't sell
295.
by birken 10y ago
FYI you'll hear every VC say that right before they go off on their 3 week summer vacation. If Ron Conway wasn't working with his son then you'd mention how he made the classic silicon valley mistake of putting his career in
296.
by birken 10y ago
I absolutely agree with you. It was an interesting experience because before you get in the room with these investors, investors that you've seen giving speeches and writing articles, you assume they are somehow these visionary people
297.
by birken 10y ago
For "terrible at pitching", the official story [1] is trying to raise a Series A and getting rejected 42 times. I don't agree with everything in the official story, but the part about going to a bunch of meetings and being r
298.
by birken 10y ago
> This piece just seems like investors giving out, what appears on the surface to be helpful advice, but really are just trying to streamline the pitch process, so they can more quickly evaluate deals. I think it is pretty helpful for pe
299.
by birken 10y ago
> Mimi : As a first employee, for better or worse, the thing about joining a startup is that it’s not a meritocracy, right? If you’re disappointed in a decision that’s made, or if you feel the founders aren’t leading the way that you wou
300.
by birken 10y ago
Vanguard has fees in addition to their funds' individual fees if they manage the 401k for a small business, though my guess is they are less than $8/month/person. Having used Vanguard's site to manage my Google 401k, I c

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