birken

37 ms·

331.
by birken 11y ago
The author is making a lot of statements without any evidence. For example: > Unsurprisingly, this has spawned an arms race where companies like Facebook and Google keep swapping engineers like they’re pawns in chess. It’s also closed t
332.
by birken 11y ago
It is tough to have these two mentalities at the same time: > Your employees adopt your bootstrapped mentality and they, too, are careful of where they spend your money and try to be as resourceful as they can with limited resources and
333.
by birken 11y ago
Just remember that companies like Box and (in the future) Square have IPO values below their final private round valuations. There is a reason your the the value of the common stock (your strike price) is half the price of the preferred st
334.
by birken 11y ago
As a counterpoint, the founders of Thumbtack started a startup before they had an idea, picked a very "derivative idea" and still did (and are doing) pretty well. If I had to quantify the motivation of the early team, it was much
335.
by birken 11y ago
I'd love to see an entire blog post about Sam's footnote #1. Though I find it funny that every point about why this is bad for late-stage companies I believe applies exactly the same to post demo-day YC seed stage companies with e
336.
by birken 11y ago
What you are talking about is essentially what Thumbtack does, and not surprisingly Thumbtack is a much healthier business. It is also nice that such a platform works pretty similarly across hundreds of different service categories, whereas
337.
by birken 11y ago
In my experience, life is easier when you admit your mistakes without business speak, and just take the blame (for example: "I" instead of "We"). I've written a lot of mea culpas for mistakes which impacted custome
338.
by birken 11y ago
Just as a quick aside of the prestige thing. It is a lot easier to get "prestige" by being a founder of a barely successful startup than it would be to be an early employee of an extremely successful one. The whole startup ecosy
339.
by birken 11y ago
There are many differences. This is in the "beating a dead horse" category of argument because the difference between driving up to an intersection and biking up to one is so intuitively different if you've done both of them
340.
by birken 11y ago
As somebody who has biked thousands of miles in SF, this is a fun thing to argue about but it doesn't make any difference on the streets. Almost every biker already does this, and as long as the police (correctly) don't enforce t
341.
by birken 11y ago
> And why not? The platforms often get paid fees. The platforms often get free carry. And what many people don’t realize is that most syndicates get what is known as “deal-by-deal” carry This is really such a huge point. A popular syndi
342.
by birken 11y ago
A low strike price only matters if there is some eventual liquidity for the shares. For common stock this means IPO, acquisition or some other share buyback. Both IPOs and acquisitions generally don't apply to companies "treadin
343.
by birken 11y ago
Startup L. Jackson has a good tweet about it: > 4/ You'd likely do better financially, on average, joining a Series A company, AND have more career upside. > Source: https://twitter.com/StartupLJackson/
344.
by birken 11y ago
Great post. I've always thought a good metric on how much founders really care about culture is to see how many early employees still work at mature companies. Retaining somebody for 1 year is easy, but retaining somebody for 5 years
345.
by birken 11y ago
There are a couple main reasons subscriptions really didn't work. First, the scale difference between "power" pros and regular pros is pretty large. A "power" pro might spend thousands of dollars per month, whereas
346.
by birken 11y ago
A long runway would be long enough to meet a huge milestone with your current funding. Given a standard milestone (reaching profitability, reach profitability in some markets, user growth to XYZ threshold), 1.5 years is probably solid and
347.
by birken 11y ago
Well if you are a startup that makes profit or has a long runway that is well managed, it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks about you. In boom times it can be a challenge to control burn for even well-run companies because the ma
348.
by birken 11y ago
I used Luminalt [1] and they did a great job throughout the whole process. The installation job was at the highest degree of quality and professionalism that I've experienced. Though it hasn't been inspected or turned on yet (hap
349.
by birken 11y ago
At least with PG&E, my understanding was that those rates only applied to a net over-production over a long period of time (I believe over the course of a year). As long as your power bill is not negative, any over-production during hi
350.
by birken 11y ago
I think all of the hardware will be very proportional to the size. In my case I had micro-inverters on each panel, so it was directly proportional, but this was actually more expensive than having a single large inverter (though more perfo
351.
by birken 11y ago
If you are already connected to the grid, then you can simply just feed the electricity back into the grid when over-producing (which is tracked by your meter), and then use electricity from the grid at night. This actually works in your be
352.
by birken 11y ago
I live in San Francisco and just had a solar system installed last week, so I have a few comments about this. 1) It vastly overestimated how big a solar system that could fit on my roof (by about 5x). It didn't care about chimneys or
353.
by birken 11y ago
I did a double take at this headline because I just listened to the This Week In Startups episode [1] about this company yesterday. You wouldn't have gotten the impression the company could have gone out of business in a week after li
354.
by birken 11y ago
I imagine there is going to be a lot of negativity in the comments, but I applaud you for not only solving a bunch of problems, but posting your code. However, when sharing code that others might use, there are some basic recommendations th
355.
by birken 11y ago
The founding date shouldn't be when the website first launched, or when they incorporated (though both are good minimums). The founding date is when the founders got together and starting working on the idea full time. This is a pet p
356.
by birken 11y ago
The graph on the article is demarcated in months, leading me to believe they are indicating that Uber is exactly 5 years old. Travis' LinkedIn says he has been working for Uber for: 6 years, 2 months Crunchbase founding date of Uber (
357.
by birken 11y ago
I love when the press accelerates startup success, even among the most successful companies of all time. They want everything to be an overnight success. There is no timeline where Uber could be justified as being 5 years old. For example
358.
by birken 11y ago
In comparison to an early grant a refresher grant will be smaller and worth less, but that doesn't make it "near" worthless. First, if you have 7 years to decide if you want to exercise it, then every stock option has risk-fr
359.
by birken 11y ago
A lot of great suggestions. I'd consider lack of #1 and #2 as dealbreakers. Any company that doesn't allow early exercise is being unfair to early employees for no reason, and not providing basic cap table information makes stock
360.
by birken 11y ago
Your dilution math is pretty pessimistic. Even if you are diluted by 30% 5 times (which would be extremely uncommon for a company that grows so successfully), you'd go from 0.5% to 0.1% of the company in your example. More realistica

More ›