birken

40 ms·

361.
by birken 11y ago
I'd read this: http://www.scribd.com/doc/55945011/An-Introduction-to-Stock-... The "summary" section had a good list of questions, and if you read the document you'll have all the background ne
362.
by birken 11y ago
The truth is that most companies in the unicorn zone will probably have some sort of stock sales plans set up that go through the company. It isn't black and white between private/no liquidity and public/full liquidity. Howe
363.
by birken 11y ago
I think that if you held a secret poll of founders of these companies, the majority of them would say they don't want this to change. Retention is really hard, and this is an incredibly powerful retention device at a fast growing compa
364.
by birken 11y ago
At the end of the day, this is a lesson in unit economics. If you want to make a successful startup, your unit of sale better be super profitable. Most successful technology companies sell bits, with high fixed costs but very small margina
365.
by birken 11y ago
FWIW Thumbtack and many other companies have the same problem, and it can be solved by just charging the cleaners more money for the initial introduction. Instead of charging 20% of the first cleaning, charge 50% or 100% or 200% and let th
366.
by birken 11y ago
Wow this is like stepping into a time warp for the early days at Thumbtack. Our A/B testing bucketing and methodology was extremely similar to this. Things we learned: > Our guiding principle has been ease and accessibility: when t
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by birken 11y ago
A good data analysis lesson here: Make sure to use multiple Y axes if you are compared line graphs like this. It is much easier to see the differences at the top of the scale than at the bottom of the scale, but that doesn't mean the
368.
by birken 11y ago
This isn't how investing works. You can't just hand wave a situation in which one of the most successful tech companies ever should have offered its early shares to more people. If you went back to the early days of AirBNB and t
369.
by birken 11y ago
You don't need crowdfunding, this is literally the purpose of the public markets. Regular people can invest in the company (by purchasing shares), and the market ensures they can buy/sell shares in a fair way. Also there is still
370.
by birken 11y ago
Bingo. And assuming somebody did actually have a really amazing and effective marketing strategy, they would be heavily disincentivized from sharing it. By its nature, marketing is about outcompeting other companies for attention and sale
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by birken 11y ago
Beautifully put. The people who build successful startups are the people who build stuff. There are very important things at a startup (building a product people want, growth), and there are ancillary things (programming language choice, c
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by birken 11y ago
Yes, but if the 90 day expiration is in the plan, then it is 90 days. It doesn't matter why the lawyers put it in there, though IRS treatment is a reason why it is very common. You aren't going to be able to negotiate changes in
373.
by birken 11y ago
Another really important, highly negative, combination of these factors is if you want to leave the company. If the company is public, then you can essentially leave whenever you want, exercise the options and sell the stock to pay the cost
374.
by birken 11y ago
How much are you paying though? The service is undoubtably being heavily subsidized by VC money. This is the classic silicon valley model, a model I love, but there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel. As noted in the OP, this also
375.
by birken 11y ago
I don't think these particular examples are that exciting. Rich people can already get this type of concierge service from existing places, like a personal assistant, virtual personal assistant [1], or a credit card concierge (you pro
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by birken 11y ago
I completely disagree. If you work on a small engineering team and want to broaden your knowledge of technologies you might want to use, reading about approaches that larger companies use is a great source of information. Most cutting edge
377.
by birken 11y ago
> Most people understand that "adding more people in their group" will lead to "less work per person" In my experience hiring new people doesn't mean less work per person, though it might allow for everybody to s
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by birken 11y ago
This doubles as a good lesson for somebody considering joining a startup, and kudos to them for being fully transparent about it. You should always ask to see the graph they've presented here, a graph with historical burn, revenue and
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Perhaps Technical Interviews Suck Because Technical Interviewing Sucks(danbirken.com)
20 points by birken 11y ago|9 comments
380.
by birken 11y ago
All online dating does is give you a huge channel to meet new people that you'll know you have some baseline compatibility with. It doesn't replace most aspects of dating, but if are having trouble meeting people you are interest
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by birken 11y ago
There are also many free alternatives which are very good. I'm not suggesting something like Tinder or OkCupid are perfect, but both of them are fully usable for your whole dating lifecycle without ever having to pay a cent (both of t
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by birken 11y ago
Liquidation preferences have value, and a lot of value, I'm saying that they just don't make VCs immune from bad consequences. I'm sure the reason they are so common is that a VC wants it, and it seems fair to the founder an
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by birken 11y ago
If all startups are over-priced, and we are in a bubble, that would mean it is a terrible time to be a VC. Talk to a VC, and they'll tell you they hate the world right now. More competition for deals and inflated valuations help co
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by birken 11y ago
> But not Mark Cuban, one of the renowned moguls in the VC world. Mark Cuban is certainly a renowned Angel investor, but not a VC. > For instance, Uber moved from $17 billion to $40 billion between the two funding rounds within six mo
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by birken 11y ago
It is very complicated, and I'm not suggesting that rent control is good. I'm just saying there is a difference between buying a house in the bay area vs living in the bay area . Right now, the former is insanely expensive, w
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by birken 11y ago
FWIW a lot of renters don't pay those prices. If you are buying a house, you are going to have to pay full market value. However, the rental market has different influences, because of widespread rent control and the fact that proper
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by birken 11y ago
It is certainly possible, but you really don't know. Especially given that the numbers are so small, any false negatives would affect the data quite a bit. And you are making very strong claims with very precise measurements that are
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by birken 11y ago
Seems like data accuracy is a big problem. Of all the data Crunchbase collects, the individual smaller investors on seed/angel rounds seems wildly inaccurate. I've just spot checked a few people who I know have made lots of ange
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If You Aren't Doing Basic Conversion Optimization, You Probably Should Be(danbirken.com)
2 points by birken 11y ago|0 comments
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by birken 11y ago
The problem is the visibility of comments changes their potential for future upvotes or downvotes. If you have a comment sitting on top of a thread, it will get much more visibility and opportunities for a statistically good sample of upvo

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