birken

34 ms·

241.
by birken 9y ago
> But the cool kids don't beg. The cool kids — the ones who really know what they're doing and have the best chances of succeeding — decide who they allow to invest in their companies. The company I was an early employee of (t
242.
by birken 9y ago
If fly.io is serious about their marketing, this is not the way to do it. Find a really slow website that sells something, give them your service for free and run half the traffic through your fast version vs their slow version. Show me h
243.
by birken 9y ago
> And while Kan is still loathe to go into all the details... > Kan promises more to come — including more details about the tech the company is building and how it will begin offering that technology to customers... I like how the on
244.
by birken 9y ago
Yeah this claim I don't understand in an otherwise very good article. At the startup I worked at, a bunch of people made some money based on equity, and while it wasn't necessarily a perfect correlation between equity and contribu
245.
by birken 9y ago
That is interesting. I did always wonder at what point the VCs transfer the returns of post-IPO shares to their LPs, because it seems like the timing on this can make a huge difference to the VCs return. Especially if the majority of your
246.
by birken 9y ago
How are the VCs going to keep the doors open? If you take away the 2% return, you've basically said that only super rich people that can afford not getting paid for 5-10 years should be VCs. Do you think that all the best investors in
247.
by birken 9y ago
These VCs have some interesting data about that: http://blog.ttcp.com/the-inverse-correlation-between-venture... I'm not sure I agree with them or their particularly analysis, but I'm very convinced they are diffe
248.
by birken 9y ago
VC isn't necessarily designed to have returns that are better than the public markets, only to have returns that are different from the public markets. If you have billions of dollars to invest, you want to diversify. So the core p
249.
by birken 9y ago
As somebody that worked for a competitor and knows a lot about both of these companies, I can't say for certain what company is going to "win" local services but I can promise you both of these companies will lose (or I guess
250.
by birken 10y ago
Something like https://mbasic.facebook.com/ ?
251.
by birken 10y ago
And they caught it again. Truly amazing.
252.
by birken 10y ago
Touche. I should have stated that in areas where agriculture have raided groundwater supplies, which take much longer to refresh than reservoirs, residential water supplies may be at risk. Even still, people can generally afford whatever i
253.
by birken 10y ago
> allowing crops to be irrigated and drinking glasses to be filled. Ugh. Drinking glasses are going to be filled regardless of how much rain we get. I don't want to diminish the importance of agriculture, it's important and I
254.
by birken 10y ago
You could say the same thing for people qualifying for in-state tuition to University of California colleges (which is significantly cheaper than out-of-state tuition). Just moving to CA and making yourself a CA resident isn't enough
255.
by birken 10y ago
I've only worked at one startup, which was quite successful, and nobody there fit the description of Greg (unless you permute it to be so vague that everybody is Greg). Therefore, you don't need a Greg character for your startup
256.
by birken 10y ago
Zach Holman has a great article about it: https://zachholman.com/posts/fuck-your-90-day-exercise-windo... And keeps an ongoing list of companies that offer extended exercise windows: https://github.com/
257.
by birken 10y ago
> Remember that raising money is not success. Raising huge amounts of money early on is very rarely how companies win (though it is sometimes how companies lose) I honestly think one of the reasons the company I worked for was successful
258.
by birken 10y ago
As somebody who wrote an article about A/B testing title tags in 2011 before it was cool [1], this is an awesome idea. I've talked about SEO with many companies and coming up with the proper title tags and meta descriptions alone
259.
by birken 10y ago
What evidence do you have that people of minority religions are being persecuted any more than people of the majority religions? In a country like Syria that is ~90% Muslim, what are the odds that all of the most persecuted people are in t
260.
by birken 10y ago
From the EA: > "the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of r
261.
by birken 10y ago
In addition to the substance of the executive order, the implementation was chaotic and poorly planned. The spokesperson for the DHS said on Saturday the order "will bar green card holders" [1], then one day later the secretary o
262.
by birken 10y ago
It is a great point and I did struggle with it. I think if you want to be pessimistic about stock options you can just assume the value to be low or nothing. The site attempts to give you a cautious but optimistic view of what could happe
263.
by birken 10y ago
haha I just get finished writing my response and see you wrote the same thing more concisely and before me :)
264.
by birken 10y ago
Generally good, but with one catch. I'd ask for 2 reasons: 1) Purely as a sign of disrespect to employees, I'd never work at a company where founders sold shares and employees never had the opportunity to. I think it is a very m
265.
by birken 10y ago
Towards the end he makes the comment: "Can you please let me know how much money I’d make from my options if the company were to sell or IPO for $100m, 200m, 300m, 400m, etc?" Here is a simple open-source site (FD: which I wrote)
266.
by birken 10y ago
Yes there are a bunch of companies with extended exercise windows now [1]! I'm a huge proponent of extended exercise windows and would personally never work at a company that didn't offer that. However, even ISOs with 90 day expi
267.
by birken 10y ago
This is a cute system and I'm not going to be against a company having a secret bonus that might give employees free money. But c'mon, don't write a blog post about how this is great. This system is much worse than equity.
268.
by birken 10y ago
I think the $400M refers to this [1], which based on the reporting seems to be money AngelList has set aside by some other VC to invest in startups on their platform, but I don't think that money is invested in AngelList itself. I cou
269.
by birken 10y ago
Where is AngelList getting this 12M? According to Crunchbase they've raised 24M total. Also why the heck would the board approve spending such a massive chunk of cash on an acquisition which seems rather speculative (IE it isn't
270.
by birken 10y ago
Do you think the behavior of these companies could possibly be explained by doing what they think is in their own selfish best interest instead of somehow using "elitist social circles" to "absolve losses"? And who is

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