lpolovets

14 ms·

91.
by lpolovets 5y ago
I'd err on the side of Amazon because the free market is more likely to address their practices. My hunch is that corruption, bullying, etc don't go away. Organizations don't stop doing those things unless they lose their pow
92.
by lpolovets 5y ago
> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem. Forcing this would also have many downsides: - if you make content that oth
93.
Is SF Finished as the Capital of Tech?(pairagraph.com)
7 points by lpolovets 5y ago|0 comments
94.
by lpolovets 6y ago
A few random thoughts on investing in Bitcoin vs Coinbase: - The risk of losing your BTC would've been high if you used something like Mt Gox, or maybe you wouldn't have made the purchase because you didn't trust the purchasi
95.
by lpolovets 6y ago
I view those more as stickiness than as moats. They help you retain existing customers but don't make the product more valuable for new customers. Scale advantages are the exception. If the costs of your product or service drop dramati
96.
by lpolovets 6y ago
This is an excellent list. FWIW these questions overlap a lot with questions VCs will ask if you decide to go the venture-backed route. (Source: I'm a VC.) A product can still find success even if there isn't a great answer to &qu
97.
by lpolovets 6y ago
I'm an engineer turned VC, and I read HN on most days. Eng career: one of the first 10 engineers at LinkedIn and Factual, and one of the first 10k engineers at Google. Investing: I'm a partner at Susa Ventures. We're a $90m s
98.
Bitcoin soars 14% after Elon Musk namecheck on Twitter(reuters.com)
4 points by lpolovets 6y ago|2 comments
99.
by lpolovets 6y ago
I wonder how many low margin businesses will leave SF because of this. If I understand it right, this is up to a 0.6% tax on gross receipts. What if a business runs on very thin margins? I can imagine someone like Waste Management ($50b com
100.
Why your first customer is worth $10M(ejorgenson.com)
5 points by lpolovets 6y ago|0 comments
101.
by lpolovets 6y ago
The human race is like Netflix's Chaos Monkey but applied to the global ecosystem instead of AWS. And our configuration file is decentralized and hard to enforce.
102.
by lpolovets 6y ago
Hey Namdi! > it is a major assumption to think that VCs are good at calculating the expected values of companies in which they make investments. It's not quite the same as proving VCs can calculate expected values well, but VC is on
103.
by lpolovets 6y ago
Good returns can come both from consensus and nonconsensus companies. For example, Robinhood has publicly spoken about the large number of investors that passed on their seed round, while Flexport has been inundated with interest during eve
104.
by lpolovets 6y ago
> But for imperfect VCs, it might be worth it to invest in 50 just to approach 100% chance of capturing these 5 top performers, the 45 others are just the cost of doing that. Yep! This is exactly how most funds operate. They invest in 30
105.
by lpolovets 6y ago
Agreed that VCs pass on way more good companies than they invest in. But if a VC invests in .5% of companies they look at, and there are 3 great companies in that .5% and 15 great companies in the other 99.5%, that suggests the VC's ra
106.
by lpolovets 6y ago
(I'm a VC.) I'm skeptical of simulations like this one because they typically assume that every startup has the same statistical distribution of returns, and whether you pick 15 or 500 startups, each startup will have the same exp
107.
My Experience Interviewing with Stripe(daeyoungchoi.com)
5 points by lpolovets 6y ago|0 comments
108.
I built a (basic) Substack clone in a month(technically.substack.com)
2 points by lpolovets 6y ago|0 comments
109.
by lpolovets 6y ago
I strongly agree with your sentiment that going the YC and/or VC route requires careful consideration. However, I have a slightly different take on Series A competitiveness. The # of Series A's hasn't grown as quickly as the
110.
by lpolovets 6y ago
The cases I'm referring to are involuntary waiting. The long seed->Series A times are because the companies are not at a stage where investors would fund the company again; the waits are not something the founders are doing voluntar
111.
by lpolovets 6y ago
> "If you’re a good company, you’re either going to raise your Series A - or Series B - in the next 12 months or have significant revenue such that you won’t need more capital. If you’re doing badly, why would you want to keep worki
112.
Amazon Q2 earnings blow past estimates as coronavirus boosts revenue, profit(finance.yahoo.com)
3 points by lpolovets 6y ago|0 comments
113.
The Venture Fellows Program(medium.com)
1 points by lpolovets 6y ago|0 comments
114.
by lpolovets 6y ago
It's hard to be sure, but my guess is the effectiveness came mostly from the brevity. Because at the time no one knew what LinkedIn or social networking were, so most users wouldn't know if the invite was spam or not, whether acce
115.
by lpolovets 6y ago
I'm very frustrated by dark patterns, too. IIRC those came well after I left the company in 2005, and I'm disappointed they're there. I think trying to get users to spam invites is especially annoying and lame: https:/&
116.
by lpolovets 6y ago
I had a similar experience at LinkedIn in its early days. Back when we had maybe 500k members, we A/B tested the hell out of our invite messages. These messages were critical because no one had heard of LinkedIn at the time (~2004ish)
117.
The Hierarchy of Marketplaces – Introduction and Level 1(medium.com)
2 points by lpolovets 6y ago|0 comments
118.
Police act like laws don't apply to them because of Qualified Immunity(usatoday.com)
144 points by lpolovets 6y ago|133 comments
119.
by lpolovets 6y ago
It's been about 20 years since I read this, but for people interested in quick mental math, here's a great book on doing fast calculations in your head: Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments https://www.amazon
120.
by lpolovets 6y ago
Great list. FWIW, a lot of SaaS companies use the second template from Christoph Janz when they're raising their seed rounds. If anyone's interested in additional content about financial modeling, I described ~10 common mistakes I

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