paulbaumgart

13 ms·

91.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Networking is a two-way street: if you want people to offer to meet with you, it helps to give some indication of what you have to offer them :)
92.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
If you're negotiating terms for a relationship that's intended to be more than a one-off transaction, it's in both parties' interest that the outcome be fair. In the modern business world, truly one-off transactions are
93.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
The main lesson learned from Second Life is that a VR world needs to satisfy real needs for it to get widespread adoption. High-fidelity socializing across physical distances is my best guess for the first such "real need." The pu
94.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Buy Oculus, create a VR world that replaces the Web, sell targeted ads in this VR world that convert better than AdWords.
95.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Box does have "network effects," even if they're not as strong as Facebook's or AirBnB's, because once you get thousands of employees at a company using your product, it's hard to tear that out and replace it w
96.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Can you work from home a day or two per week? It works well for me when I'm doing creative work.
97.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Really, the quotation marks need scare quotes, so you know they're just so-called quotation marks: "'"<modified quotation here>"'"
98.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Possible alternative explanations to what you're suggesting: 1. Growing up in a higher socioeconomic status environment does genuinely prepare you better for academic and career success, so the correlation in university admissions is r
99.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
The key missing piece to Thiel's analysis of the design vs. statistics dichotomy is the fact that it's best to have both: a strong vision combined with a lot of low-risk experiments to shape your understanding of the best path to
100.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Value per share goes up, but presumably the employee had a significant role in making it go up, so that part seems fair. The 5th year discontinuity is an unresolved problem, though. It seems that, for the most part, people don't expect
101.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
By hiring 5 employees I meant a total headcount of 7 or 8 including founders, which will burn through nearly $2M in 18 months.
102.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
The valuation is the expected value. And since we're talking about investors who get preferred shares, the actual valuation for determining the value of the common shares (which employees get) is lower than that, still.
103.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Being able to raise a seed round is a non-trivial hurdle and is not something most engineers can do. Compensation isn't really about risk (which is low for everyone involved given the current employment market), it's about value a
104.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
15 employees on a ~$2M seed round would be very aggressive. Realistically you'd only want to hire around 5, so your runway lasts at least 18 months. Low-single-digit percent equity stakes vesting over 4 years for those employees is pre
105.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
I don't think we're in a post-IPO world. We were just in a temporary dip: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/ipo-count-reaches-218-a-postte...
106.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
I think you severely underestimate the difficulty of what AirBnB has built. Two-sided marketplaces are hard . But I agree that in the long-term, the trend will be towards decentralization of marketplaces, and AirBnB will need to evolve or
107.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Yeah, clearly a city with all housing rented out on Airbnb is a crappy city, and a city that bans it outright is an inefficient city. The golden mean is still probably big enough (worldwide) to make Airbnb an immensely valuable company.
108.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Depends on the level of abstraction at which you view them :) They are all getting into legal troubles by trying to replace the status quo with a more efficient process that happens via the internet.
109.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Legal headwinds is par-for-the-course for companies bringing large, established industries into the internet age. See also: Uber, Tesla.
110.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
That's pretty normal for high-growth companies.
111.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
Assuming this was a smart acquisition by Dropbox, they'll be able to create more value now than they were before the acquisition. Unless you're arguing that the acquisition is actually wealth-destroying, it seems pretty selfish to
112.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
They proved that they can build products. That makes them very valuable to companies with more money than time. It's a significant career success, if perhaps not quite a business success. And we can congratulate them for that.
113.
by paulbaumgart 12y ago
The only thing that reliably gets rid of negative emotions for me is hard exercise. Is there a local gym with classes that interest you?
114.
The Real Reason New MBAs Want to Work for Goldman Sachs(blogs.hbr.org)
1 points by paulbaumgart 13y ago|0 comments
115.
by paulbaumgart 13y ago
This gives you the McDonalds that minimizes the overall distance traveled.
116.
by paulbaumgart 13y ago
That last paragraph is gold, OP. Use it to negotiate a clean exit where you are fairly compensated for your contributions.
117.
by paulbaumgart 13y ago
CAs will verify that you at least have control over hostmaster@ or an email listed in the WHOIS info for the domain before issuing certs.
118.
by paulbaumgart 13y ago
Yeah, assurance contracts make the "figuring out what to fund" easier, since there's sort of a natural selection process. You still have execution risk, though, which is probably the biggest problem right now: if I'm con
119.
by paulbaumgart 13y ago
The Privileged Group case is more-or-less the informal handshake equivalent of assurance contracts, and the altruism/social status option doesn't quite seem to cut it for critical infrastructure like crypto libraries, unfortunatel
120.
by paulbaumgart 13y ago
Soo, throwing a little bit of economics out there: BSD-licensed open source software is pretty much a Public Good ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good ). There are basically two ways we've figured out how to c

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