pmarca

17 ms·

241.
by pmarca 14y ago
For what it's worth, those six nonprofits weren't just chosen randomly. Each GP picked one he and his family had direct experience with. For my part, I don't know as much about this as some people, but my wife teaches philanthropy at Stanf
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by pmarca 14y ago
> You can find this sort of opinion in the Ayn Rand book _Why Businessmen Need Philosophy_. You might want to read it, and make some effort to reply to its arguments, before dismissing it as wrong enough to dismissively insult in passin
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by pmarca 14y ago
> By giving half their profit to charity, one could take them as implying that profit is bad, that they don't deserve everything they earned, and that they are appeasing the irrational anti-capitalists (if not siding with them). One cou
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by pmarca 14y ago
Interestingly, many of our investors (LPs), and many LPs of our fellow venture firms, are nonprofit institutions such as universities and foundations that were originally started by people with names like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Stanfo
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by pmarca 14y ago
We do like to think of ourselves as magical unicorns.
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by pmarca 14y ago
> 1. The best people are not going to join a firm that's giving away 50% of their management fees and carried interest income. True, but that's not what we're saying. We're saying that the GPs as individuals are going to do that, for t
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by pmarca 14y ago
> Having capital to invest in more start-ups reduces risks and increases the chances of the VC earning bigger returns. That's true up to a point, but only up to a point. You hit the point of diminishing returns pretty early. I wish it
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by pmarca 14y ago
> The other thing you should understand is that top VC firms such as AH (or YC) are not capital constrained. Dumping in twice as much money won't produce twice as much innovation or profits. That is, of course, correct.
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by pmarca 14y ago
> ...it would be much more interesting if they took part of their money and created grants for companies doing good in the world that would have trouble sustaining profitability. That is a very interesting idea but I suspect hard to app
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by pmarca 14y ago
First, thanks everyone for a fascinating debate on a complex set of topics! I thought I'd see if I can add some context to some of the questions particularly about our own commitment. I don't have a view that there's an either-or here on ho
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by pmarca 14y ago
Great point! :-)
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by pmarca 14y ago
I'd like to add that all of us at AH are very proud of Dalton and his team, and we are highly excited about the new plan (including all the parts that aren't public yet :-).
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by pmarca 15y ago
Ron doesn't have shareholders, so I'm not sure what you mean.
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by pmarca 19y ago
I believe it :-). Charlie also talks about Ben Franklin working the system: "As he was rising from obscurity in Philadelphia and wanted the approval of some important man, Franklin would often maneuver that man into doing Franklin some unim
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by pmarca 19y ago
That's actually the original version of the talk -- the version in the book is considerably updated and was finished in 2005, just fyi.
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by pmarca 19y ago
Actually, it's remarkably easy to upgrade a bad team when you have a great market. Cisco.
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by pmarca 19y ago
Yes -- I think my use of the term "red-hot" was misleading -- in my post I meant "huge and growing". Agree with second point also -- big markets often get a lot bigger, and provide a lot of opportunity to new entrants. And sometimes they'r
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by pmarca 19y ago
Yes, agree on all fronts. At any given time in the startup world, there are "hot" markets as perceived by entrepreneurs and VCs that look like they'll be huge that won't be. And there are markets that don't look "hot" at all that will ultim
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by pmarca 19y ago
Yes! I'd add two things: + It doesn't necessarily take more effort to build a product that lots of people want vs a product that very few people want. Again, sounds obvious, but I see lots of startups exercising huge effort to build complex
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by pmarca 19y ago
Close! Only a very small number of people wanted Game Neverending. A very large number of people wanted Flickr. Huge difference. Flickr much simpler product.
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by pmarca 19y ago
I'm not sure I'm being that strange :-). At a certain point it just becomes a semantic debate, but let's try: - Product -- the thing that gets built. Let's assume there is one customer/user of it who finds it relevant to his needs. That
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by pmarca 19y ago
The startup world is riddled with well built products that nobody wants and highly capable teams building those products. If you take it for granted that the primary definition of a great product is one that lots of people want, as opposed
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by pmarca 19y ago
That's a little extreme. How much do you like the company, the project, and the co-founders aside from this issue?