kahnjw

I could have been more clear. My point is that aggressively reopening might still be dangerous, but it'll take a while for the public to convince themselves it's safe enough to start going out, even though it isn't. I'd imagine this would be driven by both consumers not wanting to get sick _and_ businesses trying to avoid liability for employees and customers.

This perfectly illustrates the "opening up" paradox. If you, as a Government, aggressively open but the public still sees risk, not much will change. People won't go outside much because they perceive risk. We'll have to wait much longer to actually know whether opening aggressively is a mistake or not. From my perspective the risk of opening too early and starting a second wave much later in the year, is worth taking very seriously.

I'd say anyone drawing conclusions from a a few weeks data has a 50% chance of getting burned at this point.

Becoming a massively profitable megacorp isn't the only winning formula.

Were Linkedin, Instagram, Beats by Dre, WhatsApp, Tableau, Skype, GitHub, MuleSoft all failures because they were acquired for billions, making lucrative paydays for their founders and investors?

Let's leave it at this then: if capital is completely miss-allocated and a bubble has been inflating over the last 5-10 years as you claim, then we'll hear the proverbial pop in the next three to six months as a rapid pullback in consumer spending unwinds nearly all VC backed growth stage companies.

Ask that to someone trying to find housing off Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto.

Are we talking about investment strategy or cherry picking data for the sake of arguing?

1. There are plenty of companies on the path to IPO that didn't take 1B+ in VC money 2. The "sharing" platforms are expensive investments because there are so many players fighting for market share.

We're talking about a strategy of fast growth vs slow and steady. All the companies we've mentioned so far invested in fast growth early on, whether from VC or reinvestment.

Except for dozens of counter examples that make up for literally multiple trillions of dollars in market capitalization.

Correction: Dominos not Pizza Hut.

I'd counter that Pizza hut has a key logistical advantage of vertical integration. A delivery service is a very different business than a restaurant chain that does its own delivery.

I agree that GrubHub, Doordash, and to some extent Uber seem bloated when considering the sum total of the markets they play in. That doesn't mean these business models aren't sustainable, though. Some companies allocate resources to a few areas that turn into profit centers, some don't. The ones that don't will be sold off or parted out. And the cycle will continue. I'd wager that one of these companies will survive and turn out to be a profitable, healthy business in the next few years. The rest will probably be sold off or slowly downsized.

More broadly, to your criticism of SV's investment strategy, resource allocation is a hard problem. If you want to direct large sums of capital at certain business verticals, do you want to grow slowly and steadily over a 20+ year period only to find that the economics don't work, or do you want to fail fast with some extra waste in the middle? Failing fast has some upside to it, though I understand why I consistently hear this criticism on this site. It feels like the last decade has seen the pendulum swing towards fast money and back a little. I don't think were as far off from a healthy middle ground as some might argue.

Some private companies offer RSU grants. I've been offered them.

There are other factors at play. Most employers offering options don't pay as much in total as those employers offering straight up RSUs.

I got an RSU offer from Pinterest a couple years back when they were private, though I turned it down.