ktamura

It may or may not. It’s more that google has a poor track record of investing in niche hardware.

Realistically, if it's equal splits, they probably each own ~5% of the company (By that stage, the founder shares can be down to ~20%)

If they are raising $175M, their dilution is probably in the ~15% range, putting their valuation a bit north of $1B.

So, each founder probably is worth, on paper, around $50M right now. Again, this assumes equal splits. It's possible that the CEO has more shares by virtue of assuming greater responsibilities.

If you are long US and/or the logistics portion of on-demand, digitally assisted marketplace economy, it's not a bad idea.

For example, it's impossible to invest in just AWS without AMZN's other business. However, AWS is far less susceptible to the current macro geopolitical instability than AMZN's retail business.

This is not entirely true. Yes, Ballmer made many mistakes, but he also architected one of the most sustainably profitable enterprise software businesses (on the heels of all MS software products we love to hate). These enterprise customers are more than knees deep with Microsoft, and deep account penetration bought at least 5 years for Satya to steer the ship in the right direction (giving up on B2C mobile, Windows obsession, etc.)

One of the most common biases I see in how we assess leaders is how we try to attribute success & failure to a single person at a discrete point in time (ex: Here in the US, the extreme Left claims Trump is taking credit for Obama's foundational effort for the economy while the extreme Right says it's all Trump). In reality, it is never that simple nor discrete but rather complex and continuous.

I agree on both. Honestly, much of my long hours were due to my inexperience rather than supernatural productivity. If I were to do the same work with what I know now, I'd do it very differently with far fewer hours (probably).

That said, the point OP was making is that in a startup origin story, there's a significant perception gap between those who actually moved the needle and those who claim to have done so. Those who actually drove the bus and those who rode it. Time and again, I've seen the latter people take advantage of the relative reticence of the former.

It's probably more like, "relative to this guy who tried to kill my company early on and later claimed undue credit for its founding, this dedicated early employee surely seemed like she worked 20+ hour days and sacrificed everything for me."

>As a final note, I want to add that if anyone was a “cofounder” of TechCrunch it was Heather Harde. She joined in 2006 but she was in the trenches with the team until the very end, working 20 hour days, sacrificing her personal life and giving everything she had to make the company what it was. Heather never sells herself like Keith does, but she should. Unlike Keith, she helped build that company, and gave way more value than she ever took.

As someone who's also been an early employee, I totally see why Heather does NOT claim to be a co-founder. When you work your ass off alongside the founders, you learn two things:

1. Building a company is incredibly hard.

2. Nobody takes it harder than the founders.

Yes, I have worked hard. In the last six years, I always worked parts of my weekend if not my vacations (which were few and far in between early on). I pulled off all nighters as well as a last minute trip straight from work to close a customer. I fell asleep on my laptop answering support questions. There were many nights of dry tears and waking up in cold sweat from nightmares that were all too real.

But what I went through is a fraction of what the real founders went through. And I saw their ups and downs up close.

Startups are hard. Incredibly hard, especially for those who has to lead the ship from Day One. Early, dedicated employees see this first hand, thinking to themselves, "Man, I thought I had a good/bad day, but they are probably having it better/worse". That's why we never claim to be the "founders".

Programmers continue to discover and re-discover APL and array-oriented programming.

If someone is serious about array programming/APL and wants to make a lucrative career in it, study KDB+/Q/K. There's a small but active community around them.

Just to relate an anecdote: I used to be a fairly active KDB+ programmer in finance but left both finance and programming ~8 years ago. Just yesterday, I got an email from my friend who's building a statarb fund around cryptocurrencies. They were going to use KDB+ and offered me a job for "300-500k base with incentives"...

My friends clearly don't know that I now work in sales & marketing :D

Aside: Roger Hui, the creator of J, is a programming sibling of Arthur Whitney, the creator of K/Q and the founder of www.kx.com