lucianomt

I cannot recommend "About Face" enough. However it is a long read and covers the whole life story of Colonel Hack.

Instead you might want to check out "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts" where he focuses specifically on the time when he turned around the worst fighting battalion in Vietnam.

If you run a root cause analysis of SB or the explosion of VC in general, low rates will be at the top of the list. And this is by design.

Android was also an acquisition.

I find it very ironic that someone would mention Cuba in this post. Cuba is the epitome of income inequality where the ruling party (Castro and friends) controls all the capital, while the 99.9% hold virtually nothing.

You may argue there are benefits and people can be happy under a communist regime, but you cannot deny that income inequality is extremely high. If anything, your argument actually corroborates PG's statement that income inequality is not inherently bad.

Let me rewrite the first paragraph:

"Flying to Vegas? Look to your left. Now look to your right. Statistically speaking, everyone of you is about to get ripped off."

I actually LOL'd, which is rare.

You may or may not like DML's antics, but you can't say the guy doesn't have some balls.

That's just framing. Had the IPO come out at $20 and popped to the very same $26, everybody would be celebrating it as an amazing success.

But Goldman Sachs and DST had to get their money back somehow...

While the market for seed rounds has been generally frothy, I believe these wild valuations are very specific to YC. Maybe they are indeed adding real value to investors by attracting the very best founders, or maybe investors are creating an YC bubble by overestimating their odds based on some recent homeruns. Probably the truth is somewhere in between.

"Rip-off"? It's a help desk service for Pete's sake, not the Xerox GUI or the Page-rank. If Freshdesk can deliver the same value to customers for a fraction of Zendesk's cost, kudos to them.