martinshen

Who do you think backs those Clearco loans?

Have you tried using object attributes/features to enable tracking instead of IOU-based tracking? I suspect this tracker falls apart when there are significant obstructions. Thoughts on a Recurrent YOLO or DeepSORT based tracker?

Why would they pay you for your data? How much is it worth?

If you click on 0 ads per year, you generate $0 for Facebook and therefore your data is worth $0.

For a personally targeted (using your data) ad click on FB, you're looking at ~$3.25. For a web targeted ad click on a niche website, you're probably looking $0.50-$2.50.

In other words, your "data" is worth $0.75-$2.75 per click of revenue

FB spends 17% of revenue on direct costs and another 18% on marketing. Let's ignore R&D improvements and assume 35% of costs to serve that revenue.

Profit per click for FB = $0.49-$1.79 per click.

Please consider that these clicks must have real intent behind them. In other words, there should be at least 10% chance you'd actually buy that product.

In other words, your data is not worth that much money.

...

On the flip side, FB should offer a paid ad-free version of their services but who honestly would pay $10/mo for FB + Instagram etc.?

Passenger AI | ML & CV Engineer | Toronto, Onsite | $110-150K + 0.2-1.0% equity

Passenger AI builds remote monitoring tools for autonomous taxis and shuttles. We’re looking for a creative machine learning engineer ideally with computer vision experience. You would work with our 6-man engineering team and data ops to build models and be able to test them immediately in the real world.

Email me (CEO) [email protected] and I'll respond promptly. No recruiters or recruiting services.

By far the biggest problem in Toronto is that we do not have a deep startup tech talent pool. They all leave for the SFBay.

Why? Startups here pay engineers 1/3 to half of what they'd make in the SFBay while only being ~25% less expensive. In real terms, I've heard that a "Sr. Engineer" is $75-85K CAD ($60K USD) where in at a typical SF startup (lower than FAANGs) you'd look at $130-140K+ USD.

Startups that get excited about low wages are rarely $B rocket ships. This makes the equity story difficult as there aren't employees who got rich from joining an early stage company. AND, the startups that did succeed also gave out less equity as it wasn't valued. Thus, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Startups and large tech companies would get founded/move here if there's an overflow of top tier talent. There's talent but not overflowing.

Good Solutions:

* Startups should pay more.

* Toronto should attract a FAANG or Uber/Lyft/Airbnb to build a serious office here.

* Employees should hop around more.

* Import talent through Canadian visas for foreign workers (which also takes advantage of more stringent US H1-B visas)

Crazy Solution: End the TN visa forcing a FAANG to open an office in Toronto.

Originally from Toronto, lived in SF and ran a VC-backed startup from 2011-2016 and moved home to Toronto in April to found a startup doing robotaxi ops software. Plug: we're hiring.

I believe investors aim at ownership percentages at Series A mainly for pro-rata.

Lead Series A investors usually get pro-rata rights. Generally, the wisdom in startup investment is to double down on your winners and you typically can only do so if you have pro-rata rights. In other words, if the startup does super well, that VC will likely invest 10x more in real dollar terms to upkeep their pro-rata.

Take 2 pretend funds: CoolVC has a 20% target ownership and CheapVC has a 10% target ownership. They do their pro rata every round.

Rocketship Corp. will have the following rounds (super simplified):

Series A @ $25M post-money

Series B @ $100M post-money (15% dilution)

Series C @ $600M post-money (10% dilution)

Series D @ $3B post-money (5% dilution)

Series E @ $5B post-money (5% dilution)

Exit @ $9B

CoolVC would have exited with $1.8B + spent $100M (profit $1.7B) CheapVC would have exited with $900M + spent $50M (profit $850M)

In other words, for an additional $2.5M in the Series A, CoolVC bought an option that would ultimately make $850M more in real dollars than CheapVC.

In the VC world where 1 needle in the haystack makes or breaks your fund, it's an inexpensive option. At Series A, there should still be at least 50X potential upside.

Why do most VC funds target 15-20% ownership? Probably that's probably the most they should get to balance founder ownership through further dilutive rounds. If you look at my above example, remember that founders will probably own less than 36% of the company (they also will get diluted by employee incentive plans).