not_paul_graham

Energy Future Holdings pretty much demonstrates what might be wrong with private equity.

All players, namely Goldman Sachs, KKR and TPG pretty much recouped their investments in the company so at least they broke even. The suckers might be the folks losing jobs for these companies to come out of bankruptcy.

Also a lot of times PE firms start buying the debt when the company is doomed to fail and trading at a discount to actual value and they have another go at the company post bankruptcy restructuring.

I really hope that these top posts on HN influence at least some employees at Dropbox to resign publicly because Dropbox's core (meaty revenue generating) users aren't HN readers anymore, but the mass market & enterprises that aren't going to care.

Reasons this might be a great move for Dropbox:

1. It will help them secure major enterprise clients, probably the govt. or with ties to the govt.

2. Great selling point to institutional investors come IPO time.

3. Navigating foreign business opportunities.

Although I'm not a fan of this move by Dropbox, it is important to note that Stanford has hired Rice as a professor as well. No one is abandoning Stanford, and the hits that Dropbox is going to take are going to be minuscule in comparison to the upside. This is just the hard reality.

Rice does have a lot of experience that is relevant to Dropbox and students at Stanford and I'd just like to leave it at that because at the end of the day, connections + experiences that come from being Secretary of State trump pure meritocracy or idealism.

My question is completely off topic, but I have some questions regarding your site, if you don't mind answering:

How long have you been operating englishforums.com ? Is this your full time engagement?

How did you grow it to the 4 million+ number ? Was it purely organic or some paid advertising ?

And is the site profitable?

Thanks.

I know that $140 million sounds like a lot, but when they IPO after rejecting the 2 billion acquisition offer from Google, Goldman Sachs will peddle QUOR to institutional investors, and surely they will be able to recoup the $140 million investment + a 10x return if the stock pops. </sarcasm>

On a more serious note, Quora users have a better profile for advertisers because they are likely to be in the top brackets for income and education and unlike an English Q&A site the topics on Quora are limitless. You could target ads at 20-40 year females that have a PhD and live in New York very easily.

Also from the looks of it the decision might not purely be for financial gains. Adam D'Angelo is apparently one of the smartest people around (as referenced by Mark Zuckerberg in some interview) and also independently wealthy so keeping yourself in his good graces might lead to future positive outcomes not entirely related to Quora.

Also Tiger Global is run by a youngish hedge fund manager born into old school money family and he probably pals around in the same circles as Zuckerberg, Adam D'Angelo, Charlie Cheever, other young SV entrepreneurs with FU money and this seems a lot like friends helping friends (this is just a hypothesis which might not be true).

It can also be that the investors know something compelling that we don't know or are hoping that Quora will be the next big social thing after Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / etc.

That is not the only scenario. More people want to apply to the best colleges than ever. Also given that these schools are targeting students/schools in road shows nationally & internationally it is likely that the increase in number of applicants is also due to the a larger percentage of the sample population's interest in attending these institutions.

As an anecdote, I recently took the GMAT and had MIT as one of the schools that my score was sent to. I scored well above the 95% which is a decent score. Since then I've been getting extremely targeted emails from MIT almost weekly either about an online chat / forum, some resources, etc.

Regardless, this seems like a huge PR win for Airbnb given the recent news about crackdowns in SF/NYC.

Kudos to them and best of luck!

It is likely to keep hitting new lows unless these colleges drastically increase the number of seats that they have on offer (which is unlikely if they want to maintain the aurora of attracting and educating the best and brightest).

More students want to attend college than ever. The ease of the common app takes the pain out of requesting "paper applications" from colleges individually and college ranking lists are available for all to see. Most students have colleges segregated into:

1.) top choices; 2.) middle of the pile; 3.) safety schools

and it is mostly always the case that a lot of students are qualified enough to be at these institutions, so it is likely that this group will apply to the top 5 or 10 colleges because he fits the profile of the student most likely to attend these institutions. Almost 30% of applicants are applying to 7 or more colleges and these low acceptance rates will only perpetuate the increase in this ~30% figure because students are afraid that they won't get into the top two college categories.

From the article:

> Students applying to seven or more colleges made up just 9 percent of the applicant pool in 1990, but accounted for 29 percent in 2011.

> ..students send more applications than they once did, abetted by the electronic forms that have become nearly universal, and uniform applications that can make adding one more college to the list just a matter of a mouse click.

On another note I was recently talking with a CS professor and he mentioned that rankings are highly correlated with the years that an institution has been in existence which is worth thinking about.