portman

I mean, N=3, but I've made decent money on smaller exits.

The relevant metric is not exit price, it's ratio of exit price to pref stack; i.e. raise $40M and sell for $50M, founder is worse than if they raised $2M and sold for $10M.

I believe the author made a simple math error.

Economic returns of VC-backed companies follow a power law distribution. This means that the vast majority of the returns for the VC are at the "fat head" of the distribution. The "long tail" does not impact returns, for the VC.

However, for the founder, those returns in the tail can be life-changing. It takes a $5B exit for YC to care. But a $5M exit can be real money for the founder.

So the correct math, from the perspective of the founder, is not "what % are unicorns" but rather "what % sell for more than capital invested" and that number is likely to be closer to 50% than 1%.

I had not realized that PG and his family moved to England.

I also recently moved from California to England, so would be fascinated to learn more about the genesis of PG's move. (As an aside: I sometimes hear my kids late at night trying to convince their friends back in California to ask their parents to move here. Anecdotally it does feel like many families are considering it. Of course I have an availability bias here.)

Does anyone know of any essays or interviews where PG discusses his decision to emigrate?

Wrong stock. That is the share price of an unrelated chemicals company.

UKG is privately held.

>> then you should launch a payment processor that serves the market

Checkout.com was most recently valued at $15 billion.

Sincerest form of flattery. Plenty of room in this market for all players.

Grow really fast. It’s fairly one-dimensional: if you are growing at +50% month/month, then you will be able to raise substantial rounds with minimal dilution.

If you are not posting exponential growth, then you will likely give up more and more control with each subsequent round.

I have a year-old startup and this is the first major Internet outage we've had to deal with... was really awesome to have your play-by-play and definitely changed our incident response (for the better!). Thank you so much.

Quick note about secondary financings. Not targeted at you per-se as much as the large quantity of HN comments that seem to not understand the nuance.

You can't include primary and secondary financings in the same total, because you would be double-counting. That would be like measuring a public stock on its total volume traded, not its market cap.

For example:

- Investor A invests £100M into Uber for 1M shares

- Investor B buys those 1M shares from Investor A for $400M

- Investor C buys those 1M shares from Investor B for $500M

There has been "$1B in fundraising" but: (a) only $100M went to Uber and; (b) the market cap of those shares is $500M

Fascinating to read, thank you.

“There are more soldiers in that board there than doctors” is one of the original comments!

akharris --

Any pointers on the most polite but firm way to defer speaking with investors when you're not ready to raise?

We just raised Seed, and get 5-10 inbounds per week asking about Series A. I usually write something like:

"Thanks for the note. We recently closed our seed round and are not looking to raise at the moment. But we will definitely reach out when that changes."

Hopefully that's not too curt/dismissive? Thanks in advance for any tips.

Meta: I urge you to post this again in a few days. Very sad to see it never “got heat” and its reach was limited. I think this is one of the more valuable posts this year and wish more folks had seen it.

also $1.25MM x 3% = $37.5k

Not $45k

It is difficult to trust the calculator when arithmetic errors exist in the prose.

It may have started equal at founding and changed over subsequent rounds. I know of a case where 4 founders started equal and differed by order of magnitude by the end.

I had VIN #150,000 18 months ago, and they crossed 200,000 in May 2017 so it’s likely sitting at just shy of 300,000 right now. The 150k figure you are citing is US only (where there is a race to 200k when the federal credit expires).