thorfish
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
127
Submissions
12
Member since
May 20
Recent submissions
Comment · 11 years ago
Obviously it varies quite a bit. Some consumer companies can spend very little on sales and marketing. But many consumer companies and nearly all B2B companies spend an enormous amount. Look at a company like New Relic. They took four rounds of venture, plus two rounds of private equity. They were spending 70% of their operating budget on sales and marketing. It was expensive the whole way. It costs a lot of money to develop a product to the point where it is better than the status quo, and then a lot more money to market it.
Comment · 11 years ago
I see it as the cost of forming a startup is much lower now so they can stay private longer.
I don't think that is true. Sales and marketing is still very expensive. SaaS needs a lot more cash investment than traditional software, since you are only making the money back gradually. Many of these unicorn software companies are raising a half dozen rounds.
Also, the easier it becomes to write software the for the internet, the more a startup has to do. Yahoo! could get to a breakout stage just by having an HTML page full of links. That's not going to cut it these days. So I'm not sure overall if starting a company is much cheaper, even at the early stage.
Comment · 11 years ago
Yeah, but as I understand it, employees can usually only sell about 20% or so in secondary offerings. Six months after the IPO, they can liquidate 100%.
Comment · 11 years ago
"And the tech IPO is basically dead. The tech IPO market is at early 1980's volumes. For most of the 90's the majority of tech funding was public. This has reversed. It used to be routine to hit $20 million in revenues and go public. Not anymore."
It's interesting how it seems that inequality is an unintended consequence of Sarbanes-Oxley. Before an engineer might vest after four or five years, just as the company is going public at a modest valuation. But if the company stays private, the employees are forced to go double or nothing. Either the company continues to grow, and there is a Google or Facebook like outcome with hundreds of employees getting rich. Or the company goes sideways and the stock ends up diluted to nothing. Furthermore the general public would have shared in the growth in the 1980's, but now most of the value has accrued by the time the company goes public. So for the few that make it, all the wins go to the founders and VC's, rather than having the general public get in early.
Comment · 11 years ago
That is very eery. Reminds me of Aktemto Mine in Dragon Warrior 4. Any heroes want to volunteer to investigate what has awoken in the deep?
Comment · 11 years ago
Such experts can never be completely free of bias, but the idea that every expert should be coupled with someone with an opposing viewpoint (and if there's consensus in the field on the topic, who?) is ludicrous at best.
I actually think reaching some goal of being "bias free" is neither possible nor desirable. I would have had a less of an issue with that NPR segment if they had only presented one side - but it was the side that I thought had the most accurate view.
My problem with citing "studies" was not just that I had read that one lousy study. My problem is that virtually all these studies are inconclusive at best, since you cannot do controlled experiments, you cannot generalize a study of one immigrant group in one situation to other groups, etc. So citing "studies say" as some kind of world of God is ridiculous.
Comment · 11 years ago
I heard a really outrageous example of that the other day. They were doing a piece on migrants from Africa traveling to Europe. The NPR reporter brought on a British professor of international studies for an interview. The professor says, "There is a perception that immigrants hurt wages. But lots of studies now show that is not true." This statement went completely undisputed, it was reported as fact. No person of an opposing viewpoint was interviewed. I have looked at some of those studies. Lots of fancy math - but math only reflects the assumptions you put in. One paper I read stated as one of its assumptions that economic growth would be proportional to the number of migrants, and then based on that assumption proved that immigration would not hurt wages! It is pure intellectual dishonesty to cite that result out of context as proof that migration will not hurt wages, since the assumptions on which the paper is based are completely unproven.