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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

> “$12M raised”

Why is that even a metric to speak about?

Shouldn't the metric that matters most be # of customers, how engaged they are with using the product and ultimately sales?

Bringing up how much you have raised seems like the priorities are misaligned.

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Hey, I kinda agree. Customers are #1 and #2 etc. I believe we have quite some happy customers.

But this is a forum managed by a VC so some people are certainly interested in this. I also thought it was interesting in the context of a side project launched on PH.

Feel free to check my Twitter (link in my bio) on how I think about and interact with customers.

Oh don’t act like it’s not an important number. We don’t live in a utopia where money doesn’t matter. It’s an important number.

It’s an important number for the CEO and CFO, but it means nothing about the business or it’s success. “Funding raised” is completely uncorrelated with how successful the company is.

Citation required

This is just patently untrue. The failure rate of ventue-backed startups is 75%. The failure rate of all startups is 90%. Funding is correlated with a lower failure rate.

https://www.failory.com/blog/startup-failure-rate

You can use statistics to make inferences about groups as a whole, but you can’t use stats to deduce anything about any specific case.

A coin has a 50/50 chance of being heads, but just because the coin landed on tails last time doesn’t mean it’ll be a head the next time.

Here is the link I should have included originally https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

You said ' “Funding raised” is completely uncorrelated with how successful the company is. ' I showed you this statement is wrong, by providing you a statistic that proves they are correlated. We were not talking about any specific case, I don't know why you've opened with that. The coin flip statement is true but also completely unrelated to our discussion.

I agree with @tnolet that it's not the number one stat I want to know about any given company. But, at the very least, it does mean that they were able to convince some people who look at thousands of companies a year and then interview hundreds of them to give them $12M. That's not nothing. Granted, $12M is not a whole lot of money in VC land, but there is some signal in that data point.

All that means is that they have $12 million in funding. Assuming anything else is a logical fallacy; there is no more information available in that number.

Yes, there is, just as I said: they were able to convince someone who looks at thousands of companies a year, then interviews a handful of them to give them $12M. You don't think they prayed really hard to the money fairy and got their wish granted, do you?

No, you shouldn't read much more into that, but there factually is information behind the number.

Well no. It means they convinced someone to give them 12M. It says nothing about the credentials of the lender, or that those credentials are even relevant or accurate.

Not to mention that convincing a vc, regardless of clout, is not about objective profitability or anything correlated with success.

It’s about convincing a person that you can make money, and people are in capable of being objective

Even ignoring all the other factors, there is a disconnecting between only managing to get five (free) upvotes in one forum, and finding a group of people willing to bet 12 million on it in another.

Because if I have $100m more than you, it's quite easy for me to get more, higher engaged customers than you

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