7Figures2Commas

> To find positions where work-life balance consistently comes up as a plus, Glassdoor looked at its company reviews. Users who review a company can also rate several workplace attributes of their job, including work-life balance, on a scale of 1-5. To make Glassdoor's list, a job title had to have been rated by at least 75 people with that position at two or more companies, and 15 percent of reviews for the job title had to cite work-life balance as a pro.

This seems like an awfully tenuous way of assessing work-life balance.

This level of paranoia is kind of amusing.

If you take the time to review a resume thoroughly and ask thoughtful technical questions about a candidate's past work in the phone screen, the phone screen is almost always going to be a painful and embarrassing experience for a lying candidate. And such a candidate will virtually never make it past a reference check.

The problem is that most companies are lazy. Hiring managers don't read resumes closely and wing it (i.e. jump on phone screens without preparing). Reference checks? What are those?

How in the world did somebody with decades of mainframe experience wind up in an interview for a SaaS tech lead? On the surface, it sounds like there was a fairly obvious misalignment between the candidate's experience and the experience required by the role.

Somebody like this almost certainly should have been filtered out at the resume review stage or in a phone screen. There is no reason a company should be investing staff time in an in-person interview before it has a clear understanding about a candidate's experience.

1. Walk through in real detail the candidate's past work. This requires preparation on your part, as you will need to review the candidate's past work, any code samples, etc. If you do your homework and manage the conversation well, it will be very difficult for someone faking it to get through.

2. Present one or two real-world challenges related to the work the candidate would be doing for you and talk about how he or she would solve them. If the candidate wants to draw or write code on a piece of paper or white board, fine. But this should be a conversation, not a test.

3. Although they aren't always viable, contract-to-hire relationships are your friend.

A good resume from an experienced candidate will describe the work the candidate actually performed. A resume that is ambiguous as to the candidate's contributions is usually worth tossing.

In the case of a phone screen, I honestly find it hard to believe that folks have so much difficulty believing that it's possible to get a good sense of a candidate's skill and knowledge without sitting over his or her shoulder and watching him or her code. A phone screen is a conversation. In most cases, a candidate who is faking it will have a very hard time describing in technical detail his or her work, and answering technical questions about his or her work.

Start with candidates who have good resumes. Ideally get code samples and/or a portfolio. Prepare for your phone screen so you can ask good questions. It really is that simple.

Asking a developer with a decade-plus of demonstrable experience to whiteboard is like asking an F1 mechanic to draw an engine and label the parts.

> Unfortunately, I've interviewed people with 20 years of experience who were only marginally more skilled than someone with two or three years. The "1 year of experience ten times" effect is unfortunately a real one.

If you are not capable of identifying these people without spending hours of staff time and engaging in whiteboarding exercises, something is very wrong in my opinion. The person you're describing will not be able to pass a thoughtful 15 minute phone screen, and that's if a phone screen even happens because this type of candidate probably doesn't make it past a resume review if the person reviewing the resume is qualified.

Am I the only one who finds it crazy that at age 50+, ostensibly after working in the industry for at least a couple of decades, a candidate would be subjected to inane technical interviews and useless whiteboarding exercises?

I understand that folks have to do what they need to do to stay employed, so opting out isn't possible for everyone, but this is pure insanity.

Square has prominent co-founders and raised over half a billion dollars from prominent investors.

One way to look at Square is as a company that essentially bought its way into the payments space. The question is whether its premium valuation is warranted.

Some analysts point out reasons to be skeptical[1].

[1] http://www.streetinsider.com/Analyst+Comments/Cowens+Damning...

If you can write a scraper which performs against any real world data, chances are you're not in the business of selling yourself by the hour.

The type of scraping projects you see on the freelancing sites typically require minimal skill and can be completed with off-the-shelf tools, many of which are open source. Folks doing these kinds of projects are not realistically going to build a book of business filled with clients paying $100/hour. You can find decent freelancers in the United States charging less who are capable of doing more sophisticated work.

Look at the investors in today's later rounds and the structures of the late-stage investments.

This has nothing to do with consumer demand. There was consumer demand for subprime mortgages too. What we're talking about is where the late-stage money is coming from and how the valuations are being manufactured.

It's kind of amusing that so many in Silicon Valley rail against Wall Street and "financial engineering" when the biggest "winners" of this tech boom are products of Wall Street and "financial engineering."

Humble suggestion: when propositioning complete strangers, "we have interest from VCs" is more likely to be a turn-off than a turn-on for experienced folks.

What it usually means: we don't have money, and investors haven't been interested enough to write us a check.

> Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing things that don't scale, or by redesigning the product in the way only founders can. And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be the ones that actually work.

Or you could reconsider the size of your total addressable market (hint: it's probably a lot smaller than what's in your pitch deck) and give weight to building a smaller company that's sustainably profitable.

Note that I'm not suggesting growth isn't important. What I am suggesting is that a lot of founders seek "Silicon Valley growth" without considering the possibility that they have an opportunity to build a lasting business that doesn't need hundreds of employees, tens of millions of dollars in funding, hundreds of millions in revenue and billions in enterprise value to succeed.

> Companies like FireEye are in the red but have multiplied in market cap since going public.

FireEye debuted at $20. It hit a peak of ~$85 shortly after the IPO. Its closing price today is $28.76.

As of September, 40% of the companies that went public in the past year with market caps above $1 billion were below their offering prices[1]. The market for IPOs has become even tougher since September. Just look at Pure Storage[2] and CytomX[3].

In my opinion Square is getting out to market while they can.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-14/many-of-th...

[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/pure-storage-trades-below-ipo-pr...

[3] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/biotech/2015/10...

> Never said real due diligence, just most of the due diligence that is actually done

Which in a lot of cases is zip, zilch, nada by professional standards. A few lunch conversations and "social proof" don't constitute due diligence, but that passes for a lot of angels in Silicon Valley.

> However, if one is investing in 1,000 startups then due diligence is actually of less importance as you approximate a normal distribution of returns..

The problem is that the "normal distribution of returns" could easily turn out to be very different from what you expected. Markets aren't static. A lot of fund managers who rushed to buy boatloads of subprime MBS without doing their own due diligence learned this the hard way. They simply relied on the credit rating agencies and assumed everything would work out.

Here, you don't even have credit rating agencies. You have a hodgepodge of individuals ("syndicate leaders") who are black boxes. Just look at this[1]. According to https://angel.co/syndicates, he has the fifth largest syndicate on AngelList.

Pure madness.

When it comes to investing, ignore these words of wisdom at your own peril: do your due diligence or eventually your due diligence will do you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036321

> Soon after launch, we thought we were “doing great” — we’d raised $1M in VC funding pre-launch, we had a team of 5, we had ~$12k/month in revenue (with a 100% take-rate), and we had tens of thousands of users.

In the context of the post's headline, I expected to see more than a five person company with about enough monthly revenue to maybe cover payroll for a mid-level developer in the Bay Area.

This really doesn't seem "too far along" for anything early-stage.

Yes, and the Chinese have logical reasons for accepting lower returns because they're exposed to risk in China that domestic PE firms aren't exposed to. This said, it should be noted that when the music stops, these firms aren't guaranteed a return at all. Many of them are going to lose. It's just a question of how much.

But that's the point: everyone believes somebody else is doing due diligence, even when it's not actually happening. This is a huge problem today because of the "party round."

Just look at Zirtual[1] and Amicus[2][3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036321

[2] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119350/amicus-app-how-tec...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8082785

> The syndicate leads take the carry and do most of the due diligence...

What leads you to believe the syndicate leads are doing real due diligence?

I'm not sure you could easily find one LP willing to put up $400 million for a fund that, according to the article, will potentially make more than 1,000 investments. AngelList, because of its platform, obviously has a way to deploy this capital more efficiently than a typical firm, but these types of small early-stage investments are still fraught with challenges and I think sophisticated domestic LPs who have experience in venture capital would be very skeptical.

As the WSJ article implies, CSC may have certain motivations that a domestic LP wouldn't, such as a desire to get capital deployed outside of China. And fast.

Personally, this looks like dumb money hoping AngelList can turn it into smart money. It could very well distort market for early-stage startup investments, but it isn't likely to change the way these investments tend to behave in terms of returns.

Most millionaires in this country are self-employed/small business owners, not VC-backed tech startup founders or early [insert unicorn name] employees.

Silicon Valley has convinced many people (you included apparently) that it's virtually impossible to build a business with meaningful and sustainable profits simply because there are competitors or other forces that limit growth and market size. This is simply not true.

Hint: you don't need to own every mobile home park in America to be a millionaire several times over.

Its hind legs have been amputated.

We have a meetup group that gets together at 6:00 pm on the second Tuesday of every month at The Creamery in which members lament their inability to afford private islands, jets, etc. You're welcome to join us on the 13th and vent over a latte.

It's not all sadness though. I believe a representative from the local Maserati dealership will be there this week to tell us about a special lease deal available to well-qualified lessees.

> So, when growth slows or stops, feel free to freak out.

Or you could just save yourself the mental angst and build a profitable, sustainable business that doesn't require perpetual growth to keep the wheels from falling off.

It's disappointing that this type of activism is only gaining traction in places like the Bay Area. For years, I pushed for more affordable housing in Aspen, but nobody listened even though I was willing to walk 1.7 miles to get to the nearest lift.

The most viable opportunity relates to the application of blockchain technology to existing markets that are already dominated by major financial institutions. There is no doubt room for new companies to become blockchain technology providers to these financial institutions, but if you look at the Winklevii's investments and ventures, they are predominantly "Bitcoin as a big asset class" as opposed to "pure blockchain technology."

That's not to say that some of the technology they develop can't be repurposed for resale to other institutions, but a lot of others are already playing in the blockchain technology space and they don't have the burdens of trying to create and manage exchanges, ETFs, etc. for an "asset class" that is miniscule and heading in the wrong direction.

Maybe I'm just not hip to the whole Uber/Lyft thing, but the idea of being chauffeured around by somebody in a Hertz rental car doesn't sound at all appealing.

> ...this has first mover advantage written all over it.

No, it doesn't. Major financial institutions invest significantly in technology and many are already actively exploring the blockchain[1].

I wouldn't go so far as to say that the Winklevii can't stake out a position in the broader blockchain market, but a Bitcoin exchange isn't likely to help them establish a meaningful position.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-09-01/blythe-mas...

You can trade equity options and gain or lose far more than 30% in well under 90 days.

The problem with Bitcoin is liquidity and market depth. Even if you're a small-time trader, there are better trading markets to focus your time and energy on.

Regarding the random currencies I mentioned in jest: I was making the point that any obscure currency or security is just about as interesting as Bitcoin.