7Figures2Commas

> My personal rule of thumb right now is that the odds of getting equity that's worth a damn if I'm not a co-founder would typically not be worth it, so I make decisions based on the rest of the compensation package.

This is, for most employees, the correct approach. The reality is that most of the information you might ask for and be provided is usually going to be of limited value and for a limited period of time unless you happen to join the company right before its final financing or an exit. Put more simply, equity structure is typically not static.

If you join a company in part because you like the equity structure at Series A, you have no guarantee that the equity structure will be as appealing to you after the Series B or C.

Success comes primarily from doing the right things, not working hard. If you work hard, but are doing the wrong things, your chances of success are slim to none.

> It also lends credibility to the 'not a bubble' discussions if stage C investors are showing restraint but that is a different discussion.

Yes, It's Not a Bubble(TM) if companies with significant and obvious legal risk are only raising $30+ million Series Bs but not $100+ million Series Cs.

Oh wait[1][2].

Employment class action attorneys couldn't have designed companies more vulnerable to lawsuits if they tried. Some of these VCs should have just written checks directly to the class action attorneys.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/instacart-raised-220-million-...

[2] http://time.com/3748438/instacart-lawsuit/

Homejoy was (at least at one point) the fastest growing company in YC history according to PG[1], and if you go back and read the press, particularly around its funding, it was treated like it was already a success.

Its rapid demise is a good reminder that growth isn't profit, and funding from top tier investors doesn't actually signal that you are building a sustainable business.

Incidentally, I have pointed out the employee misclassification issue numerous times[2][3], and wrote last year[4]:

> It's going to be very interesting in the coming years to see which of these on-demand companies continue to thrive because I personally think it's inevitable that many of them are going to be forced to reclassify their workers as employees. I suspect some investors aren't giving this enough consideration in their due diligence.

If investors are now doing their due diligence (gasp) and realizing that many of these portfolio companies are not going to be able to effectively defend against misclassifcation class actions, Homejoy is not going to be the last of these highly-funded on-demand companies to literally hit a wall.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/1uyr6...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8489834

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468863

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709632

So there are wealthy people who are not perfect and have "issues." Is that really a surprise?

What's most disturbing about this article is not that the author fails to reflect on her own moral shortcoming (she did after all choose to violate the privacy of her clients), but that she comes to poorly justified conclusions. The worst: she makes the implied argument that there was a causal relationship between wealth and her client's issues.

Mental illness afflicts both the rich and the poor, and there are plenty of generally unhappy people in all walks of life. That someone would come to shun wealth out of a mistaken belief that it always leads to a sad, empty existence is disappointing, and I can't help but wonder if the author found exactly what she was looking for when she decided to "snoop."

> ...I'm kind of done working for other people at all at this point

> I have no idea what would be reasonable to ask for and what would get me laughed out of the room.

What's so bad about being laughed out of a room you don't want to be in?

When folks talk about the desire to bet against the private IPO bubble, they're thinking about a broad, significant decline that affects lots of companies, not the downfall of a specific company. Realistically, this type of broad, significant decline is unlikely to happen without a major correction in the public markets.

So long as the public markets are seen as being strong and stable, it's unlikely that the small, relatively illiquid market for private tech companies will correct itself.

There are plenty of opportunities to bet against many of these markets, some more direct than others.

To bet against the Canadian housing market, for instance, you could look at shorting vulnerable financial institutions (Canadian banks and lenders with exposure to the Canadian housing market). You could also look at the Canadian dollar, which could conceivably fall if there's a housing crash.

Private startups are obviously a more difficult target, but you should consider that the types of events likely to push the private startup market into meaningful decline would in most cases also be bad news for publicly-traded tech companies as well, and you can short just about all of these. There are numerous advantages to targeting publicly-traded companies (liquidity, availability of information, in a major market correction there will be forced selling, etc.).

One of my clients has a space in one of WeWork's San Francisco locations. Every time I've visited, I have been struck by how many of the spaces seem underutilized (i.e. companies have more space than they're using). For example, I see companies that have private offices with x desks but I only see x/2 being used at any given time.

Other private offices appear to be entirely unutilized (i.e. they're occupied but I never see anybody in them). The latter seems to be more common with large companies that have "real" offices elsewhere and don't really need space at WeWork.

Obviously, this is entirely anecdotal.

I can't either.

Flexport sounds like a great place to work.

Question: how do you efficiently filter out job candidates who have lives of their own? My company is trying to make recruiting more efficient but we are always inundated with talented people who selfishly want to invest some of their time and energy away from the business.

Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

> Most software buyers buy for reasons which have little do to with features, which after all are generally not perceptible at the point the sale is made.

I have worked for/with a number of Saas companies, including one that was purchased by a major company for a high eight-figure amount, and based on the sales cycles I observed and participated in at each company, the idea that feature set has little to do with purchasing decisions is a ludicrous claim.

> Small software businesses are, to borrow a metaphor from DHH, a lot like a local Italian restaurant. Nobody at BigCo wakes up in the morning and says "There is a spaghetti joint in East Phili [+] with revenues of $30k a month? NUKE IT FROM ORBIT IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO BE SURE."

It's not the folks at BigCo you need to worry about as the owner of a small software business. It's other small business owners (or would-be small business owners).

> Similarly, like spaghetti shops, small software companies do not primarily make money because of "features." The notion that software is bought because of features is something that running a software company will quickly disabuse you of.

Feature set is an aspect of "product." The importance of feature set varies from market to market, company to company, but implying that feature set doesn't really influence purchasing decisions is patently silly.

As an example, one of my clients sells software to lending institutions. Evaluation of product, and feature set in particular, is critical to the sales cycle for a variety of reasons. One is that in many cases, my client's software will augment or replace existing software and processes at these institutions, so ensuring that they're not losing capabilities is important. Another is that the market is competitive and potential customers are naturally going to compare the functional footprints of the solutions they're evaluating, even if their needs are relatively limited.

Most markets worth pursuing are highly competitive today, and companies that assume they don't need to pay too much attention to product because they have customers on lock are likely to find themselves vulnerable.

> Both sides cannot lose money simultaneously...

You're being far too literal here my friend.

The instruments you use, your timing, horizon, leverage, money management, etc. all affect your ability to realize gains, even if your overall investment or trading thesis is correct. For instance, I could be on the right side of a trade but a margin call could screw it all up.

When all is said and done, people playing China long and people playing China short will both end up losing money during this volatile period. Not because they were all wrong about what was going to happen but because many of them won't be positioned perfectly or have the wherewithal to see their positions through.

> If your point is that "it always goes back to the fundamentals" and therefore fundamentally-driven investors will always win in the long run

I wrote "In markets like this, no action should be taken without a thorough fundamental and technical analysis." How in the world did that lead you to conclude that I was arguing "'it always goes back to the fundamentals' and therefore fundamentally-driven investors will always win in the long run"? Why did you completely ignore my reference to technicals? It seems you're searching for an argument that doesn't exist.

Startups don't need accounting[1].

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

> I never want another job again

I hope that the author uses some of his free time to visit an impoverished part of the United States, or a third-world country, as it might encourage him to reconsider this statement from different perspectives.

While this post focuses on the author's job in tech, I believe the author's decision to leave his job has very little to do with his job. The impression I get from the post is that the author is confused about what he wants to do with his life and will probably find himself unhappy in most employment scenarios. Comments on his Patreon page like "I like to start things but I'm really bad at finishing them" and "in general I like to flit around a lot" suggest that there's a lot more here than just a desire not to be a cog in someone else's machine.

A moving average is not a trend line. It's difficult to have a meaningful discussion if we are talking about two different things.

As for false positives, nobody reasonable will tell you that they don't exist. But again, there's a difference between short, intermediate and long-term trend lines. Even under the most unfavorable scenarios, anybody with a modicum of knowledge of trend lines would have been out of the market before the 2008 crash and back in the market by early 2010 because major trend lines were broken. Incidentally, I was one of those people.

As for your advice: there's nothing wrong with fundamental analysis. Although many people fail to make money using it (just like technical analysis), it's worth noting that quite a few savvy professionals use fundamental and technical analysis together.

Not all trend lines are created equal. Some are more important than others. You too are confusing technical analysis with investment/trading strategy. The breaking of a short or intermediate term trend line does not inherently call for "turning over your portfolio."

Depending on where you are in a trend, the breaking of a short-term trend line, for instance, could set up an opportunity to add to an existing position when the trend resumes.

There is plenty of charlatanism in the world of technical analysis, just as there is in the world of fundamental analysis. But you're missing a key point: "technical analysis" is not monolithic. There isn't a single set of rules and indicators, all applied the same way over the same time periods. Most investors (and traders) lose money because of lack of discipline, poor money management, etc. This is true whether technical analysis is used or not.

Instead of creating a straw man argument, let's discuss something simple: trend lines. And let's discuss the most fundamental truth about trend lines: it is absolutely impossible for the current trend to reverse without key trend lines being broken.

Don't take my word for it. Pull up a chart of the S&P 500. The bull market that ended in late 2007 was easily identified by the breaking of long-term trend lines. And the bear market that ended in 2009 was easily identified by the breaking of trend lines as well. Just by use of trend lines alone (and no other technical indicators) you could have identified key turning points in the market.

How you act upon this information, if at all, is your choice. But that has nothing to do with technical analysis. That's investment/trading strategy.

So you just learned about Wealthfront and Betterment today and somehow you've determined that Betterment is "utterly awesome" and Wealthfront isn't? I hope that whatever your role in finance, it isn't related to due diligence.

Yes, these days it's really difficult to credibly market yourself as an innovative company without a pair of 20-something lumbersexual founders who haxored their way into an exposed-brick office in SoMa.

If Wealthfront really wants to prove that it's tech-driven, it should stop sharing technical knowledge[1] and organize more hackathons. Preferably hackathons in which the beer and laptop stickers flow freely.

[1] http://eng.wealthfront.com/

Your overall point is not a bad one, but investors don't need "thoroughly backtested trading algorithms" to protect themselves. Frankly, many of the people who use "thoroughly backtested trading algorithms" don't do as well as they supposedly should.

It is, on the other hand, entirely possible for an average investor to learn basic technical analysis concepts and apply them visually to charts. At a minimum, for instance, if you can draw a trend line on a price chart and identify when price breaks important trend lines, you can easily avoid losses from major declines without having to write a single line of code or spend more than 5-10 minutes a day checking on your portfolio.

A decent book in this vein is The Visual Investor[1].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Visual-Investor-Market-Trends/dp/0...

No offense, but the use of "on-demand economy" appears to be little more than marketing spin. Lots of established temp agencies can accommodate companies with short-term needs and deliver warm bodies quickly.

The focus of this article is baffling. Lots of temporary staffing agencies, perhaps the majority in certain states, classify their workers as employees.

> Like synthetic credit default swaps?

If you're against CDS, you should explain why.

Like any financial product, CDS is not perfect, but it's also intellectually dishonest to argue that it doesn't offer any benefit to society. For example, CDS is used widely by the insurers that the parent noted help individuals protect themselves and their property.

> Complexity that can't be coped with is rotten! The Linux kernel is quite complex but each part of it is well understood and there are a lot mechanisms in software to reduce complexity.

You apparently assume that the financial markets are too complex to be managed but poll people on a busy street in any major city and many will probably tell you they feel computer software is unmanageably complex too. Should we call software rotten because some people who used it have suffered some loss as a result?

> Tell that to Greece people that got into the Euro because of clever CDS from Goldman Sachs or the masses of people that are stuck in debt from their education or credit cards.

It takes two to tango. It would be unfair to pretend that some of the near countless individuals and companies active in providing financial services have not acted immorally or even illegally, but it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that every person who has taken on more debt than he or she can manage is a victim who was coerced into making financially imprudent decisions.

This applies to countries too.

> However recent financial crises have shown that banks offering these products for the most part understand them... the persons buying them don't.

Save for Lehman, which was allowed to fail, the large banks were bailed out. If they were as savvy as you seem to think, why did they need bailouts?

Playing the collateral damage is always a wise strategy to consider, but it's also worth considering the possibility that the decline has a lot further to go.

In hindsight, prices today might look like ideal entries for short positions months from now if this is just the beginning of a major decline. In markets like this, no action should be taken without a thorough fundamental and technical analysis. Making an ill-researched assumption one way or the other will cause a lot of people on both sides of the market to lose money.

I personally find that brass knuckles are really effective in situations like this but if you have brittle hands, pistol-whipping might be more to your liking.

> Both times the food took over 1.5 hours to be delivered and was cold.

This is a feature, not a bug.

> Just order pizza or Chinese.

That's so 1999. The hip, ultra-efficient city-dwellers of 2015 have Soylent on tap.

> The college messaging site YikYak (raised $70m+) had 2 full size buses and a motorized bull to ride.

> There couldn't have been more than a few thousand attendees at this event.

They definitely need more motorized bulls. My on-demand motorized bull company, UberBull, recommends at least 4 motorized bulls for every 500 people.

From Free Spending by Startups Stir Memories of Dot-Com Era Excesses published in the Wall Street Journal on October 5, 2014:

> Matt Galligan, co-founder and chief executive of Circa 1605 Inc., which runs a mobile application for news, says rent on his 3,000-square-foot office in SoMa has roughly doubled since the company moved in two years ago. But the rent and renovations to expose the brick walls weren’t “unnecessary burn,” he says. His 12 employees “are spending nearly a third of their life there,” he says. “It helps for it to be a positive experience.”

I guess exposed brick walls do come in handy when you need something to bang your head against.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/startups-spend-with-abandon-flus...