863 karma · joined March 3, 2011
There is one focused on something like this, called Fitness for geeks. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007UQN22A/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
I think the tech background is important, but the most important thing is to be able to talk to all stakeholders. As a product manager you will have many interfaces with marketing, management, operations, biz dev, and your team (the engineers). You have to be able to communicate well with everybody and provide context and value.
If somebody dies, they won't be counted as a DAU anymore and in on month won't be counted as a MAU.
More numbers in their Q3 earnings reports: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
apple makes money from selling phones and computers. If you want to sell a $1,799 notebook (or even $2,399 for the 15 inch version), they need to think on power users.
How did you go from games to developing airlines reservation and fares software?
Anyway, geohot built a self-driving car and received investment from a16z to hire more people and expand it further. http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...
My advice to you is study really hard and make it happen. use other people work to leverage your software and go faster. And after that show me and the others what have you made.
Congratulations to the team!
ebooks make it easier to turn this around. Digital media is reliable, easy to transport and distribute.
I think the author (or his friend at least) entered in the event to test his Speculative Stock Warrant. (It is a ways to get a small kick-back if startup goes big 10 years later) So he already entered in the event to only get an shadow option of a potential good company.
He complained that Billy did not valued enough their weekend hacking and put an outside parter in the company. But he already only had 0.4%. If I was Billy I wouldn't think of someone who had this kind of deal with me as a cofounder.
better than a LP investing direct in a early-stage startup. This is bad for both, the startups gets an unexperienced investor and the LP don't get to manage portfolio the right way.
This method you talk about is way more commom on large deal, like Private Equity, LBO, etc. Those companies make 2 to 4 deals a year. 10-15 deals isn't a small number of deals.
Either way, at least in Brazilian Law (I work with VC in Brazil, but I imagine there is something similiar in USA), we have a "Hidden Liabilities" clause in our termsheet. It says that anything prior to the investors investiment is liable to the founders only.
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/
<q> We may never know for sure, but one peculiar fact casts the mystery in an interesting light: there is no word for “blue” in ancient Greek.
Homer’s descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, taken literally, paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to the sea, sheep were also the color of wine; honey was green, as were the fear-filled faces of men; and the sky is often described as bronze.
It gets stranger. Not only was Homer’s palette limited to only five colors (metallics, black, white, yellow-green, and red), but a prominent philosopher even centuries later, Empedocles, believed that all color was limited to four categories: white/light, dark/black, red, and yellow. Xenophanes, another philosopher, described the rainbow as having but three bands of color: porphyra (dark purple), khloros, and erythros (red).</q>
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rumble_in_the_Jungle#React...
If you are an external member, somebody strategic to the company, you get paid either by meeting or some shares. Usually all board members in public companies are paid with cash.
VCs have their investors too, the LPs, and they need to have liquidity to sell their shares and take the profit. If you don't give liquidation preferences or drag and tag-along rights to VCs will not be able to sell and make any profit if the fund is about to close.