lquist

I'm surprised they sold. This seems like a fantastic business.

The Coinbase founder that a month ago called ethereum the future of cryptocurrency looks kind of silly now.

Is this funding for new grads or for experienced grads?

Unfortunately it's hard to separate this from legitimate requests for work sample based interviewing tasks.

Where should I move my BTC to assuming I can get access to my coinbase account?

I'm based in SV, and I see a lot of big name entrepreneurs rallying behind her and I don't understand it. You cannot be cavalier/lean about human life. These people deserve to be jailed.

A friend of mine at Intel told me that Intel doesn't care that much about not owning this market because the size of the profit pool around server chips is orders of magnitude greater and they have monopolistic control of that market.

You lost me here:

you can consider the typical “coin operated” sales person at a mature company to be more akin to a script kiddie than a hacker.

The terminology you use belies a lack of understanding of sales' place in an org and is frankly just insulting. To borrow from Lars Dalgaard [1]:

The “coin operated idiots” mindset toward sales is a mistake for a number of reasons. For one thing, it’s a kind of bigotry, because it basically writes off an entire workforce of human beings who create so much value everyday. An outstanding and involved sales force can often make or break a company. It’s why companies with an inferior product but a superior sales force sometimes still win.

But the real problem with the coin-operated idiots mindset is that it relegates salespeople only to the field or to the phone, when they really should be considered part of the company leadership. Not this decapitated thing you “slot onto” your organization when you need to...

Having a salesperson in the room means bringing in a bullshit meter. The sales rep is the one who is going to say, “I know you’re excited that this product was built on/with such-and-such, but so what? That’s not going to excite my customers. How is this differentiated from everything else out there?” They’ll ask the hard questions.

[1] http://a16z.com/2015/06/01/clean-up-your-startups-b-s-bring-...

I don't think the CEO should be saying this:

Does that sound kind of annoying? Well, CEO Alex Debelov said it’s designed to be “very non-intrusive” — it doesn’t play sound unless you hover your mouse over the ad (or, on mobile, when you actually stop scrolling). Some publishers go further, by only turning the sound on if you actually hit a button.

His customer is the company and he is discussing features that make the product appealing to the average web-user (but perhaps less useful for the company that is the customer!).

In this new environment, when I see an acquisition, I wonder if it was a forced one b/c of lack of VC funding.

One data point: we signed a sublease 3 months ago at 18-20% lower than market. This was a 10k+ sqft space in a Class A building in FiDi. Also notable: other subleases at the time were ~10% off.

" I've found a hedge fund that makes small business loans and yields 11% with no risk to capital. "

A down market will show you what kind of losses make that kind of return possible in an up market.

The company is getting a bit bigger and it's now hard for a new employee to get a full understanding of the company org chart without such an app.

Sorry the word manage is used incorrectly here. What I should have said is software that displays org chart info in a way that is easily accessible by team members.

A fair question :/

Unfortunately your answer is this thread itself. As I am writing this comment it is Link #1 on HN. That is to say that people love this kind of content and it drives pageviews, so media outlets are incentivized to write about it. We have only ourselves to blame :/

You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.

-Dickens

This is just good customer retention. If you haven't had a certain level of activity on apps, the smart move is to give you a bit of an incentive to come back. The fact that these two promos have come within a couple weeks of each other is probably coincidence, tbh.

I wonder if using this app is a good way to flag to law enforcement that you're worth investigating :/

This was a large hedge fund and the auditors were name brand auditors. They still had no idea what they were doing :/

I'm not 100% sure this is what's happening, but thought I'd share my experience: I used to work at a hedge fund that sometimes held stakes in private companies. Every year, we would have to mark the stakes to market. However, we could not do the valuation ourselves; the valuation was done by 3rd party auditors. And these 3rd party auditors usually have no idea what they are doing. Even if they are Big 4 auditors and the stakes are large :/

This is great! This will open airline travel to a segment of the population that has historically not had access. This is the story of airline travel. It has taken decades, but what was only available to the richest of the rich is now available to socioeconomically disadvantaged groups of society.

Honest question: why does a technology company own a building anyways? Especially one that is equal to half of its market cap? Surely Zynga investors are not interested in half of their investment being in Zynga and the other half in SF Commercial RE?

I wish I had snapchat when I was growing up instead of just AIM! It's one of the new messaging platforms that I am excited about because it introduces a new (mostly visual) means of communication.

Good riddance. Zenefits is the most bug-ridden piece of software I've ever used. It's completely unusable at times.

Hmm...this is odd:

Bloomberg says, "Fidelity bought convertible preferred stock in March"

However, NYPost [1] says, "investors were forced to take common stock, rather than preferred shares or other instruments"

So which is it? Because marking down the value of preferred is very different (and means much more) than marking down the value of common.

[1]: http://nypost.com/2015/05/29/snapchat-has-sold-537m-in-commo...

Zed, is that you?

I have to disagree with the formulation of your advice. I totally agree that you should give yourself permission to fail, but I think it's important that this is only in the short term. In the long term, you can never give up (this does not mean that you shouldn't be flexible and pivot). As PG says, "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." (http://paulgraham.com/die.html)

This thread might be a good place to ask: Why is enterprise bandwidth an order of magnitude more expensive than residential bandwidth from the same company, delivered in the same way?

Honest question: Are you serious?

What kind of person thinks to themselves, "Man, I really wish I had a gift idea list based on a particular financial investor."

Honest question: why is this of interest to HN outside of schadenfreude?