Hacker News Reader

lquiston Survive and Thrive

No there really isn't. Justin is getting at a truth about startups: "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." Paul Graham wrote that 8 years ago (http://paulgraham.com/die.html), and I wonder if it was (subconsciously?) an inspiration to this post by Justin? My guess is that it's actually more likely that Justin feels this truth intuitively. I believe that this is a truth that is so fundamental to startups that if I could ask founders only one question when investing, it would be, "When will you give up?"

lquiston The Triumph of Stupidity (1933)

Reminds me of Yeats' The Second Coming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)):

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre
  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
  The best lack all conviction, while the worst
  Are full of passionate intensity.

  Surely some revelation is at hand;
  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
  Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
  The darkness drops again; but now I know
  That twenty centuries of stony sleep
  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

lquiston The Triumph of Stupidity (1933)

Fukuyama presents an interesting counterpoint in The End of History (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...):

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

lquiston Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

This aligns with what I would expect. I met the Coinbase founders and they were basically jerks.

lquiston When Software Eats Bio

Can somebody talk about CRISPR and particularly business ideas around it? I read the recent New Yorker article (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/the-gene-hacker...), but still have a lot of questions!

lquiston Write like you talk

It's funny you mention this, because pg himself has a bunch of filler words when he speaks. See random video of him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lcp0uZsY7k.

lquiston Square files for IPO

Fuck. Seriously. Fuck.

This could be the IPO that ends the party. One of the top candidates for first Unicorpse (see also Evernote).

lquiston Your company is not “too far along” for YC

I get that YC makes sense for larger companies, but also am curious as to why YC is so inflexible on the terms of the investment. Capital is obviously not a constraint for YC, so why doesn't the fund just put up more money for the 7% for larger companies? One guess I have is that it makes it introduces friction and makes YC much less scalable, but also would attract more large startups.

lquiston How the Bloomberg terminal made history

One of the first (and largest) SaaS companies!

lquiston The Risk of a Billion-Dollar Valuation in Silicon Valley

One notable exception is Snapchat which recently raised ~$500M selling common shares instead of standard preferred shares.

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

lquiston Uber Plans to Go Public in 18-24 Months, According to Leaked Presentation

Good point, but I've changed enough of the specifics that I don't think he/she will be outed.

lquiston Uber Plans to Go Public in 18-24 Months, According to Leaked Presentation

One data point in support of this actually happening vs being a retention/recruiting tactic:

A financial analyst friend of mine was hired at Uber ~6M ago as part of a team to help with the accounting/etc. for Uber to go public.

lquiston I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

Congrats on writing a book and launching it!

That said, for me, this is just one more data point that you don't write a book to make money off of book sales. You do it to establish yourself as an authority and earn from that new position.

lquiston Gemnote (YC S15) Saves Companies from Cheesy Gift Baskets

“Our cards are opened at an almost 100 percent rate, but email is probably two percent or marked as spam. So there is a huge value proposition there, because sending out 500 cards might be more effective then sending out 2,000 emails,” says Wong.

Except that email is free...

lquiston The Software Engineer’s Guide to Negotiating a Raise

This is what Ben Horowitz has to say about matching competing offers:

An excellent engineer decides to leave the company because she gets a better offer. For various reasons, you were undercompensating her, but the offer from the other company pays more than any engineer in your company and the engineer in question is not your best engineer. Still, she is working on a critical project and you cannot afford to lose her. So you match the offer. You save the project, but you pile on the debt.

Here’s how the payment will come due. You probably think that your counteroffer was confidential because you’d sworn her to secrecy. Let me explain why it was not. She has friends in the company. When she got the offer from the other company, she consulted with her friends. One of her best friends advised her to take the offer. When she decided to stay, she had to explain to him why she disregarded his advice or lose personal credibility. So she told him and swore him to secrecy. He agreed to honor the secret, but was incensed that she had to threaten to quit in order to get a proper raise. Furthermore, he was furious that you overcompensated her. So, he told the story, but kept her name confidential to preserve the secret. And now everyone in engineering knows that the best way to get a raise is to generate an offer from another company then threaten to quit. It’s going to take awhile to pay off that debt.

For what it's worth, most competent managers I know agree with this idea.

Edit: I should mention that I am NOT advocating paying people less than market wage, but as managers know, sometimes you end up in this position with some employees for periods of time without meaning to.

http://www.bhorowitz.com/management_debt

lquiston Carl Icahn Takes $100M Stake in Lyft

I wonder how things will go with Icahn and Andreessen on the same board?

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-04/the-icahn-vs...

lquiston Housing.com CEO gives his entire stake to employees

To anyone monitoring the housing.com story, this just seems like the latest in a series of increasingly erratic events by housing.com CEO Rahul Yadav.

http://www.livemint.com/Companies/DQevn4TkemzICqPeSNe8vI/Its...

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-05-05/news...

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/housin...

lquiston Venture Investing Just Had Its Biggest Q1 in 15 Years, Says PwC Report

It is important to note that these numbers are NOT inflation adjusted. How much of a difference does this make? Actually fairly significant. 1 USD in 2000 is the equivalent of .73 USD in 2015. So VC investment still needs to increase by 37% to equal Q1FY2000 in inflation-adjusted terms.

Source: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Edit: Thanks gkop

lquiston I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

We are a bootstrapped ~2.5yr old company that is doing $5M in Revenue and ~$2M in PBT. We have fallen into a bit of a funk in the past 6-12M or so growth-wise and basically flat-lined. We are talking to a few funds to raise a ~$10M round (mostly secondary) to bring the PBT down to 0 and really swing for the fences. We've thought about applying to YC but the 7% seems high for us at this stage. Is YC interested in co-investing the standard YC amount in such a round at the market valuation instead of standard YC valuation?

lquiston If you have startup stock options, check your option plan

"But note this doesn’t mean everything will be perfect. If the acquirer decides that you are no longer needed, they could keep your option agreement intact and terminate your employment. You wouldn’t get any further vesting unless you have single-trigger or double-trigger acceleration, and you’d be out of a job. It would be the same as if you’d been fired by your company before the acquisition."

Maybe I'm reading this incorrectly, but if you don't have single-trigger or double-trigger acceleration, the employer has all the leverage they need to renegotiate your (incentive) contract.

lquiston Teehan+Lax joins Facebook

How much is FB offering them that they make more doing that than running a 40-person consultancy?

lquiston Ask HN: What do you need in HN search?

I used to use HN Search until the Algolia switch. Now I use Google site search. Why? Algolia just doesn't help me find what I'm looking for.

lquiston MongoDB Is Raising Another $100M

Maybe I'm being stupid, but a non-ACID database sounds scary to me.

lquiston Exempting popular apps from data charges is anti-competitive

I'm surprised this discussion didn't come up when FB acquired Whatsapp. IMHO, zero rating explains a significant chunk of Whatsapp's $19B price tag. Zero Rating is a valuable moat, and makes Whatsapp that much harder to unseat by rival apps. Also zero rating is particularly common in the countries that Whatsapp dominates.

lquiston Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist

One data point, so take with a grain of salt, but somebody I know very well used offerletter.io and ended up severely underpaid (should have received ~$15k more).

lquiston My Day Interviewing for the Service Economy Startup from Hell

It's also illegal to require employees to use their own devices and not compensate them for that use.

lquiston Vista Equity to Buy Tibco Software for $4.3B

> as with any private equity buyout

That's a broad brush that you're using there.

lquiston Gobble Promises to Help Customers Make Delicious Meals in 10 Minutes or Less

This reminds me how important customer service is. I was not entire convinced about Gobble, but willing to try the trial. I saw this comment, and decided against the trial based solely on sboak's experience.

lquiston Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succeed?

Yes, that should be pointed out. But I don't know if that situation is different enough to make those companies irrelevant.

lquiston Ask HN: Are there startups that went open-source and succeed?

A lot of companies seem to be using this model quite well. DataStax, Couchbase, Cloudera etc.