tomasien

Exactly. We use them because they have a robust feature set that works for our use case (highly regulated data, etc). That's not a trivial thing. It's not a "moat" but it's wall.

$2b is definitely a "doesn't have a great moat but has a great business" valuation.

They get 7%.

I don't know what you're asking with the rest of your question.

Fine to do this but unlikely to matter and don’t let not being sure about this stop you for even a second

I’m the CEO of alloy.co and know banking software about as well as anyone, I’d be happy to help assuming youre not trying to solve identity verification for the industry. tommy @ domain

The main thing is you have to start, get a team to follow you somehow, and get a reference client live and on the record using your software to solve a huge problem. Consider YC or techstars for your first $$$ investors. Some may tell you the negative of working w them but they’re deeply wrong

I've had two startups "fail" for unusually clear reasons:

Startup #1: too hard to believe it could be big. Widely loved consumer website we tried to fund with angel/VC money, and it was too implausible it could ever be a $1b+ company. We needed a non-VC strategy to fund that business but didn't realize that - ran out of gas.

Startup #2: found PMF, business-model fit, high-growth, and had an amazing team. Blown up by a nightmare original founder (I was part of re-founding an existing business) and poor corporate governance. The original founder blew up a Series A and re-cap after the team new team made the company actually work.

What I learned from both is how finicky startups are and why conventional wisdom exists. The more you try to re-invent things that aren't core to the business or fit a square peg into a round hole, the more chances to fail you create.

Don't try to get 1000 things right. Try to get 1 thing right and rely on the wisdom of others to get the other things "close enough" to right to attract talent, capital, time, and attention to the 1 thing you did get right.

accurate

It's fine for the VCs if they can recycle and re-invest that. Otherwise it's a 0.

This is great news - it sounds like Buffer is a great company to work for and own as an operator. I do think they're a cautionary tale for trying to build a VC backed (in mission and capitalization) company the way they did, but VC backed is not and should not be the norm so that's not a big deal.

It's actually way cooler than that, besides all the compliance help they provide - they provide tokenization but also software to make that tokenization work with 0 code changes on your side (besides env changes), via the use of proxies. It's awesome - your system won't know the difference between the tokenized SSNs and the real ones.

This is just my opportunity to say: it's a travesty everybody doesn't get the Global Entry / TSA Pre Experience. It's so much better and I hate that you have to pay for it.

Thank god for Justworks and Gusto

I think there's a fairly likely future that the banks and financial companies will try (and IMO succeed) to ban the providers of this data from using it for anything else. Aka: we will not use a biometrics service that uses our user's biometric data for anything other than fraud prevention and authentication.

The banks are ultra-sensitive about personal data at the moment at least, but they really want these kinds of solutions to stop fraud without interrupting your user experience. They have the scale to demand vendors stay in a particular use case and I think they'll succeed.

I would expect the future you're predicting to exist, but I expect it to come from e-commerce companies and others adopting tech from similar vendors but without demanding any restrictions on data use.

Chrome's new audio settings ruined this for me

I'm saying this for political reasons - since healthcare literally is defense of the people's physical well being, I'm suggesting a branding and messaging change not arguing for overall priority re-adjustments against other issues (education, etc)

We should think of healthcare (not insurance, care) as our #1 national defense priority.

This makes great points that shouldn't be ignored. But here's the reality: most people don't invest in anything but do pay rent. If you just shift that rent into a mortgage + repairs, at least you're investing in something that will slightly under-perform inflation (maybe).

It's lower risk / higher return when you think of it that way.

(I do not own a house nor do I plan to own one, however)

They are securities, without a doubt. Just like convertible debt is both debt and a security.

Most of that $$ was loaded towards the end of the year, so they were in the middle of the raise as it ramped up insanely. They closed the raise before the revenue was hitting that mark, announced it in August, then it turned out to be likely irrelevant when they made another $600m to finish 2017 and no signs of stopping (although slowing) in 2018.

It was fee revenue

Coinbase made a billion dollars last year. I think the investors are pretty chill with whatever.

I am sure those forces still exist, but the will to fix the subways in NYC and expand it in other cities (LA especially) is stronger than ever. White flight is either reversing or wants to reverse, and a group with increasing power wants public transportation.

I wish we built functioning public transportation because its the right thing to do, I'll accept it happening because young professionals demand it.

You're right that it's too late but a correction will matter to individuals. Drivers knew this study was BS and the correction will help them convince their friends who would be a good fit to drive for Uber that it was, indeed, BS.

Writing off depreciation + having to pay self-employment tax is probably a wash I would think, not sure though.

Yeah they're keeping their old products running, hoping to be a full service bank for crypto. The OTC desk is where the money is.

Circle's main product is an OTC crypto trading desk which has been killing it. They move huge volumes for big players.

Coinbase made a billion dollars in 2017 - a literal billion. I don't think they're thinking much about being acquired anymore....

I'm actually trying to expand Kumavis's "Universal Dapp" which seems to only sort of work here if anyone would like to help:

https://github.com/rareartlabs/udapp

Definitely read that Artnome piece if you're interested in Blockchain art - I'll share this with him as well.

I never would have become a functional program if someone had sat down with me regularly for 3 months to think through these types of problems. Learning how they thought about them and debugged them made becoming self-taught so much easier. This is great!