Many, many, many people are clamoring to outlaw gambling in the very, very few places it is currently legal, myself included. Right now Draftkings and whatever that other one is are in the process of getting worked over by multiple state AGs for violating anti-gambling prohibitions.
Gambling is legal in only a tiny handful of places and in the few places where more casinos have recently been authorized, NY state (my state) included, it has been a hugely controversial decision. In NY State, the rationale was certainly not that gamblers benefitted, but that the added tourist attraction of creating casinos in depressed communities will boost the local economy. I think this was a patently bad decision and I'm certain that history will bear me out, that the local economies will not suddenly prosperous and quite to the contrary, all of the low grade crime associated with risk seekers, substance abusers and the profligate will now infect these communities as well.
The whole reason we have the SEC in the first place is to protect the credulous from the sharks.
I don't anticipate this type of crowdfunding taking off, quite honestly, and I don't know that this is a problem. We want the middle classes putting their assets in places safer than just betting them on papa's mustache in the third - which is what unsophisticated startup investing basically is. Except there is a much greater chance that a random horse picked with a dartboard is going to have a return than a random startup will.
I really don't think we need to concede the equivalence between restricting equity crowdfunding and outlawing gambling. Gambling is legal because, as marketed, it's an entertainment product. Equity crowdfunding is restricted because it's an investment product.
Similarly, GNC can sell all sorts of useless nutritional supplements, but the FDA is all up in the business of anyone trying to sell a new medication.
Reminder: you can take money from non-accredited investors; it's just so complicated that it's not practical to do so at scale and with strangers.
So, let's say I market the crowdfunding shares as an entertainment product. Then it could become a legal model?
Relatedly, I had the idea to sell small shares of (legit, regulated) far-out-of-the-money options as lottery tickets. As investment products, they're legal, but work like lottery tickets in that you have a tiny chance of winning big (e.g. if the underlying security has a sudden, sharp shift in price).
> Reminder: you can take money from non-accredited investors
My understanding is that it's only legal if investors approach you, or if you solicit individual investors on a one-by-one basis. It's illegal to simply announce that you're publicly accepting investment. I wholeheartedly agree that the marketing of these types of offerings need to be tightly regulated, but as it stands today, it's effectively impossible to participate (as an investor) without having a personal connection to the business.
That's correct, and what I mean about it being difficult to accept non-accredited money at scale. Which is the difference between being able to invest, and being able to market an investment.
Rather than try to bring coal mining back to this community as a form of social subsidy - why not just institute a basic federal income?
These folks are not alone - they are just the canaries in the mine. They have literally no useful modern job skills. And while they are the first to fall to this trend, as coal miners in 21st century america, millions of jobs are soon to follow, from fast food workers, to call center employees, to a huge number of accountants, lawyers, salespeople, factory workers - jobs of all kinds.
Rather than struggle with trying to give jobs to people who have no skills, and then trap them into working at these jobs in order to sustain themselves, why not just give them a guaranteed basic income that keeps them above poverty? Is that so hard?
We're talking about a government that hasn't even been able to get its own annual budget in order for years now, remember. So a guaranteed basic income might indeed be a big lift.
There is an entire, rich, enormous field of law called products liability that is precisely about holding manufacturers accountable for the performance of their products post sale. Everything from toaster ovens to home furnaces to nuclear reactors.
> If we applied the same logic to other industries, there wouldn't be a firearm manufacturer left in the USA.
We do. I'm going to ignore the statement about gun manufacturers - because lets be serious, that is hugely politically loaded, and the only reason this already isn't a thing is due to a recent act of congress making it illegal to sue gun manufacturers for the damage their guns cause, which is very likely to be repealed in the near future - but in literally every other industry this happens all the goddamned time. Car manufacturers are sued constantly, as are the manufacturers of tools and appliances, home builders, makers of factory equipment, and even the companies that make the factories and power plants themselves.
I am just... shocked. America is rife with manufacturers getting sued for the use and misuse of their products, including their downstream modification by their users, on literally a daily basis. The entire plaintiff's bar is based around this. There is a massive, multibillion - and not single billions, tens of billions - industry around the diligence behind product testing, the insurance against lawsuits in products liabilities, and the lawsuits themselves, all targeted at domestic and foreign manufacturers of everything ranging from paperclips to airplanes. I literally - literally - have a dear friend who makes his living suing aircraft and aircraft component manufacturers for products liability resulting from aviation disasters. I literally have another colleague who had a rich career of representing class action plaintiffs in everything from malfunctioning car parts to injuries caused by pharmaceuticals.
If a post-sale modification of a product is foreseeable, and the manufacturer has not properly warned the user of its risks, then the manufacturer can be liable. It is really that simple.
What bugs the hell out of me is that on HN - rather like on reddit - there are often comments that make lipservice to an abstract concept of quasi-erudite fairness, saying "well if we don't have all the facts, how can we judge!?" well, two responses:
1. You are literally already on the internet. Use google for like, 30 seconds.
2. Oftentimes, those facts are actually in the underlying link.
In this case, it is self evidently true that the laws that were passed to prop up car dealerships came about in an era without mass marketing, but, very importantly, and self-acknowledgledly, these laws existed to prevent the manufacturer from undercutting prices offered by dealers - under the theory that dealers were of critical importance to customers for servicing and selling cars. Which is a combination of circular and dumb. And even if it was once true, because people could not comparison shop without the internet, it is now no longer true, because people can comparison shop with the internet and can visit manufacturers directly for servicing.
These laws are literally anti-competitive monopolies that, if they never existed, would not need to be invented now to protect consumers. Instead they operate as enforceable licenses, dividing the country up into fiefdoms, in which each little fiefdom the local car dealer is the ensconced baron, operating with a monopoly on all original cars sales from that manufacturer in that territory - and if another dealer tries to sell new cars from that manufacturer in that territory, they can be stopped by the state and sued out of existence.
That, dotcomrade, is a load of bullshit. And easily discoverable with a 30-90 second google search.
I’d be very careful about using the argument “Go the way of the Dodo.” Contemporary thought is that it was a bad thing that humans hunted the Dodo to death.
I’d use the analogy “Go the way of the dinosaurs,” it speaks to the fact that those who adapted, the avians, survived, without the baggage of debating the morality of hunting a species to death.
We know why it was put up. This is not a mystery. It was lobbied for by car dealerships in order to procure monopoly status, under the guise of 'consumer protection.'
This is kind of a bullshit response, honestly. This is a very, very well plumbed, documented and reported on issue. The corollary to your statement about fences is:
"About which you do not know, be silent."
Car dealership laws may have served a purpose, but their primary purpose these days is to enrich car dealership owners:
Oh... so I'm one of those ignorant masses that should be silent, I hope that rule doesn't extend to asking to asking a few questions? If not, I hope you can forgive me for this:
Why were they made before? Why does this not apply now? This whole thing seems to be lifted on it's own bootstraps, and I think the grandparent post and I want this paradox addressed.
> These laws that were passed to prop up car dealerships and came about in an era without mass marketing, but, very importantly, and self-acknowledgledly, these laws existed to prevent the manufacturer from undercutting prices offered by dealers - under the theory that dealers were of critical importance to customers for servicing and selling cars. Which is a combination of circular and dumb. And even if it was once true, because people could not comparison shop without the internet, it is now no longer true, because people can comparison shop with the internet and can visit manufacturers directly for servicing. These laws are literally anti-competitive monopolies that, if they never existed, would not need to be invented now to protect consumers. Instead they operate as enforceable licenses, dividing the country up into fiefdoms, in which each little fiefdom the local car dealer is the ensconced baron, operating with a monopoly on all original cars sales from that manufacturer in that territory - and if another dealer tries to sell new cars from that manufacturer in that territory, they can be stopped by the state and sued out of existence.
In other words, it was once thought that car dealerships offered critically important services to consumers - and even if that were once the case - and I deny that it was ever the case, it was just an excuse to pass these laws - it is no longer the case, because of carfax, bluebook, rigorously licensed repair shops, and car manufacturers that have figured out how to create and operate manufacturer owned dealerships.
This is the vestige of a bygone - and I argue, wholly credulous - era. It is a straight-up tax on the consumer, and it benefits no one but the car dealerships to make it literally illegal for two people to be selling new cars from the same manufacturer within the same territory. That is what those laws do - let that sink in, because that is fucking ri-goddamn-diculous. Car dealerships, and their territories, literally become heritable assets like a barony. It's insane.
And no, my sarcasm aside, the point about being silent in areas of ignorance was made out of frustration that because the person I was replying to was personally ignorant it meant that there was a bona fide debate in this area. There isn't. And it is pretty easy to do the research. I find all to common, however, it being a very fashionable and vogue statement for someone to make to prove how intellectual and cultured they are that, if they aren't familiar with an area of discussion, then surely there must be a legitimate debate to be had. Well, no. That is sometimes true, and very often not. This is one of those cases.
You will find two sides in this debate: car dealers and the people paid by car dealers; literally everyone else.
> I'd be curious to know if anyone on HN thinks that this is morally and ethically ok?
1. Yes. Absolutely. What could be morally unacceptable about this?
2. I very strongly believe in business ethics. And consumer protection, and worker protection. I don't think that this, in general, rises to the level of even being an issue with regard to consumer protection or worker protection. I don't know what about this would be unethical.
3. If you are going to say "user tracking" then I am just at a loss. This is categorically no different than any of the many dozens of user tracking services already in use. Except that, unlike many of those services who are very, very explicitly shady and fly-by-night, LinkedIn is, overall, an ethical player. When I visit NYTimes.com, my ghostery registers:
* Chartbeat
* Doubleclick
* Dynamic Yield
* Facebook Connect
* Facebook Custom Audience
* Google Analytics
* Moat
* Netratings Site Census
* New Relic
* Optimizely
* ScoreCard Research
* WebTrends
As long as this guy has an appropriately written privacy policy, I see absolutely nothing legally wrong with this, either. Morally - I just don't even know where to begin on how facile a complaint I consider that to be.
> * Chartbeat * Doubleclick * Dynamic Yield * Facebook Connect * Facebook Custom Audience * Google Analytics * Moat * Netratings Site Census * New Relic * Optimizely * ScoreCard Research * WebTrends
In these cases, the NYT isn't getting private information about me from the third party. Facebook won't give the NYT a list of Facebook users who viewed an article on their website. Google Analytics won't tell me visitors' Gmail addresses.
It is a third party exploiting LinkedIn's tracking to monitor and expose identifiable information about who is visiting their website that LinkedIn probably didn't intend to be public.
Obviously, there are lots of trackers out there. But the fact that those trackers exist, and we're sorta, kinda, maybe ok with it, or at least resigned to it--that doesn't imply that we're ok with any third party using leaks of that information to track us.
Probably the reasonable thing to do is say "if we're ok with X tracking us, we're ok with everyone tracking us, because the information will leak." But that's not the same as saying it's ok for everyone to try and make it leak.
It wouldn't at all surprise me if it's against LinkedIn's TOS, and the author admits as much.
The fact that the author believes it is against LinkedIn's terms of service, terms of service to which he has explicitly, voluntarily agreed makes it unethical on its face. (Even if the terms of service don't prohibit this behavior, the fact that he believes they probably do is important.)
It's certainly not a grave matter in and of itself, but he doubles down by publishing a post to encourage people to join him in making a promise in bad faith.
The hack presents a way for the owner of a site I visit, but did not give any other consent to whatsoever, connect that page visit to my LinkedIn profile (which is, basically, me). And then uses that to contact me.
This goes a lot further than an ad broker that knows I am the person that visited sites X,Y and Z and therefore probably have an interest in something (without, still, knowing really who I am).
I know Facebook (and the likes) could technically know where I've been, but I have no clue on whether they really do that, is there proof for that? And is that really accepted? And even then, it's a step further because Facebook at least knows who I am because I 'willfully' told them and chose to 'trust' them.
At no point in this post is there anything remotely resembling an example of what the author is talking about. With the exception of the reference to active record, the author could be talking about literally any other framework or toolset.
Tribution and Revergent are likely plays on con- prefix removal and substitution (contribution, convergent). If they are not part of some jargon, they will be. Similarly, the morphological construction for Unitory (-tory is the latin agency prefix) I can certainly believe it to have jargon usage.
Trephony could be a form of this noun for different grammatical situations: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trephone That would suggest to me that it may be a biosciences jargon term already.
I would argue as a descriptivist that revergent is a legit English word - something that was previously divergent that is now tending towards convergence.
I'm not sure if it has been removed from most dictionaries, but
apricity is commonly accepted as "The warmth felt from sunlight". Wiktionary lists it as obsolete though.
This is also rather misleading - because 300 have been shut down, 904 have been funded, which includes 107 in the last batch, which can be discounted entirely from these stats. This gives us 300/797 have shut down, or a percentage of about 38%.
What I'd like to know is the value, at exit, of the companies that have exited or gone public. Because I can guarantee you that the "valuation" of $65B+ is a totally meaningless number. This includes every single company that had a huge, unsustainable up round which will almost certainly be devalued based on future financings or exits.
> Because I can guarantee you that the "valuation" of $65B+ is a totally meaningless number. This includes every single company that had a huge, unsustainable up round which will almost certainly be devalued based on future financings or exits.
"Meaningless" is hyperbolic. How much would you pay for a share of Airbnb? More than nothing, I assume. I think one can conclude something from consummated, informed responses to this question.
Does 65B represent the actual money value that people will pay for the shares of 100% of the ~600 currently existing YC companies?
Does it tell us the average value? The mean? Standard deviation? Quintile distributions? P/E? Is that number just based on valuations from funding rounds? Projections?
It is literally meaningless. It is not verifiable. The standards that are used to calculate it are not explained. There is no explanation to how it relates to the companies in the portfolio.
I'm a bear by nature. I think that the current batch of SaaS unicorns have an unsustainable valuation, and I think this unverified number feeds into that.
Valuation means the price that investors or acquirers were willing to pay. That someone was willing to pay that is a verifiable fact.
What the returns will be is an unknown, of course. But to say that is "meaningless" is either naive or a misuse of the word. Stock prices and market caps are decided the same way.
Public stock prices are the last price someone was willing to buy that stock at.
Private stock prices are the last price someone was willing to buy that stock at.
It is slightly less simple, because you may give a discount for advice, but private stock prices are definitely reliant upon supply and demand. If one investor wants to set your valuation at $1B and another at $100m, you go with the one who offered a $1B valuation. There is occasionally a discount for advice/connections, but the mechanism that the highest bidder wins is generally the same. Private market stocks are by no means exempt from economics or supply and demand.
I don't know if you are making a disingenuous argument or you just don't know about liquidity, or indeed the effects of sample size on estimating a changing value, but what you've said here has no relationship with reality.
The problem is using the words "valuation" and "worth" interchangeably. Just because someone pays $50 million for 5% of startup doesn't make it magically worth $1 billion. No one would actually pay anything close to $1 billion for the whole thing, hence it is not worth anything close to $1 billion. That's just the implied valuation.
I believe that they just added up acquisition amounts and the last funding rounds of each company. I don't believe that number represents what "they value" the portfolio at beyond that.
I think the point you're wanting/trying to make is that private market valuations are ridiculously high. But that's not YC's fault. It should enjoy this while it lasts, and hope that as many of its investments as possible get to liquidity before the music stops.
A more interesting observation is that two companies account for over half of the $65 billion. Airbnb's most recent valuation was reportedly $25 billion, and Dropbox's was reportedly $10 billion. These companies are not likely to go away overnight a la Homejoy, but their valuations are going to be hard to sustain. Dropbox in particular would be a very tough sell to the public markets at its private market valuation given its comp[1].
Making analysis even more difficult is that today's big money, late-stage deals have lots of strings attached, so these valuations are hard to assess without knowing all of the details.
Final comment: despite the constant suggestions to the contrary, YC's portfolio appears to live in the very same power law reality as most early-stage investment portfolios in Silicon Valley.
>> Although these are very imperfect indicators of success, here they are.
There you got your response at the beginning of the post. It seems that you are attacking for the sake of attacking? Sam is providing these data because people asked for them.
Also, why is the cost of employees with overhead lower? (NB/EDIT: Pointed out below this is for 3/4 of the year, not the full year - but the rest of my point stands.) That makes zero sense. Surely they are paying payroll tax, unemployment insurance and health insurance for their employees, no?
Gambling is legal in only a tiny handful of places and in the few places where more casinos have recently been authorized, NY state (my state) included, it has been a hugely controversial decision. In NY State, the rationale was certainly not that gamblers benefitted, but that the added tourist attraction of creating casinos in depressed communities will boost the local economy. I think this was a patently bad decision and I'm certain that history will bear me out, that the local economies will not suddenly prosperous and quite to the contrary, all of the low grade crime associated with risk seekers, substance abusers and the profligate will now infect these communities as well.
The whole reason we have the SEC in the first place is to protect the credulous from the sharks.
I don't anticipate this type of crowdfunding taking off, quite honestly, and I don't know that this is a problem. We want the middle classes putting their assets in places safer than just betting them on papa's mustache in the third - which is what unsophisticated startup investing basically is. Except there is a much greater chance that a random horse picked with a dartboard is going to have a return than a random startup will.