You think Indians as a people are divided because of NGOs?
Did NGOs start the Gujarat pogroms? Or tear down Babri Masjid or try to impose Hindi on the Southern states? Did NGOs cause the Kashmir conflict or caused Meitei and Kuki tribes to fight each other in the Northeast? Did NGOs cause Congress to invade the Golden Temple? Did NGOs cause the BJP to announce imposing the death penalty for converting girls out of Hinduism to other religions?
Note how almost no one will acknowledge this is happening in the backdrop of unravelling of USAID and how certain powers in the world sow discord in other countries.
I have done a complete 180 on this issue in recent years.
> Having an enterprise product automatically increases headcount by 5x
Can you expand on this. Why is this the case. Does it even mean increase in engg headcount, if so why. Can you link to somewhere if possible.
Always had this question, and this pattern is very similar in other places. So maybe it works?
It does increase engineering headcount because you are expected to add a lot of features to your offering that end users wouldn't necessarily care about, like DLP, eDiscovery, audit logs, SCIM provisioning, admin controls, compliance with a hundred industry regulations (HIPAA, FINRA, SOX), key management, custom retention policies, data residency. The larger increase comes from the fact that large companies aren't using the checkout form on your website to buy the product, but expect a dedicated team to negotiate the contract and help with product rollouts and customization across their company.
Is it just me or Siri is very bad at picking up accents (mine isn't that bad having lived in the US for a while) and background noise.
One of the more impressive things about using the Google's voice assistant was, it did very well in noisy environments. Whereas with Siri, that is quite a bit of struggle. This is only about speech-to-text, not text-to-whatever.
It deals with my oven fan and similar regular kitchen noise pretty well. I hold it close to my mouth at parties, so I can't really compare it to e.g. Google Home or Alexa's far-field capability.
> They raised a ton of money on a high valuation, spent 25mil to make 1 mil last year and are now scrambling to raise a new crowd sourced round because they don't want to get wiped out in a down round.
Sorry to get off-topic, but is there a read/book to understand funding, VCs, etc., from a holistic POV. I totally didn't expect that consequence of having to raise a crowd sourced round due to initial high valuation.
- Their valuation is high because they raised during the recent bubble
- If you raise more money at a lower valuation than your last fundraise, it's highly dilutive. Investors paid $10 for 10% of a $100 valued company last round during the bubble. Vs. given current market conditions, new investors would only pay $10 for 20% of a $50 valued company this round. This second round would dilute existing investors, except...
- If you crowd source the funding, now you can raise at a $100 valuation again (less dilution), because these crowdsourcing investors don't know what they're doing
“Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer And VC” is pretty good. Used it when raising a round of funding.
“The Power Law: Venture Capital And The Making Of The New Future” is also good. It tells the story of the evolution of VC over the last 70 years. It is interesting that funding terms seem to be becoming more and more founder-friendly over decades.
Having been in/around the game for a good few years, I can assure you it's not nearly as complicated as they try to make it sound.
The game works like this: the VCs want 100% of your company, and you want to give away 0% of your company. (Of course, 90%+ of companies will fail, so it doesn't really matter. But let's pretend we're all in that special 10%.)
If you do end up choosing to play that particular game, then you'll find some common numerical rules of thumb. They usually go like this: Each round should raise 12-18 months of runway, and each round's investors usually get about 20-30% of your company.
On one side of the game, you have the VCs, who basically play this negotiation full-time — and whose comp structure depends on extracting as much equity from you as possible. This is why we get the constant stream of "thought leadership" from VC bloggers, because they're trying to distinguish themselves as offering something more than capital. (And, having distinguished themselves, they can extract more % from you for less $.)
After decades of practice, VCs have plenty of hustles they can run. Some of the classics are the old "participating preferred" play, as well as the usual sound bite about how "it doesn't matter what the exact numbers are."
On the other side of the game, you have the founders, who basically want the maximum amount of money in exchange for the least amount of equity — but also for the least amount of time. Fundraising is a massive distraction, and VCs know it — which is why time always gets used against the founder, with long and drawn-out "fundraising processes" that (by total coincidence, of course) also happen to exhaust the founder and push them towards signing.
The twist is that this game isn't only for 1 round. Once you take your company into this game, you're stuck in it — you'll have to keep fundraising to keep fueling the growth that you've kickstarted using external capital. With the average IPO timeline being 7-10 years, combined with fundraising every 12-18 months, you can expect to play this game 5+ times on the way to IPO.
Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, the founder raises too much $ for too little %. You'd think this is a good move — but, since this is an iterated game, it's not all upside. Decisions in this round set the stage for the next round. If you can't live up to the growth expectations implied by the high valuation, then you're in for a "down round."
VCs have a standard "down round" playbook, too. They'll have their way with the cap table, of course — and it's also not uncommon to see some/all of the founding team shown the door. The press piles on as soon as they hear of it, which drags on employee morale as well as the talent pipeline, both of which then destroy product velocity and market positioning... it's very easy to have a single "down round" be the kiss of death for a company.
So that brings us all the way back around to your question. For this particular company — as well as for many others that raised during the "cheap money" era of the pandemic and pre-pandemic years — it sounds like they're facing this conundrum. Crowdsourcing the next round is a somewhat new way to tackle this situation — new regulations came out a few years ago, and founders sometimes go this route instead of risking the "down round" game with VCs.
You usually only see B2C companies making the crowd-funding play in the first place, since you need the name recognition and customer base to even try to raise money in this way. Because founders can essentially "divide and conquer" their investor base in a scenario where everyone's investing only four or five figures, the common scenario here is that the founder sets the terms to avoid the down round — and then they begin the fundraising. Since they're fundraising from hundreds/thousands of people instead of 5-10 people, it ends up being more of a marketing campaign rather than high-touch sales, which can also play to some founders' strengths.
Anyway, I could keep riffing for a while (and I'm sure others here could do even better). I'll let the other commenters chime in with book recommendations — I'm sure someone's written about these market dynamics in much more detail.
> there are early-stage VCs these days, which don’t pressure founders for quick growth
That's really interesting. Do you know how they make that work, exactly?
I feel like that's naturally opposed to the standard incentive structures that VCs have with their LPs. They need to show results in O(years) so they can raise their next fund and keep the overall VC firm going over O(decades). That maps down straightforwardly to the day-to-day pressure VCs put on all their portfolio companies to grow as fast as possible.
Unless early-stage VCs are doing something new with the terms they give their LPs, how could they prioritize anything other than growth?
Down the grapevine at least, a couple Micro VCs ik provide a pipeline for CorpDev teams at larger companies and early stage VCs (Series A-C check signers like Unusual Ventures) to choose pre-vetted companies. Mind you this seems to be more Enterprise/B2B Micro VC oriented.
If the startup is showing good growth metrics, they'd point them to friends at later stage funds. If they aren't, they'd give intros and help get the startup aquihired.
> The twist is that this game isn't only for 1 round. Once you take your company into this game, you're stuck in it — you'll have to keep fundraising to keep fueling the growth that you've kickstarted using external capital.
Why? What stops you from raising a $15m series A and only burning it conservatively until you hit neutral profitability. Investors only have 15-25% of your cap table and can't strong-arm you.
You would have had to mislead them right? Why would they give $15m to use slowly when they can give $15m to a company that will use it quick, assuming both companies are using it in a +EV way?
I don't have a resource for you (and will probably read whatever you get linked), but one intuitive way to think about it is that VCs/investors (and most of the startup ecosystem) are generally focused on "growth", not "performance".
You can be a stable, profitable, money-making machine with 90+% margins and amazing reviews, but unless you're doubling something (users, engagement, profits, etc) every single year, you go to the back of the potential-investment line.
A high initial valuation might be great for performance relative to other companies (or whatever reasonable metric you want to insert here), but it also makes it way more difficult to show "growth" YOY compared to a lower initial valuation.
Yes it’s very different. The competencies needed to design a chip and manufacturer a chip at scale reliably takes a different set of competencies.
Even designing different types of chips require different competencies. Apple couldn’t just design a graphics chip to compete with Nvidia and infamously, Intel couldn’t design a modem chip to compete with Qualcomm
Damn, when you said Google I thought you were gonna talk about Cloudtop, etc. +1 to your recommendation, but they do a pretty good job Cloudtop too(for non-power users it is pretty usable).
Yeah, to be clear for Google work I am talking about the combination of Cloudtop (VM), Cider (IDE), Blaze/Bazel (Builds).
In addition you also need a version control / file sync system.
It's also nice to have some kind of network proxy especially if you are doing web dev. Tools or web services run on the VM and you just access it directly through the proxy on your local browser.
The integration/combination of these is what allows things to work.
For personal code this is Google Cloud Console. You can actually just jump into it . It has a built in VS Code editor.
But at home it would be GCP VM + VS Code + Git.
GCP also has built in proxy. The only problem I have had so far is it doesn't rewrite URL's which can be an issue for web apps. I think it's solveable I just haven't really tried yet.
Theres some other solutions in the other comments as well.
You also should mention the use of CitC. With CitC, I can build/write code from my work machine at the office and then go home and gmosh into a cloudtop that uses the same network mounted filesystem.
I thought network filesystems were a terrible idea until I used citc + piper, really two incredible pieces of engineering infra. So many problems are reduced to just writing files to disk if you have a magically disk that acts like it is infinitely sized and everywhere all at once with low latency and versioned by the second. Whatever promotions they offered those authors and maintainers, and whatever black magic they had to invoke, it really was worth it.
Yep, I sorta glossed over it with file sync. But I guess CitC is more than that. Its more like a workspace sync.
It acts like a view of the monorepo and holds whatever changes you make. Additionally it integrates with your version control and holds its state as well. For example any local commits or branches.
And this can all be accessed from the browser or the CLI on any connected machine.
It gets ultrapurified and used to wash _everything_ all the time, lots of steps are chemically nasty and need to be completely gone before production proceeds.
Yes, and they (universally?) already do recycle substantial fractions (>30%) of their wastewater. It’s a hot area of development. Truly enormous amounts of rinsing, mindboggling.
