> We don't need venture dollars to continue scaling (indeed the business is healthy) but you know when you don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it!
That's a nice narrative but I suspect you're not touching upon the investor pressure side of things. Your earlier investors would be upon you to show a multiple in valuation beyond what the balance sheets can show. The only way to do that is to raise more money.
The problem with this is that you're now beholden to another set of investors who will also expect a multiple on their investment which makes increasing valuation your primary objective, even to the detriment of the business. With a margin business you could sustain for a long time even when the market stagnates, but you've lost that option when you first took money from someone. It's an all or nothing play now.
By default (and in most cases) investors and operators are aligned. When we diligence our investors, we call companies they worked with where things didn’t go well, and speak to those founders. Understanding how investors operate when it’s not all up-and-to-the-right is important when picking partners!
I’m interested what you believe the intent of your message to be. You’re talking to a COO that just raised money as if you’re mentoring someone about to approach VCs for the first time. Hugely patronizing attitudes often just get a pass here on HN, but what is your purpose for using one here?
I think you misread my comment, I might've been lazy in constructing it. I don't mean to mentor anyone, rather I'm putting out my read of the situation so there's a common ground over which to discuss.
For me, raising $100m when it's not needed doesn't add up. Nobody lends money with the idea to "keep it, just in case". There are always commitments and expectations and obligations to meet those expectations. So when they said they didn't really need to raise, while also not talking about investor expectations, feels there's more to the situation than is being let on.
This was a great read unfortunately tainted by horrible graphics. If the publisher is reading this, please consider this feedback.
1. Animations are meant to distract by design, and putting them where someone is deeply engrossed in the article, disengages from whatever you're reading and breaks the flow.
2. Scrolling animations are fine for non-functional elements like intros, but I couldn't get all the folders open easily and have to fiddle around with the scroll to be able to see the artifacts.
3. Probably the worst of all, I was acutely aware of the main logo altering (someone took their name too seriously) constantly in the corner of my eye. This was so jarring, I found myself hurrying up to finish the article.
4. Twice my browser tab crashed on this page. While not strictly a design consideration, more moving parts means more chances of something breaking. Do you want to compromise the article because some graphics didn't work?
The article itself was really good. Very informative and interesting. I wanted to sit down and take it in leisurely, but the graphics were annoying to such an extent I found myself hurrying to finish it up.
But I do understand this can be a very polarizing opinion. There are probably people who absolutely loved the graphics and for whom it added to the experience. But I'm also sure there are people for whom it was nothing but a deterrent. The best approach in such a case is graceful degradation. Allow people who can't stand animations and effects to turn them off and gracefully degrade your page to retain all the functional aspects and still present your core content.
A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers who worry about incentives and technological progress, this here is a perfect (and not the only) example of how intrinsic motivation can beat extrinsic motivation by a huge margin.
There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people. Such people are also less likely to cause damage to others because it's very rare that damage to others fulfills one's intrinsic needs. Linus is arguably a net positive to human society than the top 20 billionaires combined. We need more of him and less of the others.
> A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers
Perhaps the "billionaire sympathizers" are people who can manage to see that the bar for what is considered an unacceptable amount of wealth will keep being revised lower and lower until it affects them. Here you are already proposing that a person shouldn't be allowed to earn more than a total of a million dollars in income every year, which caps one's lifetime wealth accumulation at $40-60M[0]. Which would make anyone able to achieve anywhere close to that sum as wealthy as today's wealthiest persons. After which the next person will suggest that such a thing shouldn't be allowed for the betterment of society.
0: assuming you can start earning that much starting at age 20 and you intend on retiring between 60 to 80, so obviously the range can go up or down a bit.
>There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people.
Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true. The vast majority of successful companies and products are developed by people motivated by money, and if you try to prevent them from being rewarded for their hard work then they just go somewhere where their effort is more welcome.
It's always wild to me how people perceive Europe. In left-wing academia there is this term "neoliberal encasement" that discusses in detail how neoliberal capitalism isolates the economy from democracy. The EU is sort of the end stage of this idea, economic policy is detached from democratic comtrol to such a degree that member states submit their draft budgets to unelected technocrats in Brussels for approval before "voting" on it. Imagine if IMF economists were to run the economies of a continent, that's what the EU is. It's staggering how completely the opposite of valuing people's intrinsic incentives this model is, but I get where you are coming from of course everybody thinks that, it's just still wild to me how they managed that narrative so well.
Really? Your rhetoric seems to miss a LOT of new global businesses, as well as older ones that are much bigger than ever before.
Spotify, Wise, Adyen, DeepMind just off the top of my head, but there are loads more.
The fact that you don’t know about them is because many tech bros in the USA are pretty parochial and haven’t been exposed to international businesses or indeed tech.
As long as the foreign companies operate within the country under the country's laws, it shouldn't be a big problem. But being dependent on only one vendor and not having redundancy in the system is a problem though. This is why cash is important to provide the ultimate redundancy against all technological and infrastructural failures.
Religious crazies have taken over Israel and they simply don't value the lives of non Jews. They want those poor citizens gone for more Semitic Lebensraum.
That's a nice narrative but I suspect you're not touching upon the investor pressure side of things. Your earlier investors would be upon you to show a multiple in valuation beyond what the balance sheets can show. The only way to do that is to raise more money.
The problem with this is that you're now beholden to another set of investors who will also expect a multiple on their investment which makes increasing valuation your primary objective, even to the detriment of the business. With a margin business you could sustain for a long time even when the market stagnates, but you've lost that option when you first took money from someone. It's an all or nothing play now.