This is great observation and speculation on what could happen and where would it come from.
I've had multiple conversations with top-10 VC firm partners during our unsuccessful pitches where one of the sticking points is 'unfair-advantage'. 'How can you lock $user_group/$partners into this transaction/partnership?'
Peter Thiel: "Monopolies are a good thing for society... The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices."
What the world needs is perfect competition. VCs profess that they live in a capitalist system and work within its constraints, but just about all want to capture some part of it, preventing competition from coming in.
One way to limit competition? Get the government to do it for you. Regulatory Capture.
So, excuse me, if I don't buy this coming from a VC. And I won't buy it from any other VC as well. They are arguing for them to be in control of capture. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
So that they can take over the dominant market position, eventually using the exact same tactics to keep entrants out. Anything less would run afoul of shareholder primacy so unless VCs take an active role in promoting ethical behavior from their portfolio, those words are empty as this blog post. Anyone who wasn't born yesterday knows that human beings won't do something that is in direct opposition to their interests (the exceptions to this rule became nurses and doctors and social workers, not VCs) and without an honest to goodness change in laws, reasonable people know that VCs won't change their behavior. Since most portfolio companies are in competition with someone - a fact almost every investor in the industry is cognizant of - anything short of actually spending money on lobbying to change laws and promote their enforcement is an empty gesture.
And none of them try to lock customers, partners or decision makers from going away in any underhanded way, right? Just pure offer-the-best-and-they-will-stick-with-us. And if someone does it better than us and takes them away from us, shame on us!
Nah. Most often a16z, as other VC's, invest in platforms.
What do platforms often do: take an industry, served by many businesses, often small ones, and concentrate it.
Than, the platform does most of the repetitive, scalable, work, while leaving entrepreneurs with doing all risky work, and little place for hiring employees.
As for the employees, their work is commoditized, they get ton of competition which to leads to really deteriorating pay and work conditions, and labor laws are often broken right and left.
Yet another shiny example of money vs. ethics in the Valley.
Also, don't look towards the engineers, who may or may not have known. Look towards the money. Who are the VCs invested in them and how many of them knew and encouraged that in the name of growth? And, of course, the executives.
Pretty much all major religions are compatible with each other. You can move towards a particular sect if you have specific needs. A polytheist Christian would tend towards Catholicism, etc.
I don’t think you need to adhere closely to one single tradition in order to be “religious” if that’s what you’re getting at.
To answer your question directly though, I was raised in a Christian church. I adhere to some basic form of that. Humility, forgiveness, we were made in Gods image, the original sin of the knowledge of good and evil, etc.
Why are the investors involved with this company, specifically the board members, that allowed the sexual harassment to go on unchecked not being named and shamed? It was their job to keep the CEO in check.
If they looked aside, in the pursuit of a unicorn, then they shouldn't be allowed to pass off all blame to the CEO. What were they doing? Where is their accountability in all this?
Most people at that level do not change their behaviour unless they have a financial downside. If we keep looking at CEOs while the board/investors/VCs are not called out, nothing is going to change.
"roughly what the wholesale price is plus a very small markup" .. is not my experience. I just had a pharmacist friend show this to me.
Blink charged the customer $10 for generic Lipitor (atorvastatin) 20mg, 30 pills. And reimbursed the pharmacy $4.90. Hence keeping > 50% of what the customer paid. As per the pharmacist, he would be happy to fill the prescription in cash for $7.50, lowering the price for consumer and making him more margin.
These are real numbers. Blink is in fact contributing to increasing the price for consumers, while being yet another middleman in the process.
Just to provide more info - for a given pharmacy, Atorvastatin 20mg is $.0629 per pill, so $1.887 at cost. For most pharmacies the real cost is going the pharmacist filling the rx. An insurance company would probably reimburse <$5 and may or may not just make that the copay. $10 is way higher than pharmacies would charge for generic lipitor.
Also claiming:
Avg. retail: $132.52
You save: 96%
Is the complete OPPOSITE of transparency. $132.52 might be a realistic price for branded Lipitor, but that's not at all what is being sold here.
The VCs keep pushing the 'stage ask' further upstream every year. So, what used to be considered good for A round traction/revenue/MAU is now considered Seed and so on up.
They'll only want to invest when 'I know this is the winner in this category', but I'll call it Series A and Series A has always been done at valuation $x.
FU! You won't fund a deal till it's profitable and all the risk is taken off. But, I need to get money from somewhere! So, I'll get it from small angels and individuals. And since I have to collect it 25-50K at a time, I can't do a priced round.
You set this board up, now don't complain that you have to deal with the mess.
[Edit] And if you'll only be dealing with a startup once it has gotten some level of success, you have no option but to deal with the mess, if you want the deal.
'Experiment' with no conceivable way of monetization gets 'investment' for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons.
Bros funding Bros, and then bro acquiring bro when the first-bro has blown through 7.1M. Its the Silicon Valley version of nepotism. Its all play money, but is only available if you are in the circle.
Now that you have an exit to your name, next stop, VC partner. And then ask all the startups pitching, what's unique about you?
Much of this ("for some behind-the-scenes, non-investment reasons") you've simply made up for rhetorical reasons.
But even if you were right on the facts, this kind of rant makes for a bad HN comment. A good HN comment is one that contributes to thoughtful, curious discussion. Stimulating rage among those who already agree with you is the opposite of that. Since such comments routinely get upvoted, they're a particularly bad risk to this site.
I'm not happy with your detaching this comment. Thanks for noting that you did it, and why, but other inflammatory comments in this thread have been tempered by well-reasoned child responses. That's reasonable dialogue.
Detaching an on-topic comment for taking the wrong tone doesn't feel like fair discussion.
"Tone" is a word people use to trivialize what they're referring to, which means you're assuming your conclusion.
This is a matter not of tone but of content, and the toxic effects of such content. If only we could rely on well-reasoned user responses to neutralize those effects. But internet forums don't work that way, nor large groups of humans in general. For HN to have civil, substantive discussion, moderation is sadly necessary.
Detaching comments, with an explanation of why, has proven to be one of the best moderation techniques we've tried. The sort of rant we're talking about isn't primarily about the topic at hand—it's primarily about state-changing the conversation to something agitated and ragey. Because that counteracts the purpose of this site, such posts forfeit their right to an ordinary position on the page.
Those who want to read such comments still can, but you literally have to go lower to do so. That seems fitting to me, and a reasonable balance of concerns.
Tone's a perfectly valid word when talking about a fuzzy line between insightful and inflammatory. Some people on e.g. Twitter might complain that justified bans were for mere "tone", but it'd be, what, a compositional fallacy(?) to toss out every argument that uses the word.
Regardless, I see what you mean with the state-changing here. It uses this topic as fodder to rekindle an ongoing internet fight. Something to be avoided. Fair enough.
Perhaps if you do this frequently enough your moderation tools can append the parent link + explanation to the comment body and save yourself some work - but then I guess that'd technically be editing user comments : )
And NimbleRx, which seemingly is still around, but not listed in any official or unofficial list. With the recent reviews these guys are getting, are they really around?
I have a small business that is facing it right now. I either pay the Yelp tax or they have taken our community-created page with all 5-star reviews completely off the site. Can still find it from Google search, but can't find it from search within Yelp. And if you search for us, they show our competitor as a search result.
Got a call from Yelp sales guy about an offer 'that expires this week', just the day after our listing could not be found.
Now, I can't tell you my business name, because they will bury it even further. Yelp is as shady as it gets on the internet.
PM me and I'm happy to tell you who I am after I confirm who you are.
There is only one page. The community-created one. As a business, we never created one.
If you google "yelp $business", you can find this page today.
If you go to yelp.com and search for "$business", it used to be there. But, in the last week, it was taken off the search results and now a competitor is shown as a search result instead.
Going back to the users is not feasible for us, because we don't know who they are! They are some of our customers who felt the service was great enough to leave glowing reviews. We didn't solicit it.
What actions to take is an interesting discussion for us. Ethics aside, we just might cave and pay the Yelp mafia tax, as a cost of doing business. Which is what they want. And we want to get on with our business.
When you mean google "yelp $business" is $business like "chinese restaurante" or the actual name?
All pages are "community created", you can try to recreate the page if your page is gone, you go to "Write a review", search for it and then "Add a Business"
Of course you might pay, or take them to court as well
For me the big issue is Mark insisting on holding on to the case that this was a good investment.
Last time he insisted on calling out the non-believers about tech. This time, he only writes a couple sentences defending the tech and is laying the groundwork for abandoning the physics and just supporting the team.
Something like.. 'yeah, we took a chance. Someone has to. It didn't pan out, but the team is great.'
I have done my share of pitching the VCs and they have to uphold the image that they are the smartest people in the room, or else what are they? Just Money who can't possibly know everything about everything? No! can't be.
So, here is a smart person dispensing advice on all things life, entrepreneurship, investment and technology who is clearly been had and out of his depth in this particular field. But smart enough to know that he's been had and the only remaining way out is to abandon tech and back the team.
This is a personal issue for Mark and has nothing to do with science and the rest of us. The science is clear. He just can't admit that he was had, because that kills his standing in his day job.
I've had multiple conversations with top-10 VC firm partners during our unsuccessful pitches where one of the sticking points is 'unfair-advantage'. 'How can you lock $user_group/$partners into this transaction/partnership?'
Peter Thiel: "Monopolies are a good thing for society... The opposite of perfect competition is monopoly. Whereas a competitive firm must sell at the market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its own prices."
What the world needs is perfect competition. VCs profess that they live in a capitalist system and work within its constraints, but just about all want to capture some part of it, preventing competition from coming in.
One way to limit competition? Get the government to do it for you. Regulatory Capture.
So, excuse me, if I don't buy this coming from a VC. And I won't buy it from any other VC as well. They are arguing for them to be in control of capture. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.