Essays
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- Programming Bottom-Up - Страница 1
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications - Страница 3
- Beating the Averages - Страница 6
- Java's Cover - Страница 12
- Being Popular - Страница 14
- Five Questions about Language Design - Страница 24
- The Roots of Lisp - Страница 28
- The Other Road Ahead - Страница 29
- What Made Lisp Different - Страница 44
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented - Страница 45
- Taste for Makers - Страница 46
- What Languages Fix - Страница 52
- Succinctness is Power - Страница 53
- Revenge of the Nerds - Страница 57
- A Plan for Spam - Страница 65
- Design and Research - Страница 72
- Better Bayesian Filtering - Страница 76
- Why Nerds are Unpopular - Страница 82
- The Hundred-Year Language - Страница 90
- If Lisp is So Great - Страница 97
- Hackers and Painters - Страница 98
- Filters that Fight Back - Страница 105
- What You Can't Say - Страница 107
- The Word "Hacker" - Страница 114
- The Python Paradox - Страница 117
- Great Hackers - Страница 118
- The Age of the Essay - Страница 125
- What the Bubble Got Right - Страница 131
- Bradley's Ghost - Страница 136
- Made in USA - Страница 137
- What You'll Wish You'd Known - Страница 140
- How to Start a Startup - Страница 147
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckagepad - Страница 159
- Undergraduation - Страница 161
- Writing, Briefly - Страница 166
- Return of the Mac - Страница 167
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - Страница 169
- The Submarine - Страница 173
- Hiring is Obsolete - Страница 177
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source - Страница 183
- After the Ladder - Страница 189
- Inequality and Risk - Страница 190
- What I Did this Summer - Страница 194
- Ideas for Startups - Страница 198
- The Venture Capital Squeeze - Страница 203
- How to Fund a Startup - Страница 205
- Web 2.0 - Страница 217
- How to Make Wealth - Страница 222
- Good and Bad Procrastination - Страница 233
- How to Do What You Love - Страница 236
- Are Software Patents Evil? - Страница 242
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - Страница 248
- How to Be Silicon Valley - Страница 255
- Why Startups Condense in America - Страница 260
- The Power of the Marginal - Страница 267
- The Island Test - Страница 275
- Copy What You Like - Страница 276
- How to Present to Investors - Страница 278
- A Student's Guide to Startups - Страница 282
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - Страница 290
- Mind the Gap - Страница 297
- How Art Can Be Good - Страница 305
- Learning from Founders - Страница 310
- Is It Worth Being Wise? - Страница 311
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup - Страница 316
- Microsoft is Dead - Страница 324
- Two Kinds of Judgement - Страница 326
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors - Страница 327
- An Alternative Theory of Unions - Страница 336
- The Equity Equation - Страница 337
- Stuff - Страница 339
- Holding a Program in One's Head - Страница 341
- How Not to Die - Страница 344
- News from the Front - Страница 347
- How to Do Philosophy - Страница 350
- The Future of Web Startups - Страница 357
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub - Страница 362
- Six Principles for Making New Things - Страница 364
- Trolls - Страница 366
- A New Venture Animal - Страница 368
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - Страница 371
If you're a hacker, here's a thought experiment you can run to understand why there are basically no hacker VCs: How would you like a job where you never got to make anything, but instead spent all your time listening to other people pitch (mostly terrible) projects, deciding whether to fund them, and sitting on their boards if you did? That would not be fun for most hackers. Hackers like to make things. This would be like being an administrator.
Because most VCs are a different species of people from founders, it's hard to know what they're thinking. If you're a hacker, the last time you had to deal with these guys was in high school. Maybe in college you walked past their fraternity on your way to the lab. But don't underestimate them. They're as expert in their world as you are in yours. What they're good at is reading people, and making deals work to their advantage. Think twice before you try to beat them at that.
5. Most investors are momentum investors.Because most investors are dealmakers rather than technology people, they generally don't understand what you're doing. I knew as a founder that most VCs didn't get technology. I also knew some made a lot of money. And yet it never occurred to me till recently to put those two ideas together and ask "How can VCs make money by investing in stuff they don't understand?"
The answer is that they're like momentum investors. You can (or could once) make a lot of money by noticing sudden changes in stock prices. When a stock jumps upward, you buy, and when it suddenly drops, you sell. In effect you're insider trading, without knowing what you know. You just know someone knows something, and that's making the stock move.
This is how most venture investors operate. They don't try to look at something and predict whether it will take off. They win by noticing that something is taking off a little sooner than everyone else. That generates almost as good returns as actually being able to pick winners. They may have to pay a little more than they would if they got in at the very beginning, but only a little.
Investors always say what they really care about is the team. Actually what they care most about is your traffic, then what other investors think, then the team. If you don't yet have any traffic, they fall back on number 2, what other investors think. And this, as you can imagine, produces wild oscillations in the "stock price" of a startup. One week everyone wants you, and they're begging not to be cut out of the deal. But all it takes is for one big investor to cool on you, and the next week no one will return your phone calls. We regularly have startups go from hot to cold or cold to hot in a matter of days, and literally nothing has changed.
There are two ways to deal with this phenomenon. If you're feeling really confident, you can try to ride it. You can start by asking a comparatively lowly VC for a small amount of money, and then after generating interest there, ask more prestigious VCs for larger amounts, stirring up a crescendo of buzz, and then "sell" at the top. This is extremely risky, and takes months even if you succeed. I wouldn't try it myself. My advice is to err on the side of safety: when someone offers you a decent deal, just take it and get on with building the company. Startups win or lose based on the quality of their product, not the quality of their funding deals.
6. Most investors are looking for big hits.Venture investors like companies that could go public. That's where the big returns are. They know the odds of any individual startup going public are small, but they want to invest in those that at least have a chance of going public.
Currently the way VCs seem to operate is to invest in a bunch of companies, most of which fail, and one of which is Google. Those few big wins compensate for losses on their other investments. What this means is that most VCs will only invest in you if you're a potential Google. They don't care about companies that are a safe bet to be acquired for $20 million. There needs to be a chance, however small, of the company becoming really big.
Angels are different in this respect. They're happy to invest in a company where the most likely outcome is a $20 million acquisition if they can do it at a low enough valuation. But of course they like companies that could go public too. So having an ambitious long-term plan pleases everyone.
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