I had to click into the article to understand the title of this post. Somehow the sentence structure of the post title didn't seem to make sense to me.
That was part of it - to my mind, the title was this agglomerated collection of words that needed decoding: "what's the noun / verb / etc.... ack, to heck with it, I'll click on the article and figure it out from there"
I know there's a limit on title length. If I may suggest a good eyeball catching title for this would be:
"It took Bezos 60 tries for him to get $1M for Amazon from 22 investors"
I needed 3 googles to understand the etymology. But seriously, why is ask being nounified where other verbs are not. I think it has something to do with the culture, but I cannot place my finger on it.
Wasn't Jeff Bezos a fairly senior and well-respected quant at D. E. Shaw just before founding Amazon? I would guess he would have had a fairly easy time raising money purely for capital purposes. Maybe he was strategically trying to get non-tech people in the book industry to invest and that was the root of the difficulty?
It has specificity -- it's not just any question, it's particularly about asking for a contribution from a donor. So the usage in the title is on target.
I think it's safe to guess that Bezos didn't give up much more than 10% to get started for that. From what I recall his family also holds shares and invested, whether they were part of that group I don't know.
Bezos now owns roughly 20% (Forbes and Bloomberg peg his wealth around $20b to $25b usually depending on Amazon's market cap at the time), and he hasn't been an active buyer or seller for the most part over the years (he has sold a very small portion). So if Bezos retained 80% to 90% at the time of this deal, and assuming his shares weren't specially protected (and I'm not aware they were)....
If that group held 10%: each $50k is worth $125 million
If that group held 20%: each $50k is worth $250 million
That's assuming no sales occurred over time of course. That's a decent ballpark either way, and even if you skew the numbers either direction it's a massive return.
Amazon is an interesting story with an interesting trajectory. I remember being explained about it as a teenager. The overfunded 90s dotcom that made it.
It seems to me that Amazon is the last of the 90s dotcoms. It's barely viable, so it just keeps going, but there's a huge premium on its share price that seems to presume that one day it will get a monopoly on online sales and suddenly be able to generate huge profits. As if this wouldn't (a) immediately result in massive cannibalization by new entrants or failing that (b) anti-trust enforcement.
Is amazon really "barely viable"? They seem to sell huge volumes in their main business. They might be losing money in the kindle business but that won't affect their main business (at least I wouldn't think so)
Before considering Kindles or "Prime" Amazon is barely profitable. It loses money on both of these new businesses, and it has the sword of Damocles (sales tax) ready to drop on it at any moment.
Yes, thanks to their vast operating profits from the cloud they have a P/E of ~3000.
Let's be generous and assume Amazon could push a button and run the rest of its business at break even, and that its revenues from the cloud are pure profit -- its P/E would only be somewhere between 50-70.
It seems like the moderators have been putting in some overtime lately with the headline rewriting. I appreciate the effort, most of the time the rewrite is better, but it does make it harder to visually scan the site for interesting articles (considering it is not rare for many articles about the same topic to be on the front page at once).
http://bijansabet.com/post/147533511/jeff-bezos-regret-minim...
previous HN discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1717824