On the broader subject, even if numbers are quite good, there are many reasons why private companies do not want this data to be out in public. Any investor who needs to see the data on Postmates will be seeing it as they fundraise, as that is a relatively small pool of people.
This is generally true, most VCs are afraid of things that have strong technical risk. But the point of the post is that starting a few years ago some VCs are finally catching up to founders on this. YC, Lux Capital, AH, Khosla, and of course our firm are trying to increase funding in the space and will continue to.
Palmer choose Brendan as his partner to help transform Oculus from a project into co-founding a company because they wanted to work together. To characterize him as an "investor" seems strange since he is an entrepreneur. And suffice to say Brendan, Palmer, and Carmack are voting with their time.
Well put pg. It isn't that the money was that material, it just felt wrong and petty that it was being done in the first place so we wanted to fix it. Just feels silly we didn't do it a lot sooner.
Is your fund sales tax exempt? (In other words are you able to deduct sales tax from your earnings before taxes?)
If so you may just end up making the tax man happy and reducing the amount you can invest by whatever sales tax applies in your location. Depending on your process costs and deal-flow this could add up over time.
In the EU sales tax (VAT, whatever) is added to every business-to-business transaction and later refunded. If your fund is classed as financial services sector then you may be sales tax exempt. This has certain tax advantages but really doesn't help when you start to receive substantial bills (such as legal fees on a transaction of this magnitude) with sales tax added to them because you can't deduct the sales tax on your own filings.
no, they are definitely not going to all be big businesses. for every Zynga there are plenty of RockYou's (or Free Gifts) that grow but never turn into sustainable businesses.
but the point is that the conditions that allow companies to grow are fleeting, they happen rarely and the people building real companies are best to sit up, take notice, and take advantage.
I like your core point. If you aren’t building something of value, then the press doesn’t matter you won’t last anyway.
But the “90% of Techcrunch companies are gone in 6 months” stat is just wrong. I don’t know who this Dreamit guy is, but seems to have no bearing on the reality of an average Techcrunch post.
Namely, most of the Techcrunch announcements nowadays are AFTER some amount of angel money has been raised. And most companies target around 18 months of cash. So even if they were building something horribly crappy, there’s no way they are gone in 6 months.
Looking at page 1 of Techcrunch today, and filtering just for early stage startups. We have: Worlddesk, Snapguide ($2m), Kibits ($1m), Circl.es, Hootsuite ($20m), Skills.to ($3m), RentSocial. While you can go through $1-3m quickly if you spend badly, six months is unrealistic.
As others are saying.. this is just a dumb, wrong stat.
On the broader subject, even if numbers are quite good, there are many reasons why private companies do not want this data to be out in public. Any investor who needs to see the data on Postmates will be seeing it as they fundraise, as that is a relatively small pool of people.