BC INTERNET
Saved by @Alex1Powell

Some gems from @MacConwell of @RarebreedVC in Clubhouse right now:

 1) VCs are looking for startups that can get to $100m / yr in rev by yr 7-10.

VCs need this kind of return in order to produce great funds.
2) And so many companies won't get to this level - and that's not a bad thing - but then it means you should be thinking about trying to get going w company revenue since you can't count on VC backing.
3) someone asked about age and fundraising & do accelerators help?

Age doesn't matter. But just make sure no one is taking advantage of you. And as such, accelerators can help sometimes w that guidance.
4) Someone got a rejection because he had a teddy bear in his room (side note: what investor says that?!?)

Mac says he's been there and has heard that saltiness. But you're going to get a lot of nos. And you gain more leverage w more progress and traction. So just keeping going.
5) Someone is being told by pitch competitions that she is too early or too late. (this "Goldilocks & the 3 bears issue" is one of the biggest problems in the industry IMO) Everyone has a different def of what "early" means...

Mac recommends networking w the pitch organizers.
6) Next q is about derisking customers before building out the product.

I'm not sure if it's clubhouse or my internet but I didn't quite catch any of this part.
7) Advertisement for @RarebreedVC - if anyone wants to be an LP, they are open to more investors - go to
their website!

Fwiw, I'm a (small) LP and highly recommend checking it out.
8) Advertisement for past @HustleFundVC venture fellow @jasminvests - she is going to HBS in a couple of years and is in process of becoming a VC scout. (If you are looking for scouts or even want to hire her away, I highly recommend her!)
9) Someone asked about raising $$ for a travel startup

I missed most of the responses but I think the tl;Dr was that the founder should think about other travel mkts that are here - like road travel. And keep pitching!
10) Aspiring VC asked for advice.

Mac's go-to is honesty. He is direct and upfront w/ a founder. (And I concur!)

Not all vcs do this though.
11) I missed the q (sorry am apparently a horrible transcriber!)

But if you want to work w Mac, send him honest updates w a cadence. Don't just sugarcoat news. Establish rapport. Be genuine - treat him like a person. He is not a walking checkbook.
Ok it's midnight on the east coast, so the conversation is now over.

Sorry for the poor transcription job - between the audio dropping in and out and certain offspring stalling on bedtime, I probably only caught 70% of it. Next time!!

More from Elizabeth Yin

Elizabeth Yin
Elizabeth Yin
@dunkhippo33
Today's thread is on the affiliate business model. Many years ago, I used to be an affiliate marketer. If there is any way to get schooled in marketing, becoming an affiliate marketer is probably the best way.

What is affiliate marketing and why should you care?

Read on >>

1) Affiliate marketing is selling products or generating leads on behalf of other companies and getting paid a commission for those products.

2) Some notable examples you've seen before:

NerdWallet - you read their articles on best credit cards. You click on a link to one of those cards. You fill out an application. They get paid for delivering that lead to the cc company.

3) In https://t.co/kSfWS69ybp - same thing. Any of their financial products -- you fill out an application, and https://t.co/mCrBT43mOj gets paid for that.

But the affiliate revenue model applies beyond financial services products.

4) Wirecutter -- you see a neat product they review or talk about. You click through and buy.

Wirecutter gets a cut of that transaction.
STARTUP
Elizabeth Yin
Elizabeth Yin
@dunkhippo33
Saturday thoughts on market pull. What is it? How is it different from Total Addressable Market (TAM)? And what ideas tend to have strong market pull?

A thread >>

1) First: "Market pull" != market size.

IMO (and most VCs will disagree!!), market size (TAM) doesn't *really* matter. But market pull DEFINITELY does. For that reason, I've almost never asked a startup about TAM.

Why?

2) First, what is TAM?

TAM is a sizing of how big your market is. A good way to estimate this is - if you can get to all potential buyers and based on how much $$ they are worth to you, how much money can your company make if you took the whole mkt?

3) An example: Say we run an e-commerce site that sells hippo food. TAM in the world:

-1000 zoos have on average 3 hippos = 3000 hippos.
-Each hippo eats $100 worth of food each day
-365 days * $100 * 3000 hippos = $110m per year globally

4) But, we'll come back to this.

Why I don't like TAM - it doesn't take into acct a few things:

A) how hard it is to get customers
B) how much more you can upsell once you have customers
C) how fast the mkt is moving up or down
INVESTING , ALL
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Elizabeth Yin
Elizabeth Yin
@dunkhippo33
Some wed night thoughts on investor “value add”:

1) At the end of the day, money is a commodity. That mere fact should make every vc shudder.

It is amazing how many ppl (incl myself) clamor to get into a commodity business!

2) As such, to differentiate, different investors provide other things beyond money. Sometimes it’s community. Sometimes hiring help. Sometimes expertise or sector-focused networks. Etc

3) And some VCs are truly value add! For example, if I had an edtech co, I would hands down raise from @jwdanner - he has been there as an entrepreneur, built schools, and invested in so many hit edtech companies.

4) But at the end of the day, regardless of who invested in you, it’s the founders + team who are doing all the work.

5) when I think about what I’ve done for my own founders, it’s ranged from doing intros (mostly to other investors) to cust acq advice to feedback etc

But the reality is - all of my founders would’ve figured out how to get that intro or that piece of advice w out me
STARTUPS , INVESTORS
Elizabeth Yin
Elizabeth Yin
@dunkhippo33
A thread on employee equity in early stage startups -- what are the compensation norms? What every early employee should ask? Some thoughts on whether the structure is fair.

Read on >>

1) First, there are NO NORMS! Hah. I have literally seen everything from giving early employees no equity to giving employee #1s near co-founder level of shares.

But what is more common than not?

2) In the Silicon Valley, if you're hiring your 1st employee, & you've raised NO $$ & are paying very little (e.g $0-$10k / yr or thereabouts), your first employee is basically a co-founder.

And the equity tranche for employee 1 should be closer to a co-founder level.

3) For ex, a friend of mine gave his employee #1 10% (vesting over 4 yrs of course) of the business. This employee was only getting his housing paid for. And this was 10 yrs ago, so it was during the bust.

4) On the flip side, if you have raised some $$ & are paying employee #1 near mkt rate, typically I see around here ppl get 1-5% (w/ vesting).

Caveat - near mkt rate doesn't mean compared to Google or FB salary rates. I mean compared to "normal big cos"
STARTUP
Elizabeth Yin
Elizabeth Yin
@dunkhippo33
Today I want to talk about the legal aspects of startups. How to set up? How to think about legal costs?

Fun!

Read on >>

1) Lawyers are expensive -- oof! A startup lawyer can cost you $300-$1k per HOUR! An associate paralegal may be slightly cheaper. But still pricey.

What do you need from a lawyer?

-company setup costs
-doc creation and review for financing rounds
-exit negotiation

2) For the purpose of this thread, we're just going to focus on setup costs, because this is where I see the most mistakes.

Once you get going, you may quickly realize you need a better lawyer - hah - and that generally helps w/ solving for financing rounds and exits

3) If you want to potentially raise money from VCs, you'll want to set up as a Delaware C Corp. If you don't ever want to raise from VCs, an LLC is fine.

Lots of ppl start out as an LLC because you can get tax benefits if you are not profitable.

4) But to me, if you know you want to raise VC money, it feels a bit penny wise / pound foolish, because you will need to spend $$ to convert your LLC to a Delaware C corp.
STARTUPS

More from Internet

Amit Ganguli
Amit Ganguli
@amit_ganguli
Many conversations happening on #WhatsApp (WA) groups about new #WhatsAppPrivacyPolicy .
This thread has arguments to help ditch WA & move to @signalapp:
https://t.co/En4fe9VxUN
Share, use, copy-paste, modify with understanding as you deem fit on any platform in whole or part
1/n

Note: No affiliations, conflict of interest
Info presented with NO bias, prejudice, malice or indemnity.
Open to corrections: individual tweets may be deleted, tweets added to thread or corrected as replies.
Points that are unclear or uncertain are marked with "(?)".
2/n

CONTENT OF WA MESSAGES SHALL REMAIN ENCRYPTED END TO END.
BUT, there's data: contacts, group affiliations, co-affiliations, locations (live?), frequency of contacts, *tags* generated when we send or forward a message or file to contacts or groups, links, clicks on links, etc.
3/n

It is unclear whether this data is anonymized.
NOTHING in latest policy *prevents* the collection, retention, sharing or sale by FaceBook (FB: owner of WA) of this data in part or whole whether with identifying information or anonymized.
Meme source:
https://t.co/nMDTUlb0rl
4/n


Companies need to make money & generate profits:
To create software, install & maintain infrastructure.
Google, FB, Insta, Amazon etc sell data created from our content & data generated from our interactions (searches, clicks, purchases etc).
This makes many uncomfortable.
5/n
INTERNET
Pasquale "Pat" Scopelliti
Pasquale "Pat" Scopell...
@ThyConsigliori
Prepping for today's thread, the story of the CURRENT CYBERWAR is clearly overwhelming. J.E. Dyer @OptimisticCon links us to this story. Just one quote to
INTERNET
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Gwen Snyder is uncivil
Gwen Snyder is uncivil
@gwensnyderPHL
With Parler down, there are going to be a ton of white supremacists switching to (or back to) @Telegram, a company that has sheltered some of the worst, most explicitly pro-terror Nazi groups for years now.

RT to tell @apple & @google to KICK TELEGRAM OFF their app stores, too.

Or, Telegram can actually enforce its terms of service.

But I am watching tons of Nazis thrill to the idea of mass murder on there.

They're emboldened, and @Telegram gives them a place to recruit, radicalize, and plan to kill people.

Parler was bad, but Telegram is the absolute wild west.

I've watched actual terror plots unfold there.

It's where they share printable gun plans and bomb how-tos.

It's where they discuss targets and share vicious, gory murder videos of minorities they don't like.

And I would also add, deplatforming the less dark-webby extremism platforms like Parler ALWAYS means a temporary influx to these more extremist, darker-webby platforms.

We saw it after 8chan, too.

It was necessary, it immediately and overwhelmingly cut down on successful deadly terror, but in the very short term I watched numbers swell in overtly terror Nazi channels as more radicalized/edgelors 8chan folks sought a new home.
INTERNET
John McFarland
John McFarland
@_JohnMcFarland
As the United States deals with insurgent forces at home, security professionals should look to the Middle East for insight on how this threat may evolve:



There are a lot of parallels between right-wing US extremism, and post-colonial Islamic extremism.

The most prominent, I feel, is the one between the @newtgingrich era GOP and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, like most early Islamic terrorism, was a reaction to European colonialism in the Middle East.

What starts as a political movement interested in social change becomes an insurgent group engaged in violent extremism.



The same radicalization factors can be identified. It’s disenfranchisement and cultural erosion all the way down.

Both groups want a return to “tradition” to strengthen a culture they feel they’ve lost because of modernity. Both groups feel they’ve been economically and culturally disenfranchised by a foreign oppressor. You can see roots of this same problem in the Confederacy.

In our case at home, this is because of the inherent cultural divide between conservatives and liberals. Many conservatives do not feel that liberals are real Americans. This is an important factor for later.
INTERNET
Fran\xe7ois Chollet
François Chollet
@fchollet
Here's an overview of key adoption metrics for deep learning frameworks over 2020: downloads, developer surveys, job posts, scientific publications, Colab usage, Kaggle notebooks usage, GitHub data.

TensorFlow/Keras = #1 deep learning solution.


Note that we benchmark adoption vs Facebook's PyTorch because it is the only TF alternative that registers on the scale. Another option would have been sklearn, which has massive adoption, but it isn't really a TF alternative. In the future, I hope we can add JAX.

TensorFlow has seen 115M downloads in 2020, which nearly doubles its lifetime downloads. Note that this does *not* include downloads for all TF-adjacent packages, like tf-nightly, the old tensorflow-gpu, etc.


Also note that most of these downloads aren't from humans, but are automated downloads from CI systems (but none are from Google's systems, as Google doesn't use PyPI).

In a way, this metric reflects usage in production.

There were two worldwide developer surveys in 2020 that measured adoption of various frameworks: the one from StackOverflow, targeting all developers, and the one from Kaggle.
INTERNET

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Jonathan Ware
Jonathan Ware
@ReassessHistory
Rhino Barges

One of the dullest, coolest, more bizarre and fascinating pieces of kit used in Normandy.

Which NO ONE REALLY CARES ABOUT.

BUT I DO AND YOU SHOULD TOO.
/1

#WW2 #SWW #History


Planning for Overlord and Neptune had a serious snag, how to get troops from LSTs onto the beach as simply ramming them onto the beaches and dropping the ramp was known to damage the exceptionally vulnerable LSTs and felt to be unsustainable in the mid to long term. /2


LSTs were essential in sustaining Overlord's progress and were a subject of major headaches in the planning phase, and a real subject of friction when it came to launching additional amphibious operations such as Dragoon.

A single LSTs loss represented a capability nick. /3


So, logic dictated, we don't really want these remarkable but rare and highly valuable vessels constantly doing beach landings, we want something to act as a medium between ship to shore, and in came the (mostly) American designed Rhino. /4


I fucking love Rhinos.

Seriously.

Graceful lines of pure industrial pedigree.

Modular.

LOOK AT IT. /5
HISTORY
Suhas S. Hardutt
Suhas S. Hardutt
@HarduttSuhas
THE BATTLE OF TALIKOTA and the destruction of Vijaynagar (Hampi)
26 January 1565

A tale of valor, deception and decimation.

A grim reminder that if we fail to protect our heritage, it will eventually crumble under the onslaught of "forces of anarchy".
(Elaborate thread)


This decisive battle was fought between the Vijayanagara empire and the Deccan sultanates resulting in a rout of Vijayanagara and ending the last major medieval era Hindu kingdom in south India.(1)

The seeds of 1565 encounter were sown more than 250 years earlier when the forces of the Delhi Sultanate, during the time of Alauddin Khilji and later Md Bin Tughlaq swept through southern India in an expansion spree.(2)

By middle of the 14th century, facing rebellions, Tughlaq withdrew to Delhi, leaving behind 2 empires, Bahmani, which ruled the Deccan from Kalaburagi, and Vijayanagara, which ruled most south India with its capital at Vijayanagar.(3)

The Raichur Doab, between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers, existed as a natural boundary between these two kingdoms, with wars often breaking out over control of this territory.(4)
HISTORY
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Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
@AnuSatheesh5
Yoga Ramar Temple
#Nedungunam
#TamilNaduTemples 🚩

Yoga Ramar Temple is located near Thiruvannamalai. Shri Rama is seated with eyes closed, without any weapons. Mata Sita  pointing to the feet of Rama telling that  everyone is safe at his feet. Lakshmana standing near Shri Rama


Hanuman is seen chanting Vedas obediently sitting before Shri Rama.

Sthala Puranam says that, Sukabrahma Maharishi had been doing Tapasya here, for the darshan of Sri Rama. Prabhu Shri Ram, pleased with his tapasya, came here after Rama Ravana yudham. Since Rama was returning


after the war, he did not have any weapons with him.

Another gopuram called Kili Gopuram is there for Sukabrahma Maharishi. There is a hill nearby called Dheergachala. According to Sthala puranam, Sri Padham of Prabhu Rama are found on the top of the hill


It is said that this is the place where Shri Rama gave darshan to Suka Maharishi. Nedumgunam means which shows all qualities of Shri Rama who is Maryadha purushottam. Shri Ramanavami is very famous here.

Jai Sri Ram
🙏🕉🙏
ALL
Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

Then again, when underlying conditions don't change much, tried-and-true approaches are probably better.

"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

(end)
SOCIETY
Corey Lynn \U0001f64f\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
Corey Lynn 🙏🇺🇸...
@CoreysDigs
1) OBSERVATION: The frequencies are changing. I would have to assess stats on the electromagnetic field to see its fluctuations. All I know is, I am highly sensitive to energy/frequencies, and they are changing, because…

2) 2 Weeks ago, my dog was effected by it as well. He is hearing things that aren’t technically audible. I can tell by his body language and sounds. One week ago I began feeling a pressure in my head and ears. It wasn’t painful at all, but it was intense for a bit.

3) It reminded me of taking off in an airplane a bit. I felt like I was in a vacuum. It went on and off for a couple of days. I’ve picked up on frequencies and high pitched sounds (not audible to most) for 30 years, and today my right ear began to ring for longer than usual.

4) This is nothing unusual for me, with exception of the duration. This happens often with me. No, it’s not tinnitus. Only this time, when I spoke, there was reverb creating a high pitch in my ear from my voice. This lasted for about 30 minutes. It did not hurt, just annoying.

5) So yes, the frequencies are changing. What this means exactly, I am unsure of at the moment. Some will say electromagnetic fields, others will say ascension, and some will say pole shift. I honestly can’t say at this very moment.
SCIENCE