Or looking at it another way, you can stress out for a company for 8 year (in case of segment), or or you can join the company as a c-level exec at year 6 for the same amount of equity
The sort of person who grows a company from Show HN -> Series D is a very different sort of person than the sort of person who can join as a C Level exec.
There's more overlap than I would've suspected - a lot of the Director/VP types that I saw Google hire from the outside (as opposed to promote from within) were folks who had previously founded a company, sometimes up to 4 companies.
Agreed, but that's different again. Once you've done a job like be the CTO or CEO or an exec role at a high growth startup (like Segment) then getting into a role as an exec at a larger company.
Usually the folks who join a (successful) company as a C-level exec at year 6 are those who previously stressed out for 10+ years, either as a founder or working their way up through multiple successful projects at a big company.
If they raised 175, the valuation was likely at least 300 and more likely north of 500. Even 3% is worth $15M and I'd guess they each have a bit more than that.
Realistically, if it's equal splits, they probably each own ~5% of the company (By that stage, the founder shares can be down to ~20%)
If they are raising $175M, their dilution is probably in the ~15% range, putting their valuation a bit north of $1B.
So, each founder probably is worth, on paper, around $50M right now. Again, this assumes equal splits. It's possible that the CEO has more shares by virtue of assuming greater responsibilities.
You forgot that Chinese economy crashed heavily last year and this year. In addition, Chinese government really stepped up the blocking of money transfer out of the country
Google has offices in Shenzhen, too. And one could debate whether Taiwan is a country or part of China.
But that aside, the pull seems to be China's incentives and access to local hardware manufacturing. Not just the idea of living in Asia instead of the West.
> When it comes to computer science skills, U.S. students approaching graduation have a significant advantage over their peers in China, India, and Russia.
There are a few explanations for this
1.) Programming is an English skillset, which the native English-speaking countries have an advantage. Out of the native English speaking countries (US, England, Canada, Australia, and others), US has the biggest economy, the best tech companies that can train students as interns, and the best infrastructure to grow the students. Where as China, while it does have the population advantage, doesn't have the English capability. Chinese government is currently actively engaging in nationalism (maligning foreign brands, censoring foreign cultures, destroying churches, arresting pastors, saying winnie the pooh is an evil foreign influence), thus will have less and less English skillset overtime.
2.) more innovative/risk taking mindsets. This allows a more creative problem-solving skills amongst students. The Chinese education style is regurgitation and there is a culture of copying and cheating amongst students. Rote learning is widely practiced in schools in India as well, which isn't conducive to innovative problem solving.
I don't think so. I'm specifically referring to India, which is all English. All education in India happens in English - it is our primary official language.
I think the difference is in the teachers. This difference is most likely originating because of the education given in univs by good professors.
That is incorrect. In urban areas in India, schools teach in English but in rural areas it's in Hindi. In urban areas, only if it's a big city, then peer to peer communication is in English. However, in other cities, the only interaction in English is with a teacher; other times is in the native tongue.
And even if the students in big cities are learning mainly in English, the teachers are usually not native English speakers, which means that the grammer/pronounciation suffers. which is what you see with Indian engineers that have migrated to other countries.
You are accurate of course - but for the entire sample set that would even be in the running for a computer science test would be entirely native to english for most of their lives in India.
The current administration, the one you called Idiocracy, stood up against dictatorship China and exposed the bubble mirage that was the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is now crashing hard. This current administration did what many said was impossible: wage increases in the age of automation and globalization. This administration has US economy growing at 3%, when most other global economies are going into recession. This administration gave jobs and money back to the main street people, when corporations were eager to give those to the prison labors in China.
You might be reading/watching the mainstream media too much.
There's plenty of Trump supporters in silicon valley. We may be democrats previously, but we really like what Trump did against China, even though the large corporations (who owns mass media) hated the move. Trump rejuvenated the economy, increased competitiveness of American firms, and helped to increase jobs and wages for American workers. He stood up against dictatorship China and is winning the trade war. He is a very flawed man, but he did great for America
He didn't "rejuvenate" the economy. He doubled the deficit and the economy is still growing more or less as fast as it was under Obama. His actions are going to make the next recession worse.
> It’s no longer the best place in the world to start a startup.
The place with most active investors with the largest investments? The place with the biggest pool of programmers and pms and designers? The place with the best legal system to foster entrepreneurship?
Where else in the world would you get all of this? (Not even including beaches, attractive people, weather, food, top hospitals and universities, diversity, optimism, etc)
And to the author. San Francisco != all of tech in California
> The gains from the existing tech industry increasingly accrue to a) passive investors, and b) lucky landlords.
Sure, but compare that to any other industries. Tech industry is still very very mericratic. (Low startup capital, barrier to entry) Besides, every company is a tech company now
> The state government is a levered bet on tech compensation.
Why would you not want to bet on the best industry going forward? The one that eats all the other industries?
There is no shortage of people in Silicon Valley willing to work at startups, and that's why there are so many startups.
Among those people are successful FAANG employees who already made a bunch of money and feel safe trying something new, because if it doesn't work out they are not going to go broke and will probably end up back working at a FAANG.
It's hard to hire in SV because it's the most competitive talent landscape for technology in the world.
I work in recruiting (software salespeople), and this is by far the best market in the world for hiring in that niche. The talent you get here is significantly better than anywhere else. I make the analogy that it's like hiring for finance in London or New York. Outside of a global city, working at Goldman Sachs is impressive. However when you're hiring in NYC you can get much more granular - getting someone who's worked in the right team, on the right sort of deals etc.
There are plenty of actors in the world, but Hollywood is where entertainment deals are done. We'd laugh at someone trying to hire the worlds best Oil & Gas team in San Francisco. These are the big leagues.
Why is US pretending to be friend with an enemy that is out to steal anything in US that isn’t locked down? Least of which, an enemy that is a dictatorship that has oppressed religion, democracy, free speech, and free will in its domain?
Apart from reasons already mentioned (business), I suspect another large contributor is that the these types of articles only reach a relatively small audience in the US (albeit an audience that has outsize influence on FP matters). If these articles reach 10% of the population, I tend to believe the other 90% is probably far more worried about whatever domestic outrage storm (left or right) happens to be occurring on Twitter that day and probably has no idea why they should care about China one iota or how China will affect them. (They do know that China = marginally lower prices though)
I believe this is a tragic mistake that will be looked on with regret in 20-30 years (or maybe less), but it is what it is.
See I could never comprehend this attitude, how is it that we throw the word "enemy" around so lightly at countries that steal our technology or are dictatorships but we get so appalled and shocked when middle eastern countries that we bomb call us the enemy?
We should probably raise the bar as to what constitutes an enemy if we want to remain on our moral high horse, because otherwise we're hypocrites. Just my two cents.
People use the word "enemy" when they speak about protecting themselves, because they sense that they are vulnerable or becoming more vulnerable.
When others talk about protecting themselves _from you_, yes, that's uncomfortable. But saying "we get so appalled and shocked" kind of points at a straw-man "we" here. That's not "us" in every case. It might just be those reactionaries over here or there. It also points at the shock of diving into a culture as the US did in the middle east: Wow, it's diverse, not just one opinion--shocking. That's how education happens.
Raising the bar as to what constitutes an enemy carries a very clear risk, too: Underestimating your enemy. People know a lot about that nowadays.
However I think we can develop our cultural vocabulary here. There's an opportunity for that and it's very clear when discussions about "enemy" and how it's awkward even arise.
The alternative has been tried. It was the Cold War and McCarthyism. It was far from successful in limiting the aspirations of the opponents. McCarthyism came with some dictatorship like restrictions and paranoia within the US. It was also pretending to be friends with its allies in the same period.
I’d say foreign policy is complicated, but that’s an understatement. For one thing, US foreign policy often encourages trade with non-democratic countries because strong evidence shows that trade prevents wars. It also produces an educated middle class that desires more freedoms, less corruption, rule or law, and oversight. The theory is that eventually they will demand democratic governance. And, democratic countries don’t declare war on each other.
Ultimately, US foreign policy follows its citizen’s best interests. And, ignoring our occasional knee jerk reactions, most of our citizens are happy when we avoid war, expand individual rights and freedoms, increase trade, and maintain global stability.
China may not work out as expected, though. Who knows. I doubt anyone in the 70s believed that technology would advance far enough to allow an oppressive government to effectively control billions of people. Or, maybe the Chinese people are happy enough with their recently gained wealth that they accept being oppressed.
The US listening to Merkel's private communications is more expected in international spying. Having teams of state sanctioned hackers target commercial and educational bodies to steal technology to replicate back home is a bit different.
"In 1999, Enercon, a German company and leading manufacturer of wind energy equipment, developed a breakthrough generator for wind turbines. After applying for a US patent, it had learned that Kenetech, an American rival, had submitted an almost identical patent application shortly before. By the statement of a former NSA employee, it was later discovered that the NSA had secretly intercepted and monitored Enercon's data communications and conference calls and passed information regarding the new generator to Kenetech"
Because business, the US business interest developed China for making a profit -- you have a billion smart people that work long hours for peanuts to exploit. But those people saw that as an opportunity to rule. The new strategy however seems to be one of containment by automating and moving manufacturing back to the mainland... What do you expect China to do with a billion people that have gotten used to a $6,000 average yearly wage. It's going to do everything it can to survive and grow... and the Chinese are as smart as Americans. Man vs. Man.
Yeah its a shame. Most multinationals have already diversified out of China (usually less than 30% of capacity is left in China now). It’s the middle sized and small sized businesses that were too stupid not to diversify out of China, and now have to beg and plead for mercy from a malevolent Chinese government. And drag the US down with them. I hope the current administration can stand up against them.
I mean, we also put Yanjun Xu, an officer of the Chinese espionage apparatus, in federal prison last year. This friend/enemy/partner/adversary thing really works in multiple dimensions.
I guarantee you the US tries to steal their military secrets too. There's no reason to be angry about this at all -- spying is like reading your competitor company's blog.
> Why is US pretending to be friend with an enemy that is out to steal anything in US that isn’t locked down?
Because the thing about capitalism, is that its acolytes will happily sell the rope that they will be hanged with. To meet Wall Street's next quarterly expectations for rope sales, of course.
Companies want to do business with China, because there is money to be made, and their owners don't give a care about free speech or religion of people on the other side of the world.
And this is a good thing. It means that there's a lot of wealthy, influential people, who would really hate for there to be a war between two superpowers, despite the best efforts of nationalists.
PS. Countries spy on eachother all the time. If you think the US does not steal military secrets from its friends, and enemies, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Incorrect. There was a recent study done on tariffs effects. The study found negligible effects on consumer good prices. Turns out most tariff costs were eaten by manufacturers in China. (The importers forced them to eat the costs) Which prompted them to either shut down or move overseas
That can only ork in the short term though. If they go bust prices will go up for consumers due to constrained supply. If they move abroad to avoid the tariffs, we’ll presumably the reason they didn’t already do that was higher manufacturing costs abroad, so again increased costs for consumers, even if less than the tariffs.
You can put it off for a while, but not indefinitely. After all the justification given for the tariffs was to make less efficient local production more viable. Higher consumer prices are an explicit part of that calculation.
That assumes that manufacturers can reduce their margins without going out of business. That will not generally be true in a competitive market, however, since economic profit (which includes opportunity costs) tends toward zero.
I recall seeing it, but I can't seem to track it down at the moment. It was a study done by Europeans, concluding that China was eating about 83% of the tariff cost. The remaining 17% hits the US consumers.
Of course, that 17% can sort of be returned to the American consumers via reduced taxes or increased federal spending. The jobs are nice too.
US wage is growing though. Money is flowing into US at an unprecedented rate due to:
a.) Fed raising interest rates to a normal level. Government bonds are now earning close to some of the faster developing countries, without the risks.
b.) Brexit impacting the growth of EU. Germany narrowly avoids recession....for now. But grew only 1.5% in 2018. There's still the matter of a possible US tariff on EU automobiles. And Italy/Greece/Spain debts are still a thing.
c.) Chinese economy is crumbling. GM dropped crashed 15% in China in 2018. Ford dropped 36%. iPhone sales dropped 13%. Louis Vuitton dropped 20%. Overall car sales dropped 13%. Stock market dropped 22%. Real estate sales in January 2019 dropped 44%.
d.) Asian countries impacted by China's fall. South Korea's export to China dropped 14% in 2018. Japan dropped 8%. Taiwan dropped 10%. Singapore dropped 8%.
e.) Uncertainties and high debt ratio in developing countries, prompting money to seek safe harbor. Tariff and protectionism impacts.
How does the Fed interest raise helps with more money flowing into the US?
I mean okay, money flows into US "saving accounts", but due to higher interest rate a lot of investments will be put on hold, no?
The Fed raised the target federal funds rate, which is the rate of the interbank overnight repo market, which is basically the "back office" clearing house between the accounts of creditors and debtors. And all of this means that the NY Fed's trading desk does a lot of open market transactions to reach that goal. (It converts cash in banks' reserve accounts into US Treasury bonds, thus forcing banks to increase their reserves - to meet requirements, hence forcing banks to loan reserves from other banks, which pushes up the overnight repo rate.)
How does this effect the US Treasury bond auction rate? (In theory banks [and other primary dealers that participate in the auction] just use loans (excess reserve) to buy bonds, so if excess reserve is less, then fewer banks are able/willing to buy bonds, so yes, that pushes up rates, but the target-FFR increase only affected US banks, and US T-bills are bought by a lot of foreign entities.)
Money flows into US treasury bonds, directly. People and corporations literally have direct accounts with the treasury.
The US has large fiscal deficits and needs to borrow dollars. The FED set a good interest rate. It's causing owners of dollars to lend money to US Govt in hopes of safe interest gains.
This large deficit happened because of large tax cuts in the first place. Which means, citizens have more dollars in their hands (at the expense of future interest payments). This is driving up spending and thus investment to satisfy that spending.
The yield curve is flattening because of this as more and more people think that long term, the interest payments on today's spending will weigh on economy. Thus, it will ultimately cause FED to lower interest rates. Get in on risk free money while you can.
All of the above is domestic US. Internationally, the dollars that could've helped other countries came back to US in the form of lending. So those countries don't have dollars to invest, causing drops in asset prices and deflation and debt overhang.
* This large deficit happened because of large tax cuts in the first place.*
Tax cuts can't directly cause deficits, only spending can. Spending money you don't have offsetting revenue for causes the deficit. Cutting taxes without cutting spending is a problem. Tax revenue is not down, even with the tax cuts, but spending is growing much more quickly.
>> Tax cuts can't directly cause deficits, only spending can. Spending money you don't have offsetting revenue for causes the deficit. Cutting taxes without cutting spending is a problem. Tax revenue is not down, even with the tax cuts, but spending is growing much more quickly.
That's a political debate. Economically, an entity needs to have equal inflow and outflow of money to be balanced. The govt needs enough revenue to offset its expenses (a lot of which is interest on debt taken years before, military and entitlements.)
If you think about it, generations before partied hard on the credit card with low taxes && still getting social security, medicare etc. Today's generation gets to pick either low taxes or social security/medicare. Tomorrow's generation might not even have the choice.
all I know is they raise interest rates, it absorbs up the money supply in circulation due to the attractive yields on the Ts
also the whole trope about 'China owning most of US T-bills' is actually false, there is apparently T-bills that are specifically sold to foreign nations, and then there are the real T-bills that not many countries own. The other one is an IOU and may not be honored, say during wartime.
They raise the rates indirectly, by selling T-bills on the secondary market, which simply sucks money out of the circulation. (Which makes simply makes debt more expensive, and that leads to T-rate increase.)
> also the whole trope about 'China owning most of US T-bills' is actually false,
They are just the largest foreign holder, and it was noteworthy because of the rapid rise in the distribution of foreign debt holders.
Anyway, my thought process was that even if the US money supply drops, it should not influence T-bill auctions, because the whole world likes it (due to being the least risky investment). But it's very likely that the T-rate was low because banks and other investors exploited the low FFR. Now that's gone, the system settled in a higher equilibrium (as foreign and other investors had no real reason to change their behavior).
I feel like the stats of how American companies are selling in China is not an indicator of the growth of the Chinese economy, of course the market and real estate indicators are still valid.
Better said: it's not clear that foreign company crashes in China are a sign that the Chinese economy is "crumbling". One of the largest pieces of their current economic plan is "Made in China 2025": a shift from being a contract manufacturing base to instead be building and manufacturing Chinese designed and branded goods.
>1.) made in 2025 was announced in 2015. Crash happened last year in a sudden fashion across all luxury goods
Which is neither here nor there. Something can be announced in 2015 and be put in effect "last year", or have some significant component on it put in effect last year, or see the first major results of the overall thing a few years later.
>2.) brand loyalty doesn’t work like an immediate switch easily levered by a government.
Extra tariffs and support for local made products ("buy patriotic"), however does.
>3.) average Chinese citizens prefer foreign brands still, due to food and vaccine poisoning cases from local firms
