
Fred Wilson on the StackOverflow Investment - javery
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/stack.html
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staunch
Good luck and congratulations. That said, I think they should have stuck to
StackOverflow itself. Being THE site that programmers use for Q&A could
eventually make millions per year in profit, with high quality sponsorship.
It's also a site they can genuinely be in to. I don't see them being
passionate about fashion or car Q&A sites.

Now they're stuck on the VC train without a repeatable formula. They had the
power to get thousands of programmers coming to one site, and just as
importantly, linking to it from hundreds of high pagerank sites. That's why
they've done so well with SEO. It's a picture perfect SEO-driven site.

Now they're going to struggle hard to build up a single new site as successful
as SO, let alone dozens.

Not that I think it's a mistake from Fred's perspective. The VCs can afford to
roll the dice, and it's not risky compared with many startups. They're betting
that Joel/Jeff can figure out a repeatable formula, maybe they can.

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ryanhuff
Depending on how this all shakes out, the issues that you touched upon may be
an opportunity for somebody else to fill any void created.

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jgrahamc
Does anyone know where the habit of writing $6mm instead of $6m came from? Is
there some ambiguity in writing $6m that I'm not seeing?

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sparky
It comes from banking. In that context, $6MM stands for the Latin "6 mille
mille," or "6 thousand thousands". $6M seems natural for those used to SI
units (6 megadollars), but I have heard that in some financial circles that
may be taken to mean "6 mille" (what we would call 6k).

It's all probably moot, the average person uses and understands them as
interchangeable, I'd imagine.

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loiuygthyujik
And to avoid a confusion between a US billion (10^9) and a UK billion (10^12).

Errors of 3 orders of magnitude used to worry bankers once upon a time.

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joshu
Congrats to USV and Stack Overflow. (I also participated)

