

VC for Hackers - _pius
http://chimeracoder.github.io/vc-for-hackers/#1

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samspenc
This is pretty awesome. Wish this had been around a few years ago. I've pretty
much "reverse engineered" these concepts by following HN discussions...

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nnq
Could someone explain the "Your main differentiator is the market -> raise
venture" vs "Your main differentiator is your advantage -> not raise venture"
thing better?

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chimeracoder
Sure, this would be more clear if I had the audio to go along with it (which I
should probably post too).

Basically, many (not all) successful venture-backed startups are creating new
markets for themselves. Google wasn't successful because it was the best web
portal - Google was successful because it rendered hierarchical web portals
_irrelevant_. They created a new market that obsoleted an existing one.

In other words, if you're _creating_ a market, you have a huge potential for
upside. If you're entering an existing market with a superior product, that's
possible, but more difficult.

These are all rough rules of thumb, of course, not hard-and-fast criteria.

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nnq
so from a VC's pov, a company that _could create a new market_ has more
potential upside than one that could _take over an existing market?_ ...seems
a bit counter-intuitive because for an existing big market you know exactly
how big it is, so there's no "market size related risk", whereas for a new
market, there's a big risk that it will turn out to be a very small niche
market. Isn't the optimization being made for something like [upside]/[risk],
even if it's an intuitive estimate of course, with an important component of
the [risk] being market related?

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julien421
Your link does not seem to work

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chimeracoder
Author here. You can scroll through the slides with the keyboard (press 'page
down', the right arrow, or the down arrow).

(The slides were generated with go.talk/present:
[http://godoc.org/code.google.com/p/go.talks/pkg/present](http://godoc.org/code.google.com/p/go.talks/pkg/present))

~~~
cobrabyte
Thanks! I've seen quite a few of these presentations and have never been able
to get them to work. Naturally, I want to scroll with my trackpad and this
works up through Slide 3. I didn't know you could use the keyboard to actually
load more slides. I wish they'd fix this in the presenter software.

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chimeracoder
Author here. I prepared these slides with go.talk/present[0]

If you see any issues (mistakes, things that need to be added), feel free to
submit a pull request! [https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/vc-for-
hackers](https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/vc-for-hackers)

[0]
[http://godoc.org/code.google.com/p/go.talks/pkg/present](http://godoc.org/code.google.com/p/go.talks/pkg/present)

~~~
qdpb
I found it very unsettling that there is no way to know how many slides were
left -- I know that's probably github limitation, but maybe worth inserting
summary/progress slides?

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namenotrequired
Slide 8 uses the acronym "ROI" but doesn't define it.

~~~
Blahah
Return On Investment (ROI) is very widely used, including in the general
press. He probably thought it unnecessary to define.

