Equity investments like this don't need to be repaid, so there isn't a legal obligation to repay them. Of course, there is an obligation to maximize shareholder value — but that is totally independent of the dollar amount invested.
When founders raise this much money, it's because there's (1) a lot they want to do and hire for, or (2) they don't want to worry about monetizing the product for a significant period and focus on growth or product development.
GP didn't talk about "repaying" anything. Taking 160M instead of 40M at the same valuation means giving up 4x the shares, and that's going to result in a bigger voice for those investors at the table in making decisions about the future path of the company.
What if they were offered $160mm and Tailscale countered with 4X the valuation, lowering the number of shares by 75%? Similarly, what if they wanted $40mm but the only deal on the table was $160mm due to ownership targets of funds that can actually write $40mm+ checks? It's hard to play these armchair games, even less so when the terms aren't known.
You're right that we don't know all the terms, but $160M raised is not small and it is very reasonable to worry about what level of control will be given up long term because of it.
409a valuations are made up by independent appraisals, but it’d be quite strange for an investor to agree a share is worth 4 times the appraised value.
(3) investors offer the option for founders (and earlier investors) to take money off the table by buying up a percentage of their stake, essentially creating a mini-exit for the founder and earlier investors
> Equity investments like this don't need to be repaid
You are saying equity is not bonds.
However investors expect to be repaid in the future with control and exhorbitant interest rates (based on risk). VC invests to make money, but that money comes from future equity rounds or IPO.
If you didn't take the VC money (and the business achieved the same growth without the money) then you'd expect you would have been better off by at least the amount invested (investors don't invest with the expectation of only getting their money back).
If the business doesn't succeed then you are on the hook to pay the debt from your equity via liquidation preferences.
VC payment is expectation statistics, but the investors know that game and invest to make money. That money comes from the current equity owners making less in the future.
Not only the "expectation" but lots of VCs have preference built in that guarantees them huge returns on basically any liquidity event. It's probably not as likely in a Series C like this but 2-3x preference is not unheard of. There are few investment vehicles where for every $1 you put in you're guaranteed to get the first $3 made back first.
When an artist trains by studying the masters and prior art, and even imitation, they are not acting as copying machines. Unfortunately for your interpretation, these are not copy machines neither on a technical nor philosophical level.
Separately, whether AI models ought to owe credit or compensation to the data used to train them is an interesting and nuanced debate.
Comparing the way the human brain synthesizes information with their experience and how a computer does it is already a futile point. Take the following point here: humans tend to be very poor at perfectly regurgitating copies of anything. Even well trained copycats will have different muscle memory, different interpretation of theory they apply, different means of coloring and shading, etc.
As we've seen, poke an LLM enough and it may simply just spit out a near identical recreation. As of now, it definitely proves that this data isn't just "seen". they very much store it on their databases, and we should treat it as such.
>whether AI models ought to owe credit or compensation to the data used to train them is an interesting and nuanced debate
There's nothing nuanced about it in my eyes. Especially if some artists explicitly do not want their art trained upon. Not even 3 years ago Microsoft won a court case via LinkedIn regarding the scaping of their website data. How is this phenomenon any different?
Unless we want to destroy Copyright as we know it, it's pretty cut and dry copyright infringement. But we need to tear it down first and just say we don't like current laws.
> The fees vary by payment processor, payment method, countries and currencies. In the last year, the average fee percentages have been 3,1 % for the payments processed by Stripe and 5 % for the payments processed by PayPal.
Stripe supports stablecoins if the merchant enables it. They still charge 1.5% though.
Building and maintaining integrations and dealing with customer support and monitoring accounts for fraud costs money.
And the number of people who keep spending money in stablecoins is minuscule. (I'd never use them because I want fraudulent transactions to be able to be reversed.)
Inequality is very simply to include in these models, and they do. The problem is that the models often show that the median quality of life improves faster when there's somewhat more inequality in the system, which flies in the face of every socialist intuition. It's a lot easier to pretend we need state-enforced equality.
It's simple to include, but there's no denying that the 101-level economics models steer you away from thinking about inequality harder than Vin Diesel in a car chase.
Carefully omitting the fact that the economic notion of value is wealth-weighted (and you can march enough elephants through this loophole to wage a class war), drawing attention away from "rich people getting paid for being rich" dynamics by dividing out wealth wherever possible, inviting you to use averages where "rich get richer" hides "poor get poorer" -- it's a masterclass in propaganda. I have literally never in my life seen a more artful tapestry of deception than Econ 101.
101-level models in every field elide important details. That's pretty much their whole point. And it doesn't make them propaganda, it makes them a perfunctory introduction.
I cannot think of another subject whose “101” level magical thinking has affected the real world as much as economics, though. At some point the purpose of a system is what it does, and economics 101 affects the political discourse in a way I struggle to find adequate comparisons for.
No, you don't omit the leading term by accident. Not five times in a row from three different angles.
In any case, this is also matter of historical record: the purge of left-wing thought from economics and politics at the end of the New Deal Era was loud and vicious. It didn't stop at ensuring capitalist principles got top billing, it scorched the earth until even the most earnest self-examination of capitalism's largest weakness was cause for cancellation. You bury it, or you wear the scarlet letter. Most chose to bury it, and here we are.
Inequality exists on a spectrum and there is something in between Gini coefficients of zero and one.
If anything, I think economists have grossly underestimated how large increasing levels of inequality have had such a corrosive effect on our social cohesion and political systems, and that obviously does have a huge impact on eventual economic outcomes. This societal/political breakdown is not something that economists usually model well.
That does seem to be a large part of why those who were on the fence voted for Trump. So even if it's not the core, it's a large part of why he won the election.
I certainly think, that regardless of the underlying hard numbers, there's a very strong perception that life is getting harder for the average person, and that most of that is due to their money going towards things that they resent. Exactly how and what will vary from person to person and depend on their information diet and political leanings, but there's a big undercurrent of discontent with the status quo and a strong belief it's due to a relative few benefiting from it, and this especially jives poorly with any assertion that "actually, the numbers show most people are just fine!"
I would, if I had the time, like to dive deeper into this sentiment: there's a decent amount of evidence that people are better off, on average (and median, so not prone to distortion by the hyper wealthy), than ever before, and yet this isn't how the average person perceives it. What I don't know is whether this is because said evidence is wrong or misleading, because inequality matters more psychologically than the absolute wealth, whether expectations have simply grown above the growth in wealth, or whether it's because there's been a flattening of the curve where historically disadvantaged groups have gotten better off but advantaged groups have become worse off.
I don't know if anyone is really arguing for state enforced equality. Just that in a capitalist system money naturally accumulates at the top and slowly regresses into a socialist like centrally planned economy as fewer and fewer people have meaningful wealth to allocate. A little inequality is good because there's a reward mechanism for allocating resources better but a lot of inequality locks
up the economy. And the only thing to really do is tax it and recirculate it back to
the bottom.
I have been banned from Hetzner multiple times now and believe me, nothing I was doing is even strange, let alone worthy of bans. I don't think an EU cloud can ever be trusted.
Europe is going down an incredibly dark path. Political censorship, encryption bans, and absurd consumer "protection" laws (e.g., like those limiting AI rollouts) mean Europeans are becoming second class globally. The irony of this post is that it is no longer safe for Europeans to rely on a European cloud.
Despite these problems Europe is still the better place to live in compared to "global leaders" like USA, Russia or China. Because limiting AI rollouts is not really relevant for your quality of live, social security, health, safety, sanity etc.
Worth noting that people have been unpacking and analyzing DeepSeek-R1 vigorously for days already on X before it got to Hacker News — it wasn't always this way.
HN has a general tech audience including SWEs who are paid so much that they exhibit the Nobel Disease and fauxtrepeneurs who use AI as a buzzword. They exist on X too but the conversations are diffused. You’ll have a section of crypto bros on there who know nothing technical they are talking then. Other user’s algorithms will fit their level of deep technical familiarity with AI.
When founders raise this much money, it's because there's (1) a lot they want to do and hire for, or (2) they don't want to worry about monetizing the product for a significant period and focus on growth or product development.
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