I was studying marketing when the 'super premium pet food' segment was invented. The idea that dog and cat were prepared to paid $US 3 per 4oz can of food was amazing.
At the time the best steak or fish was about $7 /lb
Not all ideas are bad, just because they didn't follow an MBA's market research. The guy that invented the super soaker came up with the idea while doing some plumbing in his bathroom. It took him years of determination to see it to success -- it's those years of determination that make the difference.
Tridge is considers Australia's best hacker. But he has no interest in forming any company. The only time he was convinced was to help form a company was with Linuxcare. Along with Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP), Martin Pool (Apache), Paul 'Rusty' Russell (ipchains) and Richard Morrell (SmoothWall)
He is interested in superior technological solutions.
He does not care about term sheets (aka term shits) or vesting rights etc.
He get paid VERY WELL for stuff he loves doing.
What is better than that????
BTW, he was ANU chess champion and often played blindfolded.
I've never understood if the $15B valuation is real either (although I understand that it's quoted by everyone as being real). The original $15B number comes from an investment that Microsoft did for a share of the company plus advertising consideration.
If you just valued the company on the share then it would be worth $15B but since there were other considerations you can't know at all what the valuation was.
I've heard of follow-on investments but I never heard any hard facts about the valuation of those investments.
On the other hand, I've heard people who should know (actual VCs, TechCrunch, press) say FB has a $15B valuation. I just don't understand how that's the case. Is it bogus or what is the piece of information that I'm missing?
Without knowing the details on the MS deal or the follow on funding, it's hard to say. I would speculate, solely from what I've read, that MS's investment values them at $15 billion while giving them the right to run ads for which they'll have to pay a certain amount as well. So in the case, and assuming other investors also valued them at $15b, that's their actual valuation.
I recall Zuckerberg admitting at SXSW they only valued it at that so that Microsoft could invest their cash and not suck up a big percentage of the company. That would mean not even Zuckerberg pretends its worth $15 billion. It seems a bit lame to repeat this valuation as if Zuckerberg is running around yelling "My company is worth $15 billion!" because he's definitely not doing that.
Confirmed or assumed? If this is true, it's a big point against FaceBook's continued success, because it means current employees are underwater until FaceBook's worth more than Ford. One of the big motivators for a startup employee is seeing those options you got for pennies suddenly being worth dollars; if those options won't be worth anything for the foreseeable future, there's little reason why good employees would choose to work at FaceBook instead of Yahoo or Adobe or any of the other mature tech companies.
Regardless of what Zuckerberg says, it's the valuation. It doesn't matter why. It's a simple mathematical equation. He can feign humility all he wants, but legally and technically speaking, their valuation is $15 billion.
I don't know any of their investors, but I'd be willing to bet my left nut that they'd be angry if the next funding round values them at $10b.
Concentrated Solar Thermal is more than 90% efficient. Ausra has a 175Mw base-load plant in construction. A number of Gigawatt plants will be made within a few years.
In China, there are 30 million solar hot water systems capturing the energy of 40 large nuclear plants and is growing at 20% per year. South Africa has mandated all buildings have to have solar hot water by 2010.
My company will install thousands of solar hot water systems without change and we will get the carbon credit and charge for the 'free' energy captured from the sun.
Why on Earth would ANY startup want to play "Treasury" like a large corporation? Using the KISS Principle an 'normal' bank account is much better. We all have better things to worry about than an extra 1% return on 'cash'.
As Warren Buffet says, if you don't understand it not invest in it.
One wouldn't want to be "miss out" on "greater returns for 'virtually' no risk" because they were "too stupid or cowardly to understand it..." according to your VC.
These things were seen as no-risk, basically like money market funds. Some startups have raised 8 digit numbers of money, and they have a CFO, and that CFO would be neglecting his fiduciary duty if he left millions in an account that earned 0.25% interest.
I was saying that safer alternatives to money market funds (i.e. checking accounts) pay 0.25% interest. I guess it came out a little unclear. These were seem as just another kind of money market fund, 100% safe. To keep money in a checking account rather than putting it into a perceived safe investment that paid a higher rate without sacrificing liquidity, would be neglecting fiduciary responsibilty.
That's easy. My wife has PhD in Statistics and works for a large bank. She spends her life building predictive models using archetypes. She has made hundreds of millions in revenue for the bank but now is working with the Australia Federal Police to detect both fraud and money laundering.
According to Mastercard her bank has one of the lowest fraud rates in the world.
Most large companies could increase their revenue by millions if they only knew how to understand the data they already have. It would only take 1 or 2 seriously smart people but the limiting factor is the political will to do it.
At the time the best steak or fish was about $7 /lb
This could be a multimillion dollar company.