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November 18, 2018
credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good. It’s the perceived value of a complete intangible, the perception of the probability of meeting some future obligation.
Humans would fill the hard gaps in a purely computer workflow process,
the data that companies like Amazon know about you—is more valuable than most any publisher data.
York Times live at the pleasure of the media supply-side technology, data management solutions, and advertiser technologies that ostensibly pay them.
Ideas without implementation, or without an exceptional team to implement them, are like assholes and opinions: everyone’s got one.
To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles.
really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds.
Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it. Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins.
occurs. The net result is that billions of times a day, Google runs an auction of keywords and accompanying bids.
If the revenue generated by postclick sales outpaces cost, up go the bid and the budget, and the reverse in the opposite case.
The ratio of revenue to cost is known as “return on advertising spend” (ROAS)
The higher the valuations (or the caps), the less the investors’ take, even for the same amount of money they give you.
upside in the fund whose money the firm invests.
There are two weak points for tech companies, no matter how large: their investors and their potential business partners.
the founders lack leverage at fund-raising time, the CEO will be outnumbered on the board, and he serves at the pleasure of voting board members.
Traditionally, early-stage startup funding was the exclusive province of either the entrepreneur’s personal wealth, friends and family, or business “angels.”
seed rounds were now reaching levels of former A rounds;
Combinator was the gatekeeper to the best present and future deals in the Valley.
the ability to take and endure endless amounts of shit.
Whatever it takes to build those reserves of mental endurance.
ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world.
You’ve spent months and gambled your career on a product, and then after a bit of excitement, you realize what a misshapen and misbegotten piece of shit it really is. This is the crisis that kills 90 percent or more of startups that manage to survive the initial plagues of founder disagreements, failure to ship code, and failure to raise money.
almost always involves some impediment to paying users being scalably acquired or serviced.
“product-market fit,”
Walking into any meeting, you should know every goddamn thing there is to know about the other person; if you don’t, you’re failing.
combined Facebook-Twitter-LinkedIn stalk at least.
API is “application programming interface,” and it’s the set of functions and subroutines that an outside party can run in order to build its own third-party services on top of a company’s service.
What a company builds (SVP, Product), how it builds it (SVP, Engineering), how that eventual product is operationally run (COO), and what other companies it buys (Corp Dev): those are the core functions of any large tech company,
The visionary CEO doesn’t care about money, only the user experience, and manages by looking at usage dashboards, not revenue ones.
the Ads team runs around reactively trying to monetize whatever comes out of the product-development process.
Trust, but verify—and keep a loaded shotgun under your bed.
party acting on behalf of another, with complete agency and assumed trust.
“Fake it till you make it”
stateless machine is a device that simply processes according to some set of instructions,
means understanding the company’s “stack”; that is, the pile of interrelated user interface and back-end server technologies that power the product.
dev team is the engine of a tech company.
giveaway: Jess called back to ask specifics about the cap table. That meant they were already thinking about the investor versus founder split in their proposed deal, one of the more important high-level parameters.
Little did I know that in the real world of deals, what’s very euphemistically called the “consideration” given to investors can vary widely per the whims and machinations of the founders and the acquiring company.
The acquiring company doesn’t care less how money is divided between investors and employees. As we’ve reviewed, what they care about is price per high-value person (that is, engineers and product managers). If that works out, and the form of payment is whatever admixture of cash versus equity they prefer (or are willing to put up with), the deal looks fine to them.
“replicating portfolio.” This is a set of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and whatever else mimicks the returns—while being composed of different parts—of some other portfolio of assets.
profit from the rise of a given stock without having to carry the actual shares on some company’s maxed-out balance sheet (i.e., what’s called an “equity swap”).
miniacquisition for one person, complete with cash, options, vesting schedules, intellectual property
even founders in a well-established company are on a vesting schedule, and get only a quarter of their fat equity slice after a year, just as a big-company employee does.
mundane trade-offs of technical difficulty among various implementations, the prioritization of engineering time, the vagaries of user perception, and the demands of marketing a new product are the bread and butter of everyday product manager work.
As in life, so in business: maintain a bias for action over inaction.
One of the oddities of Wall Street trading-desk life is the rapid recalibration of monetary value. Everything—whether profit or risk—is measured in units of millions of dollars, commonly called a “buck”: “We
clickthrough rates, which are a coarse measure of user interest.
They would, however, love to know what movie you saw on Netflix last night, what’s in your Amazon shopping cart, every item you scrutinized when you last visited Best Buy, and how long it’s been since you bought a car (and which car). They also want to know what mobile devices and browsers you use and every website you visit, so they can serve and track media on each aforementioned device.
Like most employees, I had a vesting calendar that determined the speed and cadence of my equity being awarded.
“cognitive dissonance”: the mental stress people suffer when presented with realities contrary to their deeply held beliefs.
