abcampbell's comments

http://bit.ly/2925W6M :-D

Don't think you understand my question.

#overconfident

Not arguing for secondary sales, arguing that we take these companies public to clean up that crap.

Our take... http://bit.ly/youshouldsellyourequity

"Rationally, the now-former employee will hold off until the end of the exercise expiration window before deciding whether to exercise at all."

Classic example of good maths, bad thinking.

This is nonsensical. For employees where these options represent 90% of their wealth, the benefit from marginal time value in these options is trivial when compared to getting liquidity and diversification.

"The bottom line is that if companies are going to continue to stay private longer, we need to fundamentally re-think the stock option compensation model. We need better, careful, and more thoughtful solutions."

Seems like the simplest solution is just for the investors to force the company to go public.

Going public creates the liquidity that solves this problem. It might be at a lower sticker price, but at least employees can arrange financing to pay for excercize and tax needs.

That and they might be able to actually diversify from a portfolio no self-respecting LP would tolerate.

But why did the machine want to go long Salmar ASA?

Well, unless your life plan is to start a Hard Tech business that will require 5 years of funding before anyone takes it seriously.

Then this is is kinda like telling a soldier about to deploy to Afghanistan that they don't need Kevlar because it's never been a better time to bring democracy to the middle-east.

+1

Darkweb shows that there is a (small, but real) market for an anonymous, decentralized web. I don't know anyone that prefers to navigate the web in a way that is permanently stored in NSA/advertiser servers forever.

Which implies that the reason there is not widespread adoption of a more decentralized, anonymous web is thus more of a product question.

Maybe. Risk I see is that they are essentially financing long term leases with rental income that can dissapear in a month.

Reminds me of zenefits vs ADP

Well, it raises the question of whether it's legitimate to ask applicants to list the equity stakes in the first place.

Seems like YC is asking people to hold to that structure when it is in their interests, but ignore it when it is not.

To be clear, don't think this is terrible. Just, if you are going to claim the split means nothing, then why force applicants to create one in the first place?

If memory serves, Google did this with Word2Vec as well, which is a bit sketchy.

If you open source something, there should be a reasonable expectation that it is contributed to the commons. Otherwise a lot of people will build off your stuff, which you can then turn around, file a patent, and claim infringement.

Not a lawyer, but seems like a problem.

This will happen to Google. Sooner than people realize.

(From another story on the front page) http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/general-news/20160513/uc-st...

"Every quarter, hedge funds and institutional investors managing more than $100 million are required by law to reveal their US long positions to the SEC. These 13f filings include only long US stock positions, ADRs, equity options and notes."

http://www.octafinance.com/13f-filings/#ixzz48YTGbIeH

Good idea, but search isn't great

The question isn't 'are profits too high?' But rather 'where do profits come from?'

The question isn't are profits too high...but rather, where do profits come from?

It's not sentiment that connects public to private markets, it's the literal capital pipes that allocate money across assets.

When people realize there is a risk they will not get liquidity for their investment, they try to sell to get cash.

That sale sucks liquidity out of the market, the dollars have to come from somewhere.

Which is why what's going on in energy markets, or China, or Europe, matter for startups.

Startups are by their nature consumers of liquidity, as founders sell equity to get cash to build stuff.

When other assets (public market stocks, energy bonds, CNY, European bank stocks) are being sold to get cash, this competes for those dollars.

When there is enough selling that asset prices fall, then assets that compete for the same capital/liquidity also have to reprice lower to attract capital. Not to mention investors realize they are literally less wealthy than they thought yesterday.

It's not something as ephemeral as sentiment , it literally works like a machine. I call it #theCapitalCycle

https://medium.com/@alexanderbcampbell/a-turn-in-thecapitalc...

Well, first, I would try to understand what "AI" you are talking about and why you have so much confidence it will be big.

It's a pretty broad category, and a lot of it is (still) very far from commercialization.

It's almost like asking about "the Internet" in 1992.

Here are some categories that may help to dive into...

-Computer Vision

-Natural Language Processing

AClustering vs classification in machine learning

-Neural nets (convolutional, recursive, hyerparameters and optimizTion techniques)

Read "how to create a Mind" by kurtzweil

Related (but distinct topics)

-Understand rise (and fall) of semantic web

-Open/Linked data

-Relational vs NoSql databases

-distributed/parallel processing (MapReduce ->hadoop-> spark)

*edit - typo

Already did.

https://medium.com/@alexanderbcampbell/more-than-500bn-of-we...