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inboulder's comments

inboulder | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Selling my first company - need help with the process

From reading a lot of VC blogs, the thing that affects their valuation the most is competition. I think the most important thing you can do for your deal is get a competing bid of some kind, any kind, any outside interest at all will do more for the price than you can do within the confines of the deal with company x. This may sound difficult and it is, but I think it's absolutely critical.

inboulder | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Selling my first company - need help with the process

0.9 to 1.6 as a multiplier is absolutely terrible, that's a crazy discounted cash flow rate, at those multiples you are guaranteed to be better off just holding onto the business unless you know it is going under very rapidly. 5x is starting to become reasonable.

inboulder | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Selling my first company - need help with the process

"This is really just a myth. If you present a buyer with well-justified and thought-out reasons for your number, it's going to be hard for them to counter-offer with something ridiculous, unless they're just being an ass"

Wrong, you're missing the point entirely, I'd like to buy a business from you...

The point is that if you offer a price first, this is the HIGHTEST the buyer will pay, he might have valued the business at more, in this case you have left money on the table.

inboulder | 15 years ago | on: How I Graduated from Harvard, Turned Down Google, Got a Job Through Twitter

So basically you majored in arts and crafts at Harvard (and you're surprised BSing poli sci papers wasn't difficult?), wrote a bunch of blog posts and tweets, have an annoying 'young upstart' linkedin page, but don't know a linked list for a lincoln log, and are going into a non-technical entry level position for a random start-up?

inboulder | 16 years ago | on: OneSocialWeb: We’re Ahead Of Diaspora In The Creation Of An ‘Open Facebook’

OneSocialWeb, Diaspora et all are solving the wrong problem but are getting attention because of the general grumblings about Facebook. The issue causing the most Facebook user dissent is privacy. Open protocols do little to address this; having your whole social graph (think embarrassing pics) sitting on any server out of your control, whoever the owner, is the problem.

What is needed is a system that guarantees privacy by storing your social graph is such a way that it cannot be data-mined, sold, leaked, or linked by other websites. One way to do this is to have all data on the server be encrypted where the key only resides on the client side.

OneSocialWeb does nothing to solve the privacy problem.

inboulder | 16 years ago | on: The scariest pricing idea ever. That works.

This will work in certain situations. Basically, in negotiation the one to mention price first 'loses'. The reason the first party to mention a price 'loses', especially if it is the payee, is fairly simple game theory. The first price mentioned by the payee will set a high bound. If they payer must set a first price, this will be the low bound, and may exceed the payees high bound. For instance, if a dev offers to do work for $100, but it is really worth $200 to the client, the client will accept the $100. The client may have offered $200, but now with the information that the dev will do it for $100, of course they will only offer $100.

tl;dr - The client must come up with a price first, and if they have a personal relationship with you and the value they gain is higher than your sunk costs, it will probably be higher than what you would have set.

inboulder | 16 years ago | on: Should Entrepreneurs Lie?

Entrepreneurs obviously need to spin their situation in as positive a light as possible, see all the chatter around the monitization of twitter as an example, but I doubt outright lies are going to be a winning strategy. (it may work for Jobs, see woz-atari story, but is it worth the risk?)

I think it's important for the Entrepreneur to understand that VCs lie all the time however, it is just their nature, despite how open they look, they're especially good at lies of omission and manipulation of fund performance.

inboulder | 16 years ago | on: PayPal Never Could Have Been Built Lean

Never mind the cost of the network effects, PayPal only stayed in business because it figured out effective fraud loss minimization, which its completion did not (billpoint etc). Preventing fraud is mostly orthogonal to the lean/cash intensive issue.

inboulder | 16 years ago | on: Why MBAs fail at Entrepreneurship

I was just investigating postabon, I zoomed out to the whole US and only found a few dozen postings. They really need to work on their network effects, probably by spending large amounts of $ on contests and marketing.

inboulder | 16 years ago | on: My Duck Duck Go reddit ad by the numbers

Can't you have a standard for reddit ads? I would like to support reddit and view ads, but I feel you broke your covenant with users when you allowed flash-based blinky and moving ads, so now unfortunately your site is adblocked.
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