mpenn's comments

What’s the process for when a user gets a new phone? I dread getting one because my keys depending on the phone completely disappear and have no transfer mechanism.

Try contacting Tiny / Andrew Wilkinson; you may be able to sell it.

Would it work out of the box with a react native app?

Interesting. Anecdotally, I have seen the opposite, where a company will raise multiple layers of SAFEs since pre-money SAFEs get diluted as you add more SAFEs, and you don't need to negotiate board seats or any control terms with a SAFE round. But obviously you have seen the real data on what co's are doing, not just a few anecdotes!

My understanding is that additional post-money SAFEs dilute solely common, whereas additional pre-money SAFEs dilute common and other pre-money SAFEs. So if you want to do a new round, by doing an equity round, you can dilute the post-money SAFEs with common. But if you do a 2nd post-money SAFE round, solely common gets diluted.

Since keeping cap flat is logistically / emotionally easiest for both sides to swallow, the founder dilution is worse under a "flat" scenario. In the pre-money world, if you did pre-money $10mm cap and raised $2mm, then later another $2mm at same cap, common would own ~71% (10 / 14) on conversion (assuming A is high enough). In post-money world, if you do $12mm cap and raise $2mm (so equivalent to old world in 1st round), then later raise another $2mm with same cap, common would own 67% (8 / 12). That's just 4 - 5%, but a real difference.

So I believe the incentive is higher to do an equity round to convert the post-money SAFEs so they can be a part of the dilution of the new round. Unless I am mistunderstanding how they'd convert or something else here. The math is complicated (which I guess is the whole point of why moving to post-money will improve founders' understanding).

Overall, simplifying how to understand one's cap table is great. It gets in the way of many founders understanding their business in really pernicious ways.

I do believe this will change the dynamic for YC founders dramatically 1 - 3 years out if not ready for a Series A (equity round) but need more capital (seed extension). I know many people who raised $500K - $3mm more on SAFEs. Because they were pre-money, the dilution for stacking SAFEs worked. Now, that will be much harder. The next round of financing will need to be an equity round to convert SAFEs to equity. I don't know if this is good or bad, but it will push people very heavily towards an equity round if they need any more funding.

How do you use them? And what prices do you typically pay for the services you use?

Wolfram Research (Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha) - 700 employees, no outside capital.

Could someone turn this into a business? Then it would hopefully survive on its own.

His linkedin claims he took 1 Stanford class, and the notes he claims he wrote were clearly written by someone else (it's on Sukru Burc Eryilmaz's personal page).

He went to Florida Atlantic University for his Bachelor's degree. He gets a nice headline in his education as Stanford, but he definitely did not attend for any degree.

My anecdotal evidence is that VC is more a "operator turned VC" now than ever before. VC used to be all MBAs / finance types (e.g., head of tech research at an investment bank). But every year, it is harder and harder to become a VC partner without significant operating experience. I am not sure who has hard stats on this though.

I disagree and believe this should be better for founders. Demo Day works so well because it's a forcing function for getting a lot of investors to see you at once and make a decision quickly, because so many other investors are deciding at the same time. Typically, investors want a long time to consider a company, and they only move fast if someone is / might bid against them. Scheduling meetings post-Demo Day is tough, and most people do it sub-optimally (by scheduling them too far apart). This new system makes meetings happen faster and more per day, increasing a chance of getting a bite quickly, which should lead to a higher chance of closing the round.

The downside I see is that if you are bad at meeting investors / need to iterate on your pitch, these meetings won't allow you to do that, as they'll be over before you can rethink it. But I think it's generally worth more / faster meetings.

*As another investor pointed out, 20 minute meetings may also be too short. I am not sure what the optimal meeting length should be. 30 minutes might be better. 1 hour is probably too long (you can always schedule a follow up meeting).

My bad on that -- I definitely misread the beginning. After rereading, she presents the beginning and end fairly based on an anecdote and not data.

I'd still love to know why the company didn't switch to this full throttle.

The writer claims to "rely heavily on data," but the punchline of the article is purely anecdotal that 1 person at 1 company got hired, was good and would have been overlooked. I am sure there were also many candidates with good resumes who were now overlooked.

This article starts out with an air of science and ends with a completely unproven conclusion.

While I do agree in my gut that resumes are not an amazing filter, she has completely failed to present evidence that her alternative interview process is better.

And in fact, while KeepSafe still has the no resumes option open, they are now accepting resumes again -- I do not great confidence that the alternative system was anything more than a PR move by the company.

We've thought about releasing a white paper but haven't gotten around to it. We brought it 35 people and 4 professional tailors. We had each tailor measure the subjects and then we measured each subject. We compared the standard deviation of the 4 tailors vs. the average of the 4 tailors vs. us. Our std was 20% smaller -- for the stats people out there, we're 20% more precise. Apologies in advance for anyone who wants to yell at me for the misleading use of "accuracy."

I encourage you to give us a shot and see if we can nail the fit for you!

Marketing materials are always a work in progress!

We're very excited about pants; we don't have them yet, but it's most likely our next product.

We'll have to work on our website then! Probably losing sales due to a poor explanation of our product.

Thanks! The machine learning has been incredibly fun :-).

Right now we have been spreading a lot through word of mouth, which has been awesome. We have also been playing a lot with advertising.

Definitely in the pipeline! We had to start somewhere, but we plan to expand into every article of clothing for men and women.