winterchil's comments

You're not wrong but it depends on the platform and campaign. If the ads are bought click-optimized then yes... if conversion optimized then the algorithms will learn to avoid zealous clickers.

There's a dated but entertaining dramatization of this failure from the movie Pentagon Wars: https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA.

he means he shorts the stock market... although it can be difficult to get the borrow when everything is tanking.

Tesla is huge in Norway because of a number of large tax advantages from income tax deductions, to free registration, etc.

That being said, they obviously wouldn't sell if they didn't work but I wouldn't look at the popularity there as endorsement of cold weather performance, other factors are at play.

I understand the product-fit, but what incremental value does Etsy bring to either of those companies?

What hasn't been mentioned yet is that employees hold Common Stock, whereas the investors generally hold preferred stock. The preferred stock is worth more than the common stock because of special protections/provisions/voting rights/etc.

It's perfectly reasonable that the price would be lower on a buyback program. On the other hand controlling the equity is pretty important and it's not surprising they won't let it go to open market.

Welcome to the wonderful world of being a minority shareholder.

>top class negotiating skills exhibited by the sellers

Certainly a nice premium but not clear if this is a result of negotiating prowess or necessity given the large fractured institutional holdings. 30% is a pretty typical change of control premium for public companies and until the offer OPEN was under its 90 and 120-day moving averages.

Sounds like you got in at just the right time, congratulations!

This totally explains why everyone is moving to Oakland but, as you say, not a fair comparison.

Out of curiosity, how much would you estimate it costs to buy the house? Some quick math will let us figure out the rent vs. buy for your neighborhood.

You're welcome to call bullshit but it's not and here's why.

First $6k/month will not get you a $1.5MM home unless you had a down payment of $500k and even then it would not cover your taxes and other expenses. A general rule of thumb for someone with good credit is a monthly payment of $3k will let you borrow $500k on a 30-year fixed mortgage. You can check this yourself here: http://www.mortgagecalculator.org/ (or use Trulia's).

The problem with Trulia's "really cool tool" is unless you use the advanced version all the inputs are wrong. For example, its tax assumptions are less than half of real cost for SF. A more sophisticated tool is available from the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...).

Of course getting an apples to apples comparison is pretty hard unless you're talking about buying a condo vs. renting a condo in the same building. Yes, it would be cheaper to buy a 1 bedroom in Bayview then rent a 3 bedroom in Pacific Heights. If you're looking at starter homes in a decent area, say, Noe Valley and compare those costs to renting something similar in the same area renting is generally cheaper.

The "excess for investing" DOES exist, at a minimum in the form of the down payment you did not spend. The good news for home buyers is that you get leverage on that return if the market keeps going up. The bad news is that it's illiquid and we don't know whether that's a better investment than the stock market or one of the companies we see on the front page everyday. In short, if you're never moving again buying is likely cheaper. Otherwise, it's complicated.

TLDR: It's complicated, and most calculations downplay other buyer costs and ignore other renter opportunities.

If you're buying something comparable it's not $3k/month, it's $5k/month + $900/month in property taxes + all maintenance and expenses + the lost opportunity cost of investing all that money in diversified assets.

It's disgusting that this is necessary but it's a fight we have to win.

Very sorry to see them go and it was a beautiful product. However, this is no surprise at all. More surprising is that they were able to raise money for a business model that is fundamentally unsustainable (negative gross margins).

I think there's a glitch with their pie charts. They have no founders for any region making a salary in the 125k-175k bucket. Possible, but unlikely.

The number that return <1x is significant too. Out of 10 investments typically you'll have 1 big hit, 2-3 decent returns (2-5x on investment) and a bunch of "failures" which would be anything less than 1x.

Depending on the VC it's possible anything less than 3x is considered a failure because of the opportunity cost and their inability to re-invest proceeds.

Seems more likely that Yahoo is preparing to take a write-down on a collection of assets and is trying to mitigate the total amount by auctioning off the leftovers.

Yes, we got 7 views spread over 5 days that were probably all from YC reviewers (embedded player). They watched an average of just over 1 minute of the video which was just under 2 minutes long. We were not invited to the interview.

There was some very cool discussion at the end of the video and I'm guessing none of them saw it. Elsewhere in this thread is the speculation that high views = application that was on the fence and I guess I take comfort in that.

Anyway, if we were to apply in the future I'd ensure we had a shorter video. On the other hand, we were highly unusual candidates so it's possible we were just a bad match.

>> The safe thing to do when biking on sidewalks is to dismount as you arrive at an intersection

I think this is also the legally required thing to do in most jurisdictions.

Not if the price ceiling were selectively enforced against only one type of radio station. In your analogy this would be the e-commerce company has to buy twinkies from their supplier at 8x the price everyone else pays by government mandate.

They make more from Pandora than they ever did from radio... and their music accesses a larger audience.