yosho's comments

I'm not sure why this is news. Planes have had first, business and economy classes since as long as I can remember, and everyone knows the feeling of walking through business class to get to your economy seat. Why are we shocked that now other businesses are following that exact same model? A more premium experience at a more premium price is pretty much business 101.

I'm a $5m+ Amazon seller here, so many wrong assumptions in the comments, hard to know where to begin...

- Firstly, not every Amazon seller is a drop shipper, or private label products. In fact most of the successful ones I know all design and brand their own unique products. We ourselves design everything in-house and own multiple design and utility patents on ALL of our products, you won't find these products on Alibaba. Yes, we manufacture in China, but it is really cost prohibitive and uncompetitive to do so almost anywhere else.

- Yes, Amazon's policies hurt us and is completely unethical. The biggest one being losing the "buy box" (ability for customer to buy from your brand) when a lower priced product from your brand is found on a competing website such as Target, Walmart, Shopify, etc. They essentially force you to have the best price possible on Amazon at all times or get severely punished. Why this is terrible... let me explain, let's say Walmart stores offer your product as a holiday sale item in their stores, or let's say a particular color variation of your product isn't doing well so they offer it as a clearance item. Now someone can buy that product at a discount, sell it back on a Target or Walmart online marketplace at a slightly lower price and guess what, your Amazon listing is now practically worthless. You lose the "buy box" and all your sales because another site has it listed for cheaper. This happens ALL THE TIME. And sometimes, there's almost nothing you can do about it.

- They practically force you to use Prime fulfillment. Technically you don't HAVE to use it, all you have to do is again, be uncompetitive with products that do offer Prime and lose half your sales. Same with Marketing, PPC, adwords, etc. They've created an ecosystem where all of these options aren't really options because there's no way to compete otherwise.

- Amazon basics and Amazon using private sales data to find out which products sell the best and compete with those brands directly. It's just really evil. They have all the info, all the data, and they know exactly which products to target to offer a cheaper version at a discounted price and steal all the sales...

I'll be the first to say that I owe Amazon a lot for allowing small businesses the opportunity to be making millions. But at the same time, some of the criticisms are valid, and with a few changes, the platform could be truly great for small business owners.

36 year old here, I've gotten Diamond in both Overwatch and Apex Legends and was an LEM CSGO player.

- I don't think reaction times matter as much as people think it does, positioning, movement, and general crosshair placement matter a lot more as does map knowledge and situational awareness.

- Having good equipment is pretty standard these days, a good GPU and gaming mouse + keyboard is almost a must have as well as a 144hz or higher refresh rate monitor.

- The biggest constraint on my ability to beat the best at an older age actually just comes down to how much time I can dedicate to the games. With a full time job, a wife, and 2 kids, gaming will always just be a side hobby and something I do with the little free time I have so I basically just don't practice as much as younger kids with more time. That's what 99% of it boils down to.

Are you always this cynical? There are plenty of good tech companies that have IPO'd recently: Snowflake, Unity, Corsair to name a few. I'm sure all three of those will do well in the coming years. Not everything is a bubble, these companies have some impressive growth numbers.

Is a fetus considered a human baby? This is one of those 2 sided debates that regularly occurs and the problem is that no amount of science will be able to give a definitive answer. It's a personal worldview and both sides have valid arguments.

Options aren't gambling, they're typically used to hedge your position, hence the 100:1 leverage. You can easily hedge out entire positions with just a few contracts.

It's not really a question of values because depending on what the actual death rate actually is, you can make informed objectionable decisions based off of it that two rational people with different values should agree upon. For example, if you determined that the risk of death from Covid was less than the risk of death from driving in a year, than I would argue that you should accept that risk if you're okay with driving.

Basically, in order to be rational, you should be willing to accept the risk of dying from Covid if it is less than something else you do that is more risky on a daily basis. So the idea that it is a question of morality and differing opinions of N and M isn't really accurate. It's also why we compare death rates from Covid to Influenza and other diseases because we need to understand just how big of a risk to society it actually is to properly weigh our response.

Look up FatFIRE, I think people on HN would be more aligned with that philosophy rather than regular FIRE.

As a founder that has built a VC backed business to $XXXM in revenue and now as a founder that has built a bootstrapped business to $XM in revenue I guess I'm in a unique position to answer this.

They both have their pros and cons as many people here have said. VCs allow for faster growth, greater risk taking, focus on other things such as culture and team, and sometimes you get tangential benefits such as PR and exposure. However, the downside is dilution, complicated cap table, growth at all costs (including profitability), infighting, differences in opinions and direction, and if you keep going down the VC path, ultimately you might realize you've built a company that doesn't feel like yours anymore. But hey, if you IPO one day at $XB dollars, everyone wins right?

For bootstrapping, the pros are you control your own destiny, work life balance can be great, you get to make all the decisions, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. The cons are you live and die by your customers, growth can be sloooow, you have to watch every expense, money is always an issue, it's hard to pay employees top dollar.

There are ways to get money without VC, there are many small business loans out there, there's also friends and family which you can also get loans from, it also feels more real to live off of profit - which I think many companies in SV don't know how to do. You can also raise from Angels with non-traditional VC terms such as profit sharing.

As to which I personally prefer, I think there's something great about bootstrapping and living off profits. It's liberating and freeing... but I'd also be lying if I said that VC money doesn't tempt me every now and then. Ultimately I'm lucky in that we're profitable enough to grow at a decent clip without VC dollars so that's the best thing I can ask for... so for me, bootstrapping so far has been pretty great.

Try fishing, one of my favorite hobbies for relaxing.

The title of that article is some serious sensationalism. I wonder if journalists during the race to the moon wrote articles like that back then, telling NASA that working so hard was unsustainable even if everyone believed in the mission.

I think the deck pretty much just shows that the best way to raise $66M is to build a successful and growing company.

Getting a 404, anyone else?

Your profit should always cover your customer acquisition cost. If it does, congratulations keep spending and grow the customer base and start scaling. If it doesn't, refine your business model and keep iterating until it does. It should never be a catch-22 really unless you're doing it wrong.

We applied I think in 2010, got rejected. This was when YC was still fairly young. so arguably competition was even less than it is today.

Our company now does over $100M ARR and still growing. We learned a lot along the way, to be fair, I don't think I would have accepted us either at the time. Just take it as a learning experience and get better, don't let rejection stop you. I couldn't tell you how many "NOs" we've gotten in our company's lifespan.

The James Damore Google manifesto and the Youtube creator demonetization censorship comes to mind right now. Granted that's only one company, Google, but I think there's a general feeling that if you're not on the left leaning political spectrum, you're going to have your opinions shuttered.

I, for one, applaud FB's decision to keep him on the board. A lot has been said about this already, but it's true that Silicon Valley is an echo chamber that tends to push out dissenting opinions. It's valuable to have someone on the other side that can challenge your views, as painful as it might be and as much as you might disagree.

One of the better fundraising guides out there for sure.

Yeah there's definitely some things that are taboo to talk about because it's too political. I for one, am a liberal gun owner, which gives me a unique perspective in that I understand where a lot of liberals are coming from, but I also understand how conservatives feel when liberals constantly attack their viewpoints and try to silence them. It's funny how many debates I get into with other liberals about guns when they've never held or shot a gun in their life and yet claim to know everything about it. And the amount of moral superiority they hold around their viewpoints is staggering, truly a "I'm right you're wrong and an idiot" mentality.

If there's one thing I recommend everyone to do is just listen to the other side and at least TRY to see their perspective even if you disagree.

My team and I were rejected back in the day for our first startup idea, which ultimately didn't work but we eventually pivoted to a company now doing $100M+ in annual revenues. I don't really blame YC for the rejection as the original idea probably wasn't very good, but just pointing it out there that you can still be really successful without being in YC.