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“Breaking Workplace Taboos: A Conversation About Salary Transparency” via 99u
Some may call this socialism. Others say it can never work long term. However, I see this as the only equitable way to compensate employees, one that values experience and contribution over negotiation tactics and favoritism.
(via marksbirch)
I’ve seen a few startups where salaries get overinflated based on a variety of factors, and have suggested a similar,though slightly less complex, pay structure. I love the radical nature of everybody knowing exactly why they are being paid what they are, and think that it creates much less of an issue among employees. When people start to overvalue themselves (which happens a lot) or worry about others, management can point to the equation. I find this as a great complementary strategy to the more equity, less salary, and lean startup methodology.
(via marksbirch)
And I’m finding that across most of the things I search for these days. If I want a new restaurant, I search Foursquare. If I want new music, I head over to Hype Machine or see what my friends are listening to on Rdio. If I want up to date news, I search Twitter. And the list goes on.
Perhaps we’ve seen the end of general purpose search. Or, perhaps we’re just seeing more evidence that the best way to compete with incumbents is by not competing with them at all- until you do.
”Pinterest Accidentally Built A Better Search Engine Than Google
Apps were always meant for specialization and Google hasn’t been able to keep up with it. I use foursquare for food/drinks, ex.fm for music, twitter/feedly (still antiquated) for news, and services like TalkTo to text businesses instead of googling a number and calling it.
I agree that we’re in the midst of a search overhaul and I love it. The data is better, the use-cases are more direct, and there is a lot less noise to sift through.
Tesla Hindsight, Trading, & Being An Investor
I’ve been a Tesla Motors cheerleader for the past 2+ years. I bought the stock the summer of 2011 at 25.96/share and have held, added, held, and added some more to the position (highest price at 30/share). At one point my personal speculative trading portfolio was made up of 50% TSLA, 30% cash, and 20% a few other names. With the recent run-up of the stock, I reluctantly closed out my position at $88/share. At the time I figured I had learned from my mistakes of letting a stock run up and not selling and was being responsible taking profits. At this point today, I realize I was wrong.
When I originally started speculative trading, I was blindly punting money around, trading options with huge volatility premiums, and leveraging an event-driven, high volatility, almost binary outcome, short-term options trading strategy. At first I made a killing, running up over 60% in my first 3 months of trading, but quickly a few big bets went wrong, and my profits had been wiped out. It was at that point that I realized I needed to 1) understand how to roll out of options trades better and 2) start looking into pure stock more.
One of my first investments was Tesla Motors (TSLA). I was a summer analyst at a life settlements trading firm (see: Death Bonds) in Midtown, and the other summer analyst and I had been talking about the necessity to focus on a sector if you want to be trading successfully. I’ve always followed the tech sector the closest, so I started there. I previously had made money on a GOOG options trade, however their stock was too rich for my limited portfolio. One day I came across a somewhat newly-public company that was led and personally funded by the founder and former co-founder of Paypal, Elon Musk. I had always liked the idea of EVs and felt that it wasn’t “if” but “when” they were going to become mainstream. Seeing the success that Apple and other premium category leaders were having, I started reading about Tesla, and eventually decided to buy shares at $25.96. In hindsight, the amount of research wasn’t really that in-depth in regards to the company itself, but more a gut-feeling on the big picture.
Over the next year I made a bunch of good and bad calls in my portfolio, and traded mostly sideways, while still holding TSLA. I was talking to a friend of mine who worked in retail equities, and he mentioned that he was invested in a public venture fund called GSV Capital (GSVC) and recommended that I look into it as well. They had a bunch of Facebook stock, and all of the buzz in 2011 was the impending Facebook IPO. I trusted my friend, and also liked the idea of owning a name with exposure to private companies. I bought the stock at around $13/share and decided to keep checking in with my friend over time to hear his thoughts.
Leading up to the Facebook IPO the stock ran up to $20/share and I contemplated selling. I immediately decided that the FB IPO should cause an even bigger pop in the shares, and opted to hold onto my stake and ride the wave. My friend sold out some point before the IPO, but I held and held and held. Today GSVC is trading at $8.38/share and I took a serious haircut on my initial purchase.
After the GSVC trade I realized that I should have a system in place to take profits and prevent greediness. I’ve read about letting your winners ride, but figured that I could stomach a big upside swing, in exchange for downside protection. I largely ignored this rule with my Tesla shares, but eventually succumbed the pressure when the stock ballooned up to $88/share in a matter of weeks. It was finally the rumors of another offering the signaled it was time to think about selling.
I discussed with friends that the investment was emotional and financial. I loved the company, had made money on the stock, had convinced someone close to me to buy the car, and frankly didn’t see where I would put the cash in this market environment. I thought back to the GSVC trade, and a few others and hastily decided that I had let this winner ride long enough. I disregarded people who say that you should only own a stock if you would buy it at the current price (i hate that saying), because I still believed in Tesla growing to become a market-leader in EVs. I unloaded my shares, and in a bittersweet moment, watched the stock fall down to the low 80’s over the next few days. I felt triumphant, but hated rooting against a stock like that.
As of today, Tesla is trading at $102. Musk has a bunch of good news that he’ll try to spread out over time I’m sure, and the stock price will probably go up in 5%+ runs. I still believe that the market has run-up a bit too much, and expect a fall-off by the end of 2013 or whenever the market notices Bernake taking his foot off the gas, that will impact stocks across the board.
Hindsight is 20/20 and most people will tell me to shut up and take my ~300% return, but it’s moments like these that show the difference between a pure trader and an investor. People like Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson have made it abundantly clear that they are investing in people and ideas, not purely numbers and charts. Clearly this has worked out for them recently, and hopefully will work out again soon. After this experience, I’ll never feel uncomfortable letting a winner ride, and I’ll never pile out of a trade again because of markets, portfolio theory, or any other trading indicators.
The market has always been intended for investors, but somewhere along the way Wall St. changed that. I’m just glad to have figured out early that, for the most part, I’m an investor, not a trader.
i could reblog SBJ all day long
Learning From Los Gatos — The Peer Society — Medium
(via fred-wilson)
Just another reason why a new grad would rather work at a Facebook type over Goldman Sachs.
(via fred-wilson)
The new TrackingPoint sniper rifle doesn’t fire when you pull the trigger. Rather, it fires when it knows it will hit the target you’re aiming at. And then streams video to the included iPad mini to allow you to share your hunting or sharpshooting experience with Facebook, YouTube, or maybe even Al Jazeera.
Now, the company says, everyone can be an expert marksman.
“With TrackingPoint, even a novice shooter can become an elite long-range marksman in minutes, accurately and effectively engaging targets out to 1,200 yards,” the company said in a press release.
Click the buttons at the top of the page to tailor your results:
Choose a price range (like a fancy restaurant for Mother’s Day)
See which places are offering money-saving specials
See only shops that are open right now
And because it’s Foursquare, it’s easy to personalize the recommendations
”I’ve been waiting for this since I started using Foursquare. Foursquare is now better than Yelp in every single use-case.
Ferrari Chairman Luca di Montezemolo (via davemorin)
Hope that he’s not Chairman in 5-10 years.
(via davemorin)
Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley: Quora! Quora! Quora!?
Though this is obviously a bit of snarky fun, it does touch on the perverse nature of venture capital. While there was great promise when Quora first launched over three years ago, it has become something of a wasteland of pointless questions and answers. It makes you wonder if Quora would have been better off without the obscene amounts of money shoveled their way?
Also, it should be noted that Space X was first funded by Elon Musk who put in $100 million of his own money. The first VC funding round only came two years later.
(Mark Birch above)
My take: In general just love this quote. I don’t know how Quora is ever going to evolve into anything more than what it is now, but it is a great service. I’ve been meaning to write about service vs. businesses, and this will definitely show up in that post, whenever it happens.
(via marksbirch)
There are roughly three New York’s. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
Of these three trembling cities, the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
”There Are Stupid Questions
I went to the NYU Poly Innovention Demo Day last night to support my friend Derrick who runs a great event, and to see a bunch of interesting startups present their semester’s work. The judges were all very intelligent and had impressive backgrounds ranging from law to venture capital. The one problem I had with a few of them was this question that came up multiple times:
What’s to stop (bigger company/competitor X) from replicating this?
I hate this question. To be fair, none of the experienced venture capitalists asked this question. Although I understand it is one that should be asked from time to time in very specific circumstances, not every business must be proprietary. One entrepreneur went straight at it and said “nothing” and admitted her product wasn’t proprietary. Another re-iterated that his idea appealed to a larger user base (this was obvious and frankly the question shouldn’t have been asked to this startup).
Years ago I was pitching to an investor who made money by owning restaurants and bars in New York City. He asked me this exact question during the Q&A of part of the pitch. I had an answer prepared, but all I wanted to ask him was “If somebody else can open another restaurant in NYC, then you should have never opened up yours, right?” It was an ironic question coming from someone in arguably the most commoditized industry (food) in the most fragmented market for that industry in the country (NYC).
The problem I have with this question is the person asking it usually comes off as somebody trying to shoot ideas down. I’m an incredibly skeptical investor, and always look for holes in ideas, but not in the sense that “somebody else can do this, so i hate your idea”, and that is what this question boils down to. Everybody has to worry about competitors. Some of the most recent successful startups haven’t had much proprietary about the overarching concept (think: Facebook, Square, Vimeo, etc.) but it was the execution that separated it from their competitors.
There are a lot of variables when investing in companies, and there’s a difference between knowing your competitors, and worrying about somebody trying to do exactly what you do. If anything, the big guy in the space trying to replicate your startup validates your idea (SnapChat). As an investor or entrepreneur, its more important to worry about the quality of the idea and the ability of the team to execute that idea. You can’t control the rest of your market, you can only control your product. So next time somebody tells you there are no stupid questions, think again, because while being proprietary can be important, execution is king.
