Great article and as a former investment banker so true. Good laugh reading the comments, I speculate mostly from insecure startup employees, executing their "post purchase rationalization" for taking the accelerator route.
The reality is that the accelerator model has more parallels to the investment banking model than many of the commenters are recognizing. Very entertaining to see some commenters trying as well to justify that startups have more benefit to society than bankers or MBAs, in fact hilarious as the reality is that without those "dumb" MBA investment bankers who can attract IPO money to feed the VC's to fund startups, many with questionable and untested business models, accelerators and most startups wouldn't exist.
Thanks for the entertainment, better not waste too much more time and get back to trying to bootstrap my startup.
Entertaining to read all the comments on this thread. Great article and as a former investment banker, yes so true, really no difference from, what I observe for SV startup accelerators, and an investment banking approach of hiring the best. I guess the same could be said of other elite professions such as law etc. With respect to other derogatorary comments on this thread, about bankers and MBA's. I suspect most are written by people attempting to self justify there choice of startup vs a traditional careers. Good laugh re: the comments about the social utility of startups vs banks and how unproductive to society investment bankers are. But face it without these investment banking "parasites" who add no value to society, most startups who need to raise capital wouldn't exist. Anyway back to work on my bootstrapped startup!..
Since when has number of free downloads in the app store been a measure of business model viability? The fact is they are pursuing destructive means to grow their business, as an investor I would much prefer to have founders who were investing my monies in a constructive way especially given the generic and dissimilar app names. I mean how good a product do they have if they feel that the name of their competitors app is having such a material impact on their business?
Reading between the lines given the complete lack of similarity between the names, it seems to me you are grasping at straws because your own business model is not viable. If I were an investor, I would really question the sustainability of your startup given you are having to use vc money to shut down competitors as opposed to building constructively a sustainable business. Just my 2 cents.
The underwriter has no legal obligation or "duty" to guarantee or support the original issue price. Definitely, they have an economic and business incentive to ensure the price stays above the issue price. Failure to keep the IPO above this price could lead to a loss of credibility with their large institutional buyers and also with the issuer and their participation in future IPOs.
There is another possibility and that is dealers were desperately trying to maintain facebooks price above the Ipo price, especially given the significant lower fees taken on this Ipo and the greenshoe option. Without this dealer intervention it is possible facebooks price would have correlated more with zynga's price short. The greenshoe option http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenshoe could also have something to do with these trading patterns. Given facebooks stock performance this is not positive for future Internet IPOs.
Yes I am wondering whether it is that much different than including a concern module, at the end of the day you still have to test the code. Interesting approach though.
A very interesting and timely article coming right at the time when I am reevaluating the launch functionality for my Asian "yelp-like" startup what2do.asia and after just having a series of meetings with seed/vc investors.
The interesting thing is that the Asian local search market has never really been cracked, it is highly fragmented and travel patterns and local search needs are very different. Anyway thanks for posting this and sharing, it has provided some great insights.
After I read this it really makes me want to find an alternative to gmail, its too bad the main focus is diluting from being the best at search to becoming a social vehicle. If others feel as i do i think there are some potential great product ideas/opportunities for some of the cloud storage services to expand their product offerings, maybe other readers know of such as service?.
I find it scary relying on one company with the famous motto about evil having so much data about me and with the no opt out nature of this policy - as a result I now make an effort to ensure that I am not automatically logged into my browser when I search.
An obvious conclusion if your definition of design is "how something looks". I would suggest that your attitude would doom any startup relying on a human to machine interface to failure. Without a focus on designing for useability or user experience I would argue that your startup will not solve any users problem, as they will give up on even trying to use it. So I think anyone giving credence to you views with respect to their startup will quickly find themselves with a lot of wasted effort and a pile of horseshit.
I think some good ant-trust regulatory lawyers would have a field day with this. But one would have to have deep enough pockets to pay the legal bills!
The reality is that the accelerator model has more parallels to the investment banking model than many of the commenters are recognizing. Very entertaining to see some commenters trying as well to justify that startups have more benefit to society than bankers or MBAs, in fact hilarious as the reality is that without those "dumb" MBA investment bankers who can attract IPO money to feed the VC's to fund startups, many with questionable and untested business models, accelerators and most startups wouldn't exist.
Thanks for the entertainment, better not waste too much more time and get back to trying to bootstrap my startup.