"If you show revenue, people will ask 'HOW MUCH?' and it will never be enough. The company that was the 100xer, the 1000xer is suddenly the 2x dog. But if you have NO revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue! You're a potential pure play... It's not about how much you earn, it's about how much you're worth. And who is worth the most? Companies that lose money!"
Out of every scene in those two seasons, no sentiment captured what I've witnessed in startups as precisely as this one. Straight up perfect. I wonder who was the main advisor for that speech (this was pre-Dick Costolo, I believe).
It is a ridiculous sentiment, but my startup has had revenue from early on, and I've talked to investors who have wanted to value us on revenue multiples because of that - whereas without having any revenue they would have taken a guess at our potential. (They'd have had to, they can't apply a multiple to $0!)
It's stupid, $2000/month in revenue shouldn't mean you are valued at less than if you had $0/month, but I can understand why some founders don't want to have any at all - in order to not have the more silly investors be distracted by looking at it.
There is a little truth to what he's saying - Once you have more than $0 in revenue, you have to make that number go up every month to keep investors happy and have nice numbers to bring in new ones, which makes it harder for the startup to invest in longer term projects that could bring much more revenue but with a slower buildup.
Same thing is easy to see in established companies: management is more inclined to throw piles of cash at businesses that don't make money while at the same time cutting costs in the "cash cow" divisions to show better growth numbers on the balance sheet.
Huh, Gabe is on that show. How good is that tv show anyways? I've been meaning to binge watch it but it seems like its raison d'être is to take cheap shots at SV.
BBT makes fun of stereotypes, in the way only outsiders can make fun of stereotypes: The jokes don't make sense, the writing seems to have no real compassion for the group that they are lampooning at all, and I've never actually seen people behave like the characters do.
Instead, SV makes sense for people in startups: It doesn't really spend most of its time making fun of how maladjusted startup workers are, like BBT does, but instead makes fun of the theater we all are surrounded by. By just turning the tech into star trek style technobabble, the show can focus on things that are relatable and real.
Take, for instance, a conversation they have, in an early episode of this year, about the problems of high valuations and down rounds. There were articles written about it that hit the very top of HN, because the conversation was so very real. The craziness you see in the GPs video? It seems deranged, but it's said by a character more than loosely based on Mark Cuban, and it's reflecting the values of the time when Cuban made his money! And his story covers a huge issue in entrepreneurship: Does the fact that you managed to get an amazing exit in one company really mean you will be any good later as a venture capitalist? Were you lucky or good?
If you take away all the laughs, the series tackles realistic problems all the time. So the series is not about easy laughs at the expense of people: It's a story about a culture, that happens to have laughs to make sure people that aren't interested in the culture are still entertained by it. Just like The Wire, it's not a documentary, but it sure seems to rhyme with reality.
Office Space should be /required viewing/ in high school. That movie taught me more about what to expect in the typical American office than any other experience in my life.
There's a brief clip of pornography near the beginning. We watched it on the bus ride for a high school trip. The teachers quickly turned it off upon noticing.
I haven't heard any complaints, the humour is on point, the characters are great and it's even more amusing if you have some insight into how ridiculous certain things in real life SV are.
This bit is definitely my favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJIAOosI6js
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo