Strongly recommend tiger21 - which is an amazing community of people dealing with the positives and negatives of wealth. I have found it immensely helpful.
We are building a new kind of venture capital investment firm - Empros Capital.
We are hiring for two roles:
1. People that have a technical background and want to become investors.
2. People that have an extraordinary background outside of technology (especially in writing or other liberal arts) and a deep interest in technology and want to become investors.
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Interesting to think about why this reality didn’t come to pass. Ben was clearly right about the opportunity market being huge and i think it’s timing. Without having thought too much about I think he underestimated or couldn’t compete with Microsoft. Having cheap wintel PCs everywhere made next irrelevant.
The points Steve makes in the early parts of the session were quite visionary, but when he got to the hardware parts, I guess it's quite easy to say in retrospect what they got wrong.
What's interesting, however, is that he does discuss this from several angles (my interpretation / memory below), namely that a) the hardware angle was a way to get people to use the software, b) a purely software venture couldn't sustain funding for the level of marketing required to break into the market, c) software seems to be moving slower than hardware (? - I guess that's the 80s / early 90s for you) and d) there's still a juicy hardware business that would be left off the table, if it were a software-only venture. So, it was a fairly well researched and opinionated bet, that just didn't pay off. I guess by tying the success of their software to their hardware, they ended up sealing its fate.
I agree completely. I went all in and I have 7x UniFi ap AC in my house (2 per floor over 3 floors and one in the guest house). They are all powered by the switch (power over Ethernet) making it super clean.
The software is fine by the big advantage is that it has meraki reliability without the licensing.
I think the spirit of this is misguided and goes against the spirit of the compensation. The stock based compensation is designed to align everyone's incentives as well as filter for individuals who believe in the prospects of the company.
Hedging out your stock based compensation goes directly against this, and misaligns you with the rest of your company. I think if you don't believe in the companies prospects it is best to take another job or ask for more cash and less equity.
No not really. Being an employee itself is a 'hedge against risk'. As an employee with this kind of 'insurance' you still want the company to do well and have the stock go up in value because it personally benefits you.
- Selling enterprise software (you can make 10%-20% of an 8 or 9 figure deal)
- Selling securities in some form or another (you make ~5% of deals worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars)
- high leverage consulting (solving very hard tech problems for lots of people. for example: I have a friend who helps a whole bunch of computer vision companies and makes a ton. Another friend is an SEO expert.)
- Patenting core technologies and selling those patents (A buddy of mine sold his patent for $10M)
- "platform based land grabs". Think of the people who bought tons of domains early in the Web's history. Or the first guy to make an emoji app on iOS. These are different than "starting a company" as you really only need a product and can pull it all off on your own. I suspect there will be more of these in the future.
All of these require creatively navigating business as well as being an awesome dev.
Sales/Business Development executives are generally the best compensated in most companies. You may recoil at the thought of something smarmy like sales. However, there is an learned art to the process when done well. And leveraging your background on the software development side could prove a huge competitive advantage. Buyers will see you as the Real Deal.
Would you mind sharing some more about how your friend monetized his patent? I'm in a somewhat similar situation (except it's a hardware patent, not software) and would love to learn from a success story. Alternatively I can reach you out-of-band (let me know what's your preferred contact method), or you can ping me at bgxvsp at hotmail. Thanks!
I would debate that...if your 'product' takes a team of stanford engineers to actually deploy at an enterprise, then it's probably closer to a dev framework.
No, it's a bog-standard on-premise "Enterprise" product, like Oracle, SAP, etc. This is how that business model works. The customer pays _both_ for the software _and_ for the on-site engineers, usually through the nose.
Well, they need a way to get up-to-date data into the system from whatever it's coming from. That alone requires someone to write code. They probably also do some customizing of what data is displayed; maybe via a GUI or maybe via code. But that's just the last mile (on each end) that needs customization.
I don't see how you can simplify that into calling it a "dev framework".
> if your 'product' takes a team of stanford engineers to actually deploy at an enterprise, then it's probably closer to a dev framework
Fair enough. But you may be underestimating the value of production-quality fast-development dev frameworks in enterprise.
Remember, these are guys who are used to seeing 5-year project timelines for anything that touches more than one system. (And every business case touches more than one system...)
Message me if you are interested.
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