Lots of gems in here. One humorously self-effacing anecdote:
"At that time we knew that a talented engineer in a tough to get tech was worth about $1.5 million per head. Thus, I knew with relative assurance that since we were going to hire at least 70 people with our Series A money, that our worst case scenario was about a $100 million exit.
If anyone is paying attention, you are now saying, wait a minute! Didn't Powerset sell for $100 million to MSFT? .... Yup, we nailed our worse case scenario!"
Reminds me of P.A. Semi, the embedded PowerPC design company bought by Apple in 2008. Obviously Apple had no intention of using PPC anymore, so their product was discontinued.
P.A. Semi had 150 engineers, and Apple paid $278 million for the company. That's about $1.85MM per head. Seems to match the Powerset story pretty well!
"At that time we knew that a talented engineer in a tough to get tech was worth about $1.5 million per head. Thus, I knew with relative assurance that since we were going to hire at least 70 people with our Series A money, that our worst case scenario was about a $100 million exit.
If anyone is paying attention, you are now saying, wait a minute! Didn't Powerset sell for $100 million to MSFT? .... Yup, we nailed our worse case scenario!"