YC-backed startup means a culture of 'move fast and break things' - works for facebook, but definately not something I would want to store my bitcoin on, since 'break things' means 'losing all my money with no recourse'
Past performance does not guarantee future results - That is true for all investment types, including home ownership.
Home ownership does have very advantageous tax consequences in the US compared to other instruments - e.g.: deductible interest, tax breaks on capital gains.
But it also depends on your stage of life. If there is a good chance you'll just randomly move to a different city or country in the next few years, then i would not recommend buying a home.
Okay, let's do that thought experiment. Set Sales and marketing expense (Currently $171 million) to zero. So, they would be making $2.3 million a year in profit.
But you can't have your cake and eat it too. Without sales/marketing, you can't expect any growth. And expectation of future exponential growth is the trigger for these very high tech company valuations. Without that growth, I would value it like a blue chip company.
The average P/E ratio of the S&P 500 is about 20 times earnings. That would put the valuation of the company at about $50 million - a far cry from what they want to value it at.
Or, if you do it by sales, the average P/S ratio of the S&P 500 is about 1.7 times sales. Which puts their valuation at about $210 million - still a far cry from what they want to value it at.
So, while they have a scalable and profitable business today, they don't have one which comes anywhere close to justifying their valuation outside the silicon valley bubble. Ergo, they better still be in the search stage.
Average S&P 500 P/E is hardly a good proxy to evaluate a nascent, fast-growing, enterprise technology company. The "E" part of the ratio is still too small to matter.
Salesforce.com hit 6100x P/E in 2011. Facebook had 3500x P/E in 2013 (now at 100+). LinkedIn was over 950x until recently (now 770).
Bottom line: as any other IPO, the valuation is not a reflection of how much the company is worth today, but what the company will be worth in the future. That's why growth is so important for them, and building a successful sales team is the single most important thing for Box now.
They have the model, and it's proven scalable. Now they have to just execute it. Before everyone else.
How many people actually have a net worth > $30 million due to stock options from a Silicon Valley startup? Assuming a billion dollar exit, you would need 3% equity (post dilution) to end up with that net worth, or 5% if you want that net worth after-taxes. The average startup is going to have maybe 2-5 people with that level of equity. There aren't that many billion dollar exits, so my gut is that the total number across all startups in the last 5 years isn't going to be more than about 1000.
I would guess the number of wall street traders with a net worth > $30 million would be higher.
Hard to get any stats on this, but it would be indeed interesting to see. In the valley, there are also quite a few 9-digit exits with 2-digit equity percentages. My gut is that in today's scenario, the Silicon valley count would be higher.
The unicode consortium got unicode wrong, not java. At the time Java was created, there only was a BMP and Unicode had a purely 16-bit design. Therefore, it was perfectly reasonable for java to assume a 16-bit char. Unicode was later extended to support more than 2^16 characters, but that was after java was created, hence the need for UCS-2/UTF-16
Other languages which strongly value backwards compatibility and were created around the same time have the same issue - e.g.: C#/.NET, i believe python as well
'Even memcached, which is the conceptually simplest of these technologies and used by so many other companies, had some REALLY nasty memory corruption bugs we had to deal with, so I shudder to think about using stuff that’s newer and more complicated'
Does anyone know what memory corruption bugs they are referring to?
