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Leo Polovets
@lpolovets
, 3 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
Great post: "Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company" by @shl.

My favorite passage below is about how hard it can be to estimate the impact of our work.

medium.com/@shl/reflectin…
When I was a SWE, I recall sleeping under my desk for a few wks to launch a "critical" release. It's surreal to think about how hard I pushed & how much I neglected to meet that deadline. I slept in my office for weeks, & it's not even a blip to the company or its metrics today.
Which is not to say 16-hour days can't have value, or that the things we do don't matter. But things that seem to really matter (or not matter) today often look very different after ten years. Remembering that can be useful when you're stuck in a stressful situation.
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Leo Polovets
@lpolovets
The tweet below got me thinking: what are examples of intangible assets that are valuable but hard to factor into valuations? A few to start:

- strong social media skills (@Austen, @wendys)
- proprietary data (Google)
- moonshots & high risk/reward experiments (Google)

Others?
To elaborate on a few of these:
#1 -- Lambda recently raised $. Let's say it was a $100m valuation. I bet VCs didn't say "based on metrics the valuation should've been $95m, but @Austen is great on Twitter, so that bumps it up to $100m." But the tweets have clear value/ROI.
#3 -- A few years ago, Google started doing tons of valuable moonshots: self-driving cars, Google Fiber, Google Loon, etc. One could argue each of these is "$500b+ market cap potential * several percent chance of success." My hypothesis is the stock market doesn't price this in.
Read 3 tweets
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Leo Polovets
@lpolovets
1/ Here are some cool job openings at companies @SusaVentures works with. Each tweet lists an opening + what makes the company special. There are roles of all kinds (eng, sales, PM) in locations all over the US. If you're interested, please apply! #SusaJobs
2/ Company: @outlierai in Oakland
Blurb: Outlier analyzes your business data & automatically surfaces valuable insights
Roles: SW Eng, Data Sci, BD
🔥CEO previously started Flurry ($300m acq)
🔥Lots of interesting data to analyze
🔥Product has big impact on customers' businesses
3/ Company: @Troops in NYC
Blurb: Troops helps sales & customer success teams automate their workflows
Roles: Finance/Ops, Demand Gen, BD, PM
🔥Very experienced founding team
🔥Customers *LOVE* the product
🔥Still a very small team given stage of product. High impact opportunity
Read 9 tweets
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Leo Polovets
@lpolovets
I'm going to stop tweeting politics for a while after this comment, but a tax on assets feels like a very dangerous precedent. It's a clawback on $$ you already earned. If I ever had >$50m (I won't), I'd immediately start looking for new countries to live in. Canada seems nice.
To put this into perspective: if you have a $100m net worth from building a company that's created hundreds or thousands of jobs, and you earn $1m/year to run that company, I think your net worth actually drops each year under this proposal.
An analogy: let's say that starting tomorrow Uber said they would charge the .1% heaviest users $0.10 for every ride they had taken *in the past*. And this charge would happen yearly. And if you're one of those users you can't quit Uber w/o paying a large fee. Would that be fair?
Read 3 tweets

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Anil Dash
@anildash
I’ve tried explaining this story so many times, but Mandeep does it perfectly here. Ride-hailing apps ignoring the law caused countless immigrant families to lose their investment in intergenerational wealth. There’s no accountability or recourse. Whole communities undermined.
To answer the common questions: there’s nothing about enabling innovation in taxi apps that required rewarding VCs funding the breaking of laws. Yes, the medallion system was often broken & sometimes corrupt; replacing that with no laws at all is not going to *improve* that.
Yes, the first wave of apps may have helped with “hailing while black” & other exclusion issues, but antiblackness in the South Asian community isn’t a problem tech can solve. Now ride hailing apps do *no* reporting on who gets picked up — do you trust Uber to do the right thing?
Read 4 tweets
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Connor Ratliff
@connorratliff
Almost all of the Road Runner cartoons are available via the @BoomerangToons app.

I subscribed for $5 & decided I'm gonna watch & tweet about 'em all in chronological order, even the later, terrible ones, for which I have an irrational affection.

Here we go.
#BeepBeep
#MeepMeep
Boomerang lists them alphabetically not chronologically so Chuck Jones masterpieces sit side-by-side with 1960s atrocities (& later 'revival' attempts.)

I am going to start at the beginning. I will also be including Wile E. Coyote/Bugs Bunny & Ralph Wolf/Sam Sheepdog shorts, FYI
September 17, 1949: "Fast And Furry-ous"

Chuck Jones intended this short to be a parody of cat & mouse "chase" cartoons. Instead, he accidentally created the definitive chase cartoon series of all time.
Read 1189 tweets

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