Maybe a dumb question, but doesn't YourMechanic do this as well?
I suppose auto repair and geo-location are a better match together than house cleaning (rip HomeJoy, I really liked that company but it isn't as hard to book cleaning services as it is to get a reliable taxi on demand...)
But yeah, once I've found a few mechanics in my area that I like, why would I book them through an app?
Also I do all of my own repairs, I know this is not typical of auto owners, but it's very rare I need car repairs from a professional
Where did the VCs get the money from [1][2]? If they didn't break a sweat, they won't hesitate to throw it around without asking questions about profitability.
EDIT: People who are downvoting are trying to hide the truth of the market, whether it's a bubble or not, this is the source of the money and in turn, your livelihood ;)
[1] Probably from banks who got it from the gov't who got it for cheap, right?
VC funds getting money from banks? I've not heard of that and your link doesn't support it. Unless the government connection you're trying to assert is that low interest rates drove more money into VC funds in order to seek higher returns.
> Unless the government connection you're trying to assert is that low interest rates drove more money into VC funds in order to seek higher returns.
This is a constantly overlooked factor in what's been driving the VC climate for the past few years. "Cheap" money (in the form of low interest rates) pushes more money into riskier positions, and the VCs have to give that money to someone. It's no coincidence that the correction is coming at the same time as interest rates finally rising again.
I get the theory there but it's never seemed realistic to me. What VC would actually change their mind about pulling the trigger on an equity by because of a fractional point change in the risk free rate? It just doesn't make sense.
It's not the individual VC that changes their mind. The LP that funds the VC has to work harder for returns when money is cheap. They're incentivized to put more money into potentially higher-yielding investments (or even just keep the same asset allocation, but a bigger pool = more money going into VC at the same allocation). That in turn means they're incentivized to fund more marginal VC firms, and then it's the marginal VC firms that fund the marginal startups.
Good VCs usually maintain the same investing standards in good times and bad. But during boom times, there are more VCs, and many of the newcomers aren't particularly good at it.
That's my point: a change from 3 to 3.25% in the prime rate doesn't suddenly make CoolApprfy into a good vs a bad investment. The need to earn higher returns on cash doesn't make CoolApprfy more likely to go big and pay a return; reality doesn't work like that. If you're investing in CoolApprfy to "win back" some income streams, you're doing it for the (very) wrong reasons.
My point is that there's a wide variety of beliefs as to whether CoolApprfy is a good company. To get funded, CoolApprfy only needs to identify one person who believes it is.
When money is cheap, it is much more likely that they will be able to find someone controlling money who believes it is. When money is expensive, the intersection of [people who have money] x [people who believe CoolApprfy is a good company] is much smaller. For companies that are actually good companies, this intersection will likely (although not always; good companies fail to get funded in challenging fundraising climates all the time) still be non-zero. For companies that are bad companies, it's much more likely they will be unable to find anyone who believes they are good companies.
Markets are made up as individuals, but they don't behave like individuals. An effect does not have to be observable on the individual level for it to be observable in the behavior of the market as a whole.
That would still suggest that the set of "VC investments that depend on Fed policy" is the same as the set of "VC investments that will sputter out anyway" (module the fortuitous luck factor).
Are you saying that a change in interest rates doesn't have an effect on funding decisions? Because it seems like fractional interest rate changes would have (at least) a fractional effect on risk perception.
Plus, are you accounting for tax benefits and other ancillary forces?
From a 2014 WSJ article [1] : "Spanish banking giant Santander in July announced a $100 million venture capital fund to invest in fintech start-ups globally, and a few months ago HSBC allocated up to $200 million for investment in early-stage tech companies with the aim of improving its technology."
These are literally drops in the ocean for banks and VC in general.
Banks invest in VC the same way that auto manufacturers do: to suss out potential innovations and/or to have inside access to future disrupters. They don't do it for the returns.
The article and infographic you link to never mentions banks or the government, and the sources it references for VC funds don't suggest "money that comes easily". (pensions, corporations, endowments, etc - primary or secondary sources that came from working for money)
That's why you're being downvoted. You're attempting to take a controversial position without any logical proof. The "truth of the market" doesn't support your conclusion.
> People who are downvoting are trying to hide the truth of the market, whether it's a bubble or not, this is the source of the money and in turn, your livelihood ;)
You are getting downvoted because while your point about money coming easily might be correct, your link for where money comes from directly contradicts your point.
VC LPs are overwhelmingly people who (a) have a financial incentive to see good returns and (b) are qualified investors. They include family offices, mutual funds, and sovereign wealth funds.
A big part of the latest outsized valuations are actually startups which route around VCs by directly taking investments from so-called "dumb money"—investors who might actually be pretty good at managing a basket of investments, but are not qualified or experienced enough to directly established suitable valuations for startups.
Yes, I completely agree with the above. Litigation is handled poorly, taxation handled poorly (federal and state), identity handled poorly (Social Security Admin), legislation, elections, law enforcement, and these are just the things I can think of...
At every step of the way, something or someone outside of your business can topple your personal life and your company's life just for trying to do business in the USA.
So you either try and deal with it, or go abroad and be labeled as something else entirely
LOL, kind of like the 18th century witch hunts where the witches cry, "If you must burn me at the stake, at least put me to trial by jury of OTHER WITCHES!" Imagine how that would have gone over :P
That seems like a silly minimum for WDC to have, unless the discounting is phenomenal (50%+) compared to other vendors.
I'm asking myself, even if I'm a WDC rep that is selling hundreds of thousands of PC hard drives and having an excellent quarter/year, why would I turn away the business of a growing company?
Tape cartridges can be purchased in packs of 20 from any corporate vendor and no order is too small to attract a rep's attention. I've seen deals (25th to 75th percentile) from $10,000 to $200,000, and the min/max deal range is from $2,000 to $500,000
I imagine it has something to do with demand or their partnerships with their distributors. This is conjecture, but I'd think that in order to keep distribution deals/channels up they might have deals in place that stipulate any order over 10,000 goes direct and any order under goes to preferred distributors. No idea though, but that would make a smidge of sense.
I imagine maybe 10x more than this. The numbers actually aren't too shocking if you think of the mirroring of data that's required for maximum uptime (not even archival), and the occasional disk failure.
1,000 TB (1PB) can be easily handled across ~150 (6-7TB)HDDs for one copy, but 300-450 HDDs would be required for additional mirroring.
Largest tape cartridges out there are between 6 and 8.5 TBs, and cost around $22 per TB. That's only $22,000 per PB, and this is for high throughput cartridges like LTO7 or StorageTek Titanium. LTO5 is much cheaper.
Considering that the largest tech companies and major organizations routinely cut POs for several $100ks and are dealing with 100s of PBs of data across disk, tape, DVDs etc, it isn't outside the realm of possibility to have 300,000+ individual disks and tapes floating out there :)
I thought waking up at 3am, shambling to my desk and connecting to the VPN was bad. Imagine having to drive down to the datacenter and rack 200 hard drives.
Sweet, I appreciate that info :) I imagine 5PB fills up quite quickly for Google too!
At that scale, it's just a function of (number of ethernet cables) x (avg size of ethernet cables), rather than disk space in their data center, I'd imagine!
That's all good, it would just increase the number of disks required to be purchased and the amount of electricity/cooling/floorspace to maintain them. It would add to the disk count, but not really affect cost per TB all that much.
How do cloud storage vendors guarantee triple-mirroring and uptime then? Lots of 2TB drives? Lies? :)
Does it say triple mirroring or triple redundancy? Take a look at the article from Backblaze for an overview of the math. In their case it might be called quadruple redundancy. 20 shards hold 17 shards of data with triple parity. Events destroying hard drives containing information about your data could happen three times, and you still wouldn't lose anything.
> 1,000 TB (1PB) can be easily handled across ~150 (6-7TB)HDDs for one copy
Yea, our latest storage pod (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/open-source-data-storage-serv...) has 60 drives at about 8TB a piece so we're pushing 480TB. Two pods are about a Petabyte, if you go up to the 16TB Hard Drives some of the manufacturers are testing, you can hit pretty close to 1PB in an enclosure, and Dropbox is actually doing that already with their "Diskotech" boxes (HN link -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11282948) - so folks are already getting more and more dense :D
This is not a good example. Distribution, branding and maintaining retail outlets make most of the cost. Ethiopian farmers can't sell their beans for dollars because:
* They haven't shipped them across the ocean
* They don't have warehouses to store them in
* They don't have a retail store to sell them in
* Nobody knows the quality or consistency of Ethiopian Joe's coffeebeans, but they know that Starbucks is consistent good.
A better example of irrational acting is that: MLB tickets can be sold for hundreds of dollars, even though professional baseball is the most boring thing to watch, we barely have good enough eyes to see what's happening from that far away anyway, and you'll have to pay 2x for anything you eat or drink.
Also Beanie Babies. Buying beanie babies and tulip bulbs was really irrational acting.
