Showing posts with label natalie portman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label natalie portman. Show all posts

Monday, January 07, 2013

Paul Graham's Black Swans


Black Swan Farming
the best ideas look initially like bad ideas ..... The total value of the companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it. ..... we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing. .... in purely financial terms, there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business. ...... You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong. .... the best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas. I've written about this before: if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good ..... the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad. ..... The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners. ..... how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time? It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site (1) for a niche market (2) with no money (3) to do something that didn't matter. ..... When you pick a big winner, you won't know it for two years. .... fundraising is not merely a useless metric, but positively misleading. ..... We can afford to take at least 10x as much risk as Demo Day investors. ..... The best we can hope for is that when we interview a group and find ourselves thinking "they seem like good founders, but what are investors going to think of this crazy idea?" we'll continue to be able to say "who cares what investors think?" That's what we thought about Airbnb ..... if you're flying through clouds you can't tell what the attitude of the aircraft is. You could feel like you're flying straight and level while in fact you're descending in a spiral. The solution is to ignore what your body is telling you and listen only to your instruments. But it turns out to be very hard to ignore what your body is telling you. Every pilot knows about this problem and yet it is still a leading cause of accidents...... The reason Google seemed a bad idea was that there were already lots of search engines and there didn't seem to be room for another. ..... I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, would not be able to raise money after Demo Day. I couldn't convince Fred Wilson to fund them
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Thursday, February 17, 2011

Thursday, September 02, 2010

News: September 2

ReadWriteWeb: Ping: First Look At The iTunes Social Network
Boxee: How Boxee Sees The Apple TV
CNet: Twitter Plans To Record All Links Clicked
VentureBeat: Reddit ‘Excited’ About Chance To Eat Digg’s Lunch
SilverLight: The Future Of Silverlight
TechCrunch: Android Users Can Now Check In To Foursquare By Using Their Voice
ArsTechnica: Plan For Nationwide Free Wireless Broadband Finally Shot Down:For four years the Federal Communications Commission tossed the idea around like a beach ball: a coast-to-coast free wireless service across the low end of the 2GHz "AWS-3" band. The service would pay for itself via advertisements and by selling commercial access to various portions of the license area. The company that proposed the plan, M2Z Networks, would commit to building out the project in a decade, and pay five percent of its annual revenue to the United States Treasury..... the AWS-3 spectrum will continue to lie fallow providing no economic value to American consumers." .... the wireless industry hated the proposal, and is happy about the FCC's announcement.
Business Insider: Yelp's First Daily Deal In San Francisco Gives Groupon A Beating
Wired: Google Testing Full-Featured Google Apps
Business Insider: Early Twitter Employee Alex Payne's Online Bank Startup, BankSimple, Raises A Big Round
WSJ Digits: Twitter Japan Tweeting All the Way to the Bank

CNN: Natalie Portman Generates Oscar Buzz For Racy Role








Washington Post: Departing Obama Adviser Urges More Stimulus
MercuryNews.com: Boxer, Fiorina Clash In Hard-Hitting Debate
Bloomberg: Burger King Agrees To $4 Billion Bid From 3G Capital
Los Angeles Times: Bernanke Says Fed Had To Let Lehman Fail