Mobile app = table stakes these days. I think though that Mercury being a place to park cash for startups and earn interest to off-set SaaS costs could be worth it though. You might want to think about a tier where if startups maintain a minimum balance of $X, certain partner services are included for free as an alternative to earning interest.
the point of notes is to be able to raise without expensive legal fees and be reasonable on valuation (i've done a lot of angel investing and when i invest i want a "starting point" - doesn't have to be crazy low but has to "make sense" - at least to me; 20% discount on next round isn't appealing enough {why would an angel putting money super early with the greatest chance of losing it all only get a relatively small discount})
Ease and simplicity is definitely the biggest reason notes have continued to be used. But their original purpose was to solve the problem of setting a price on early stage companies.
I agree that 20% discount by itself is not appealing enough incentive for the risk of early stage investment. But what about 40%? ...50%? A discount is just the mechanism that most accurately captures the variable nature of valuation. Finding the right number is where the modeling happens.
I believe 25% is the smallest discount I've seen thrown around, 40%-50% is rather common.
As was mentioned elsewhere, smaller discounts tend to apply to shorter horizons, such as when bridging immediately into a round. In those cases, they can be a good way for VCs to get on the cap table with prorata rights without having to muck around in series-A drama.
I'm unclear on how the cap would be a starting point? To DelaneyM & pcmaffey's point, it then becomes a proxy for price, so you've effectively set a valuation.
Would it be more appealing if you the round was closed in the next few months, so you investing early would be well rewarded with the discount?
can't price it without it being a real equity round in which case closing costs are the real issue (the other reason why converts work well at early stages)
brave should do ad replacement implement horizontal ad targeting based on sites you visit and then pay publishers and users. users don't want to pay for content (we're spoiled by free), they don't really care about ads as long as they are relevant (to a point), and publishers are stuck right now implementing "native ads" which is just sneaky clickbait crap. brave is onto something but paying with bitcoin will reduce the value of the potential from an everyone market to a much much much smaller one.
Blocking ads is one thing, lets just say for the sake of argument that users have a right to not execute stuff on their own computer.
But replacing ads on websites is quite another. I don't understand how this wouldn't be downright copyright infringement made for profit reasons. And if they share that revenue with users, then users can get sued as well.
I also think such a business model is incompatible with what it says on the box. On one hand, this browser is advertised as being more privacy friendly, on the other hand users would be willing to submit their browsing history to yet another third-party for ads targeting.
Mozilla was harshly criticized on HN for wanting to include ads in Firefox with an implementation that was never communicating with any Mozilla servers, all the targeting being done offline.
I surely hope HN isn't guilty of double standards.
With the money they didn't stand still, they started hustling and built an outstanding buy/rent site that kills the ugly competition (magicbricks, commonfloor, indiaproperty).
Have to admit that the "Look Up" campaign has been nothing short of silly.
That's an issue for the first month or few, but then it goes intuitive.
When it sunk in for me, I found myself combining operations in new ways without thinking about it. The situations where I really have to think about what I'm doing are usually when it's something weird like encodings or huge blocks of strangely formatted daily-wtf-worthy legacy code.
Sublime Text certainly has a lower upfront commitment cost to productivity, though. I still pop it open occasionally just because Ctrl-D is amazing.
and yet it's not necessarily around big successes. companies aim to exit modestly all the time (not every company can be a google)
i run a company that employs "remote workers" but all centered around one city so that there is some in-person interaction and 4-6 big meetings across our two offices. i think the compromise between the talent demand "problem" and finding remote workers scattered across the world is to pick a 2nd/3rd tier city that's reasonable and set up shop there. it's worked for us and i don't think we're any company special.
