VCs would happily invest in low risk, high-return investments -- that is in fact what they are looking for.
But wherever there is truly low risk, multiple funding sources will compete, and returns will be driven lower. Companies that fit the profile you describe will generally use debt financing, which is not available to venture startups.
If you're working on a smaller, highly tactical idea then persistence is often a waste of time. Anyone who meets a lot of startups will see many ideas that just aren't going to work. The sooner the founders realize it and move on, the better off they are.
In general I think pay-to-pitch is highly suspicious, but I'm sympathetic to Graham Lawlor and Ultralight startups. He charges a small fee to cover expenses and make sure people are moderately serious. There's no way he's getting rich off of it. Pizza is included. The feedback and exposure are well worth the minimal cost. If the fee still bothers you, then just don't pitch there.
On the one hand, it's kind of a classic dick move by Mark, pretty typical of his bloody mindedness. (He's more of a bulldog than Zinga ever was.)
On the other, in any company as big as Zynga there are people who coast along and don't really earn their shares. Zynga isn't trying to take back what's vested, just clamping down on future shares for people who aren't doing a great job, maybe playing a lesser role than they were originally hired for. That seems like a perfectly valid thing to do -- in fact it's only fair to the employees who are pulling their weight.
You're absolutely right -- RDBMSes were designed to solve problems with the nosql-type approaches that preceded them. The nosql bandwagon is blindly rolling into the past, where it will crash into the old problems of concurrency and consistency under load.
BTW if you want nosql-style schema flexibility within an RDBMS, then a simple solution is to store XML or JSON in in a character blob. Keep the fields you need to search over in separate indexed fields. If you make incompatible version changes, then add a new json/xml field.
There's already artemisinin resistance starting in several places around the world, especially the Thai-Cambodia border, a very chaotic area with high endemic malaria.
The main problem is that cheap medications are often out of date or have improper dosage. Also, people stop taking medication when they feel better, but before the parasite is eliminated. The result is resistant parasites survive the treatment, and then spread.
We have maybe a decade of artemisin usability in the hottest areas. Could be more or less depending on how efficient public health practices are. But no way is it a permanent cure.
Most vaccines are against viruses and bacteria. Malaria is a more complicated organism, a protist with many local varieties, and a tremendous ability to evolve around vaccines and medications in general.
Natural immunity to malaria is often limited to the local variant -- go a couple hundred miles, and you have no resistance at all. Vaccines rely on the body's natural immune system, so it is nearly impossible to create a single vaccine that is effective across the world.
For this reason, I'm highly skeptical that this initial test result will hold up with broader trials. BTW my spouse is a malariologist, formerly at WHO, and I've been a witness to much of the fight against malaria over the years.
There are so many ways to screw over a non-employee, minority common shareholder, you may well have no case here.
For example, if the company hit a rough patch, it might have been recapitalized, with all current shareholders wiped out. Since your partner had 80% of the shares, and plenty of cash, he could have easily pulled this off.
Depending on what state you're in, you may no longer have any right to seek redress. If your partner knows what he's doing (or has a lawyer who does), the best you're going to get is a small amount of cash to go away. And if you guys are on bad terms, you may not even get that.
Why change when you are hauling in billions of dollars per year, and there's nowhere to go but down? The mobile carriers are going to extract as many dollars as possible while they still can.
The fundamental problem is lack of competition. When there are only a small number of providers, none of them have an incentive to slash the price of texts to a more reasonable level.
If you start a startup, you'll probably fail. Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.
The real story might be that his product just isn't as good as the competition. It took 10 seconds of searching to find https://www.igradeplus.com/, which on the surface looks like a much better offering.
He seems critical of his customers and dismissive of his competitors, both of which are big red flags.
@pg I think you should consider that your portfolio company is possibly not telling you the whole truth after they screwed up in a major way. I have no idea what happened -- just asking you to consider the possibility, which you seem to reject out of hand.
They have every right to promote their differentiation. Speaking as someone who lives in a great part of Manhattan and is often out of town, I've never used AirBnb because I don't trust their verification. I will definitely look for a competitor that does more thorough screening, even if the volume and rental price is lower. It's worth it to me.
There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs had awful pay, about $15K/yr, but it was a chance to break in to the business.
One grizzled editor chain smoked cigarettes through our interview (you could do that in the office back then). He listened to me describe why I wanted to write. Then he leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke, and told me:
"You kid come into this business thinking you're going to make a difference. Pretty soon you find out, you're just filling the space around the ads."
He was right, actually. So I got into high tech instead, and have been doing startups ever since. Not sure I always make a difference, but at least I'm trying, instead of just filling space...
You'd be surprised. The ones that raise the most money also have the hardest time getting over the preferred total. The purchaser will take care of the employees it wants, but other common shareholders often end up out of luck.
If YC holds common shares, then you need to adjust the expected value down quite a bit. On any exit that isn't a huge win, non-employee common shareholders are by far the most likely to get short end. The expected value is probably 10-50% of the fully diluted headline value of a VC deal.
But YC is clearly going to do spectacularly well. They deserve big congrats for what they've accomplished.
But wherever there is truly low risk, multiple funding sources will compete, and returns will be driven lower. Companies that fit the profile you describe will generally use debt financing, which is not available to venture startups.