The 211 number was given as what Airbnb has found to be what it takes to break even on the cost of a unit. Prop F, and others like it, are not trying to destroy Airbnb but stop people from purchasing housing and using it exclusively for short term rentals.
That statistic is meant to say that only 340 units were rented out enough to match what could have been made via a lease. So if people are snatching up property to use just for Airbnb, they either aren't doing it a lot or aren't actually making a sound economic decision in all but 340 cases.
That is how representative democracy works. You decide how things work in the area where you live. Imagine if I got to decide how things worked in your neighborhood without living there, that wouldn't be fair.
People who _want_ to live somewhere have no rights to it. They are by definition not yet part of the community. That's like allowing job applicants vote on company policy. I'm sure they would want to, but communities are defined by those in them.
"Sharing economy" is just the marketing term for it. If I share a bench with you, I'm not charging you for the privilege. I agree that it is the word we use, but it doesn't accurately communicate what we're talking about.
It's a difficult line to walk. On the one hand, sharing sounds nice. Even as capitalists we are suspicious of efforts to make a profit. And many of the "sharing economy" services are about using things that you personally own and selling use of them to the public.
On the other hand, when AirBnB/Uber/etc try to make an economic argument for their services, it is clearly not around sharing. We're exchanging value (my empty home, parked car, etc.) for value (your dollars, as a proxy for work you have done.)
> nothing stops an unethical founder from raising 800k at a 8M cap, and turning right around and letting the company get acqui-hired for 4M a month later, pocketing $3.6M and leaving the investors with half their money.
Except that they just exchanged a stake worth $7.2m and sold it for $3.2m. Founders with large stock options are _more_ incentivized than even investors to maximize valuation in the event of a sale.
I understand that you want to make a bet while minimizing risk, but if you're going to try and guarantee your money back then as a company I'm going to price that in by minimizing the upside.
Without liquidation preferences, you as an investor can negotiate more reasonable valuations (if you're setting a cap of $8m and the company is willing to take a $4m buyout, you've seriously mispriced the company.) That means more potential upside.
In Silicon Valley it would be like a company that is raising record amounts of money at mind-boggling valuations but whose revenue isn't growing at the same pace.
One of the major question marks has been wage growth during the recovery. Stock markets have been skyrocketing, but wages have generally remained stagnant.
Similarly, labor participation (i.e. of the people who could work, how many are actively looking/employed) has remained worryingly low. While the US unemployment rate is very low (~5.1%), that isn't a direct inverse of those who are employed. There is a huge group of people who have simply given up trying to find work and others who are working but less than they would like (e.g. part-time, have one job but would like to work another/overtime, etc.)
We see that effect on inflation, which is no where near the 2% level that the Fed would like. Inflation crudely correlates with real growth because it encourages spending; if the money I have will be worth less in the future, I'm more likely to spend it today.
So in effect, we look at the S&P and think "Awesome! We're at all time highs!" But then we look at the economic fundamentals for people and it looks less sketchy.
> Seeing a team build a prototype shows another level of commitment. I've built hardware, so i know how much more time/effort/money it takes over a software wireframe...
A wireframe is not the same as a hardware prototype. The similar analogy would be a functioning product, which in software is also difficult to do well. Functioning means it solves a need better than existing solutions, which requires research, experience, insight, and technical knowhow.
Furthermore, building a functioning software product that is well-engineered to scale (as opposed to a hacked out MVP) is, in my personal experience, rare. Very few "engineers" are able to.
Could you run the other ones as well? If you're positioning yourself as a faster alternative to ABP, it makes sense to compare yourself against other popular alternatives.
That's really been the most enlightening part of the series for me.
Reinforces that the hardest part in engineering is rarely the technical problem. Distributed databases are really f*ing hard, but infinitely harder if the people can't work together or don't open up to faults.
We struggle with that last one all the time. Our sales team can't add issues with tags or assign them without write access to the repo. So they just have to dump them in issues and then engineers have to categorize them.
Ideas may be cheap, but that doesn't mean that good ones are not valuable. Execution against a bad idea is my largest frustration with SV.
Consider Color[1]. Raised $41m for a genuinely terribly idea. Social networking with random people in your vicinity just isn't a good idea. All of the time and effort spent solving that "problem" was a waste of brilliant people's limited life.
On the other hand, the AirBnB team has executed tremendously well. Their idea is also excellent. To say that ideas are cheap is to discount the vision of a company. It's to repeat the tired maxim that hard-work is all it takes to be successful. But no matter how hard you work towards putting Tinder on the Blockchain, it is still a terrible idea.
Start with a vision of how you the world will be different, then apply execution towards that.
> In other words, Square today is more of a financial services company than a consumer product company
They are becoming a B2B software company, building back-office tools. Square Capital is a financial service, but a majority of the new products they've rolled out are small business software products.
One critical question not yet addressed is how Square handles the impending (October) switch to ship and pin readers. My guess is they take a one-time charge by shipping new readers to every customer; otherwise they are open to a competitor swooping in.
> With Wallet’s demise went Square’s Starbucks partnership that allowed people to pay for their coffee using the app (though the company continues to process payments for Starbucks)
Fortune neglected to mention how disastrous that deal was for Square. They lose money on every transaction. They spent, and continue to spend, substantial money for press and acquiring a customer outside their target market (small businesses.)
Lastly, there is no criticism that they have filed for an IPO while there CEO is also the temporary CEO of another public company. That's an incredible distraction at a difficult time for any company — exactly the moment when you want your leadership focused on getting everyone on the same page.
You are technically correct. Silicon Valley uses P/E when calculating valuation/revenue, because startups are rarely profitable.
They aren't equivalent in the same way that user growth and revenue growth are not equivalent to profit growth. A misinformed statistic for a misinformed view of how to build a successful business.
From startups and public markets to open source projects and online communities, communication and collaboration are always the most difficult and rewarding piece of any human endeavor.
Never let the technical problems mask what really matters, where the real hard work comes in: people.
They may be important, but the argument against them isn't just not understanding their market.
If they were a strongly profitable, or even high revenue-generating, company then the announcement wouldn't be about strengthening Yahoo's digital portfolio or expanding their reach in mobile, social, and native. It would be yelling about the cash flow potential.
Site visits, money raised, and number of employees are not business metrics.
The problem is that RubySpec isn't used to TDD cross-implementation features. It isn't a "specification" so much as a reflection of what MRI does.
The Rubinius team's complaints (though hyperbolic) still stand. Developing features in MRI and then testing other implementations against that is not a good design process. It makes sense for historical reasons, but there is significant work to be done cleaning out the cruft of Ruby.
Note that Kara Swisher (executive editor of Re/Code) was married to Megan Smith [1]. Megan is now CTO of the United States, but previously was at Google for over a decade and a VP at Google X.
It's not unreasonable that Kara, and by extension her team, would therefore have made a number of high-level contacts inside Google.
That said, if they are speaking to sources then they should reference them (even if anonymously.) Otherwise, as you noted, we can only consider it an opinion piece masquerading as journalism.
That statistic is meant to say that only 340 units were rented out enough to match what could have been made via a lease. So if people are snatching up property to use just for Airbnb, they either aren't doing it a lot or aren't actually making a sound economic decision in all but 340 cases.