I don't think Google would benefit from a YC-style approach. Google can afford to buy the winners because they have mountains of cash. They also can only invest the time in companies that have significant upside because the numbers they need to move the meter are so significant. YC is a different animal altogether. They use relatively small sums of money in hopes they will find a lottery ticket.
This is Wil Schroter @ Startups.co. I was a customer like many who got the same email and was disappointed. This is a great company that made some bad moves. I'm not defending that. But I will tell you - it is still a great business, although obviously with some serious challenges. Will this be an incredible uphill battle? Of course. But I believe in the company and I think it's worth it.
If you get over your toes in operating capital it can absolutely happen. Think about a low margin business where most of the money just flows right back in operating costs. You only need a few months of mistakes to be in serious trouble.
@superplussed. I've played with both. My diet isn't awesome, and never has been, so I'm sure that doesn't help. But if I could choose being more focused or giving up chocolate Pop-Tarts, I'm at a point in life where I'm just going to enjoy my Pop-Tarts and deal with the consequences.
@mortdeus - I'm not saying for a moment I wouldn't prefer more concentration. I would also prefer to be 6" taller, have 20 more points on my IQ, and be attractive to women. But life gives you what it gives you.
(author here). The first 18 years of my life, particularly in school, were dreadfully plagued by ADD. I graduated at the bottom of my class in high school, went to summer school year after year, and was generally considered an awful student. I just couldn't concentrate and it was incredibly frustrating. It left me at a point where I really didn't think I had any capacity to do anything, and by 18 I hadn't even bothered to apply for college.
What I came to find out later, after I started a company at 19, was that if I could train my brain to sift out all the incredible noise, there was actually a lot of useful activity going on. 20 years later I finally feel I have a handle on it. I also learned I wasn't the only one. I wish I could sit down with so many more young ADD-laden students, founders and kids and help them along.
What if he did NOT profit? What if he lost millions of his own personal net worth? Would you consider him the opposite of a bastard?
There are very few instances where a company takes a complete header like this and the CEO gets paid handsomely. And how can you compare being in $40 million of cash debt and putting the company to ABC against selling a company in an acquisition?
Last week at this time it was popular to pile on Onlive's CEO to say "he fired everyone and stole the company!".
No one asked why he did it. The common thread was "he was greedy!"
That really pisses me off. We come to find out a week later that the company was days away from total insolvency and that structuring an ABC to deal with $40 million of debt was the only way to keep anyone's jobs. It's a brutally painful place to be.
Sometimes people do awful things for simple and awful reasons. But I believe that's rare. I believe some people are forced to do awful things that they would never otherwise do given the option. I think in this case people didn't want to know, or perhaps didn't care to know why it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.
I fear the media's growing lack of interest in the why.
For as many sales that exist behind closed doors with b/s valuations, here's a few guys who used standard metrics (sales, gasp!) for valuing their company and made multiple attempts to sell it properly.
How about this? Nice job guys. Congrats on sticking to your guns and getting the price you felt was fair.
None of these evolutions in funding happen in a vacuum. There will be new structures to accommodate crowdfunding investors as well as basic provisions.
Remember too that VC's fund an incredibly small number of early stage deals compared to millions of companies that get started each year. Not sure that companies that are heading in the venture funded track are necessarily the model for this.