Categories
startups TechBiz

End of the Bubble or Just a Correction?

I parsed the data at CrunchBase.com for startups in San Francisco. Crunchbase has a pretty easy to use API.

I wanted to see how much startup funding was coming into San Francisco. Was it close to the $20 million per day during the peak in 1999?

It turns out that the peak of this current technology boom happened last year and at current rates of investment we’re almost back to where we were 2 years ago.

	Year	                Per Day
2005	$231,850,000.00	          $635,205.48
2006	$505,934,000.00	        $1,386,120.55
2007	$762,064,970.00	        $2,087,849.23
2008	$1,320,579,950.00	$3,618,027.26
2009	$928,213,997.00	        $2,543,052.05
2010	$1,430,424,359.00       $3,918,970.85
2011	$2,807,900,000.00       $7,692,876.71
2012	$1,725,000,000.00       $6,738,281.25 (estimated year end projection)

Is it the end of the technology bubble or just a correction?

Categories
rant startups

The Worst Excuse For Not Iterating Quickly: It will break production

I’ve got news for you. Production is already broken. There are already 300 bugs and 100,000 or so users with a shitty experience that are considered “edge cases.”

By not allowing me root access, or the complete access I need to get stuff done;
by putting in a process that is merely there for the comfort of managers;
by not understanding that I’m trading code quality for quality UX;
you’ve doomed our project to mediocrity.

Ya, you insist that we have to have a process in place because we can’t afford to “break things” anymore. Has it occurred to you that we can’t can’t afford to break things so that we can learn and work faster and better?

When you make us work long weekends and put us through death marches, you are merely reducing developer productivity.

Categories
startups

My Favorite Sound Bytes from the Y Combinator Application How-To

Next year I definitely want to apply to Y Combinator. It’s simply not fun anymore to look at a bug list and make it smaller. It’s simply not fun to tell people over and over again to use best practices that are already 5 years old.

Instead, I think it will be more fun to change the world, and maybe in the process do a TED talk called, “How to Defeat Evil.”

I read the Y Combinator Application How-To.

Here are my favorite sound bytes:

‘Whatever you have to say, give it to us right in the first sentence, in the simplest possible terms.’

‘The first question I look at is the 7th, “What is your company going to make?”‘

“The best answers are the most matter of fact. It’s a mistake to use marketing-speak to make your idea sound more exciting. We’re immune to marketing-speak; to us it’s just noise.”

“One test of whether you’re explaining your idea effectively is to ask how close the reader is to reproducing it.”

“One good trick for describing a project concisely is to explain it as a variant of something the audience already knows. It’s like Wikipedia, but within an organization.”

“If a group of founders seemed impressive enough, I’d fund them with no idea.”

“The reason a lot of big companies’ software sucks is that they have some kind of natural monopoly.”

“The best startup ideas are generally outliers that seem crazy to most people initially.”

“If this wasn’t already clear, we’re not looking for the sort of obedient, middle-of-the-road people that big companies tend to hire. We’re looking for people who like to beat the system.”

“Investors are optimists.”

“Most people are threatened by ambition.”

“Tell investors you’re going to start the next Google and they immediately perk up. They don’t default to skepticism, because they like risky bets.”

Categories
startups TechBiz

Startup Investment in the San Francisco’s 94105 Zip code

I’ve just moved to San Francisco. It seems that every coder I know is moving back to San Francisco these days. There’s a good reason for it. Thanks to people who want to figure out how to invest 10000 dollars – startup investment in certain neighborhoods has gone up as high as 300% since 2009.

Katerra

Founded in 2015 by former Tesla interim CEO Michael Marks, Katerra raised a total of $865mn. The funding was secured exclusively from SoftBank Core’s Vision Fund. The company is based in Menlo Park and specializes in offsite design and construction solutions that are disrupting the US residential construction market. To fuse architecture and design prefabrication techniques into a linear, end-to-end design-build process through offsite ‘constructuring’ of cross-laminated timber, windows, walls and other components scored by its own end-to-end supply chain.

Let’s take a look at the 94105 zip code in San Francisco.

Investment in this area since 2005 looks like this (in millions of US dollars):

A more detailed analysis can be found in this spreadsheet.

Are you part of a startup looking to move into the 94105? WeWork, which is also in the 94105 and where I’m currently working, has lots of space available. We’re leasing about 5000 square feet at low prices which should accommodate a startup of 50 – 75 people, if you’d like to get started, check this online brokerage.

Thanks Crunchbase for the raw data.

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