Yuri Milner Invest $150K to every Y Combinator Startup. A Threat or a Blessing?

Av
I've put two stories below. Other investors are partly very sceptics. The startups however, very glad to accept this investment offer, which are also on good terms. What do you think?

A post from techcrunch.com by Chris Yeh has the whole story. Here is a part:

Editor’s note: Guest author Chris Yeh is an independent angel investor and VP of Marketing forPBworks, one of his investments. He has been involved with Internet startups since 1995. His Twitter handle is @chrisyeh.
Update: This post refers to DST as the investor inStart Fund when it actually is Yuri Milner personally investing, along with Ron Conway’s fund SV Angel.
The big news this morning is Yuri Milner’s announcement that DST and Ron Conway will beinvesting $150,000 in *every* Y Combinator startup on a no-discount, no-cap convertible loan.
Many people have already weighed in with instant reactions—”It’s a bubble!” “It’s the greatest thing to happen to the US economy!” As usual, these off-the-cuff reactions focus on a single part of the story, rather than looking at the big picture.
Let’s walk through the news, step-by-step, and see what it really means. Ultimately, my take is that it’s good for Y Combinator and DST, but bad for the rest of Silicon Valley.

Late last night the 43 startups in the most recent Y Combinator class got quite a surprise. Start Fund, a new fund created by DST’s Yuri Milner as an individual and SV Angel, offered each of the companies a $150,000 investment in the form of a convertible note with no cap and no discount.
Most of these companies are still in stealth mode, and Start Fund hasn’t seen them. They made the offer based on the Y Combinator stamp of approval.
The startups are jumping on board. 36 of the 43 startups in the class had signed the paperwork to take the loan before the event was even over last night, says David Lee, a managing partner at SV Angel who’s also managing the Start Fund. “As of 3 pm today we’ve received 39 confirmed signature pages, and we believe the rest are awaiting approval from their attorneys.”


Populære innlegg fra denne bloggen

Predicates in Core Data

Av
Database programming is all about filtering and sorting tables linked to each other. According to the book Core Data , «Core Data is Apple’s object graph management and persistency framework for iOS, OS X, watchOS, and tvOS.» In a sense, predicates are an object version of the WHERE clause in SQL. Just like NSFetchRequest represent the FROM clause in SQL. I never have had problems with WHERE and FROM in SQL, but the predicate format strings in Core Data has been quite a struggle for me. I don’t think the struggle is only my fault. Predicates should clearly be thought, at least to me, as a method of writing WHERE clauses. Here is some notes from tutplus’ Core Data and Swift: Relationships and More Fetching : let predicate = NSPredicate(format: "%K == %@", "last", "Doe") The predicate format string uses %K (K stands for Key) for the property name and %@ for the value. let predicate = NSPredicate(format: "%K >= %i", ...
More...

How To Disable Google’s Personalization Of Search Results

Av
Bilde
Do you want to know what the rest of the world gets as answer for their search, instead of what Google thinks you may want to see? I do, therefore the post from MakeUseOf.com by Ann Smarty did catch my interest. She explains it well, both for one-time use and how to change your firefox and chrome browser, and I just copy the one-time part: 2. Disable Google Personalization: One-Time (Browser Independent) Again, you may like the feature and the fact that Google tries to show you what you really want (your favorite sites or sites you are more likely to like on top), but in some cases you will want to see “real” results (for example, to check how your own website is doing). In this case, what you need to do is manually modify the search query URL path: just add this parameter: pws=0 The ‘pws=0′ parameter removes the search personalization: If you don’t want to add the parameter manually, use this browser bookmarklet (courtesy of  Google System Blog ): Turn off Google perso...
More...

InvestorForum by VentureLab in Oslo a success story #startups

Av
Bilde
Photo from Hotel Continental website 200 persons, mostly investors, joined to see what 20 startups could offer in Oslo after the finance crisis . I was astonished to see so many foreign investors, from US and from UK. There was in my opinion a lot of great projects . Since I also presented, I could only follow some: Yes Game : They have ingenuos  reduced the chess board from 8X8 to 5X6 by taking away all second officers. In that way they have create a Chess Attack, which can take you into the final stage of a chess party immediately. They have it for iPhone and very important, also as a physical board. uformia created software very well suited for 3D printing. The CEO Cherie Stamm was an American living in Norway. She softened every Norwegian heart when the said the reason was our beautiful nature. 3D Printing is in my opinion a possibility for the Western society to rebuild the manufacturing industry we lost to China. kikora presented a math editor, which evalua...
More...