I don't even need to look at the data to say that in the US most successful companies have at least one white, male founder. Does that mean that if you start a tech company and are non-white or non-male you should make sure to partner up with one to ensure success? Is it just a bias due to demographics? It it a real factor related to an intrinsic advantage of white males in making successful startups (even if it's just an external cultural factor)?

Or, is it a much more complex issue that can't and shouldn't be so easily infographed and turned into a convenient piece of folk wisdom?

Taking this data, which incidentally is extremely incomplete, and using it as a rubric on how to start your company is little more than cargo cultism.

I feel This statement assigns specific attributes to the data-points in question where as the original data is more generalized (and suited to the argument). Doesn't the assignment of random attributes skew the point being made and just try to forcibly fit a separate tangential argument?

Let's look at this from a different perspective. Assume that the data conclusively shows that 2-founder startups have a higher chance of success than 1-founder startups, by a huge margin (say 10x). Does that mean that you should seek a co-founder before launching your startup? Even then, it does not. Consider two different startup ideas, one is founded on a very solid plan with a good chance of success, the other is founded on a bad plan with a lot more risk. The good plan is going to have a much easier time of finding a co-founder, because the potential co-founder will look at the idea and see that it has a lot of merit and potential and they'll be enthusiastic about joining in, whereas the bad idea will have a much harder time finding co-founders. However, imagine if someone with a bad startup idea pushes much, much harder to get a co-founder because they have learned that startups with co-founders are more likely to be successful. Will that help the company's prospects any or will it just warp the equation and result in a bad company failing even with a co-founder?

I think it's more important to go about a startup with your head screwed on straight than to attempt to imitate the forms of previous success. If you find someone you trust who seems to be a valuable addition to your startup as a co-founder, then by all means make that partnership. But if you can't find a co-founder for whatever reason but you are still quite convinced of your business plan then I don't think you should wait. You should certainly be careful that you aren't deluding yourself and be sensitive to any criticism of your startup idea nonetheless, but a good plan is a good plan even if you go it alone.

Also, the amount of founders could be neutral to the success, in such case neither is countering their own success, and again just a matter of samples.

Correlation is not...

What is really necessary is a statistically significant sampling of startups from their inception and tracking the percentage of success and failure depending on various factors. There is simply not enough data in the study at hand to say that 1-person startups are less likely to succeed than 2-person startups, in fact it's quite possible that they are more likely to succeed, we just don't know.

Your next two sentences explain why this isn't true.

  "I don't know what Paul's thinking," Maris said.
  "It's just not true. Our portfolio speaks for itself."

  "We've already closed investments on companies from this class,
  so they don't seem to feel that way," Maris said.

In other words it would be unethical for the VC to not work to get the best valuation.

A) Care deeply about producing the highest return for you and in doing so use their expertise as negotiators including their competative advantage as a well branded firm (google). And in doing so dilute founders and less experienced investors in the process...

B) Ask them to negotiate in a way which maximizes other investors' returns and founder returns at the expense of your own returns.

Both cases you are paying them a fee to do this.

If you answer B, I encourage you to leave a response explaining your position.

Then consider you are a pension advisor who needs high returns to make sure that you will be able to pay the pensions of fire fighters. Would you make the same decision?

Fiduciary responsibility is independent of ethics. You can't use ends to justify means.

Exactly! Enron would be the equivalent if Google Ventures decided to falsify their valuation documents they were sending to investors saying they were getting much better valuations than they actually were. Then one day in 6 years they said all of those financial reports they submitted to the SEC were falsified so there is a total loss in the Google Venture line. In doing so they violated their fiduciary responsibility.

I'm sure there's a line in your head that companies are not meant to cross in serving their investors, but it didn't make it into the argument.

Of course there is, but an arm's length negotiation with CEOs of angel invested startups seeking to be the CEOs of the worlds largest, most innovative companies is well within that line.

Fiduciary responsibility is independent of ethics.

Fiduciary responsibility is the core of business ethics that should never be violated. Within fiduciary responsibility you still can't do anything illegal. Of course ethics are always a grey area which is why there is a discussion about this topic here, but I disagree where the line is clearly with you.

You can't use ends to justify means.

That is not what I am doing.

Seriously, ask yourself what you would want the VC you entrust with your money to do.

Is that all you need to ask in considering how ethical an action is?

The whole point of ethics is to reason in the context of tensions. Tensions between what you want and what others want. Companies have responsibilities to more than their investors. Their employees, their communities, their customers, their environment. Focusing exclusively on one side of the tension has nothing to do with ethics.

Focusing disproportionately on investors is also ethically convenient, because their interests are often aligned with yours.

"an arm's length negotiation with CEOs of angel invested startups seeking to be the CEOs of the worlds largest, most innovative companies is well within that line."

It may seem obvious to you, but it's clearly not obvious to grandparent since that is what the argument is about.

"Fiduciary responsibility is the core of business ethics that should never be violated. Within fiduciary responsibility you still can't do anything illegal."

I think this position doesn't require the word 'ethics'. You can get by with just 'laws'.

This isn't a rhetorical device. I think lots of people think this, and honestly am ok with it. At the least it's internally consistent. It just fails for me because it doesn't permit asking, "what should the laws be?"

If the CEO is unable to negotiate what they are worth, they should hire a dreaded MBA to help them.

1) You're going to be in business with your investors for the next decade (if things go well).

2) The pool of investable startups and investors is pretty small, and reputation matters. If you screw a company once, you might juice your expected return from 50% to 55% (likely still an actual return of $0 on any given deal), but if you get a reputation for behaving badly, your dealflow will no longer include good deals, which hurts you far more.

GV or other capital firms do this all the time, they can probably put a valuation exact to the cents in your startup (I'm exaggerating, still)

Everyone that is on a long lasting business (or better, those who last in business) knows that what comes around goes around

No, that's called business.

I do see what you mean, but I'm not sure the metaphor really helps because it reverses who's the big and famous player.

From the article: Google Ventures managing partner Bill Maris blasted back, telling BI that Graham's accusations were "patently absurd."

First example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-denial_denial#Types: Characterizing a statement as "ridiculous" or "absurd" without saying specifically that it is not true

Summary: PG warns that he sees a pattern at Google Ventures. Google Ventures isn't denying or confirming anything in regards to PG's statement.

Seems simple enough.

// sorry to be a killjoy

This is just innovative guerrilla marketing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ1TIYxm1vM

The money he gives out is legal tender - $2 bills bought in sheets from the mint (they're his "local printer," you see). He just cuts them up and makes various unique forms of moneybook out of them, and he's OK with giving them out at below face value because the ensuing hilarity is worth it to him.

That's very different from making a fake document on official government letterhead or representing itself as a government document.

I really don't get the "word I typed is in the dictionary, but autocorrect thinks it found something better" use case.

Looks like some kool-aid over there about advertising. A brand advertising to its customers is the same thing as someone talking to their friend? Since when? They are not trying to shove ads on the side and pray people click on them because they know people increasingly will ignore them. Instead, they've opted for tricking you into clicking them by putting them in your feed with your friends' avatars slapped on top.

Product placement isn't disruptive as long as it makes sense. I feel Facebook should know enough about their users to make the call on if the user would like to see that post. Notice I say "post", not "ad". I want to see companies the way they are, not the way their ad firms want me to see them.

Sure, there are edge cases. But generally, 99.999% of the time I don't want product updates from companies whose products I use.

This is part of the reason I think FB's advertising value is overrated - a Like is so noisy that it is almost useless, whereas other entities may have actual purchase data, which is far more useful than a "Like".

Google's view of ads is that it's information.

Either way you're going to find we're entering a world where ads are naturally integrated into everything and sometimes you do want it.

"We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of Google unless one of the following circumstances apply:"

"We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Google when we have your consent to do so. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information."

Sensitive personal information: "This is a particular category of personal information relating to confidential medical facts, racial or ethnic origins, political or religious beliefs or sexuality."

All other personal data can be shared on an opt-out basis if they would like - it doesn't say anything to the contrary about this.

You could read Facebook's policy and make the same comment: "We do not share any of your information with advertisers (unless, of course, you give us permission)."

And, of course, one of the ways you can give them permission may be by using the site. It doesn't explicitly say how you give them permission anywhere on the policy.

On our new Policy, we state the facts simply. We don't sell your data in any case, and the only time we ever give it up is when we are being forced to by law. Big companies use legalese to hide and otherwise obscure facts from you and to grant themselves rights to your data that they shouldn't have.

Anyway, I'm not a lawyer and if you don't like our policy, don't use our site (as with any site). Whether or not I'm right or not about Google or Facebook's policy and what they intend, I still don't really understand how mentioning whether Google has a similar policy is relevant to the discussion at hand. We decided to write our own policy because we thought it was doing right by our users, and we encourage others to do the same. Our policy was not written to attack Google or any other company specifically and there's nothing in there that should lead you to interpret it that way.

No, I don't give permission by using the site. That's blatanly dishonest to say that. They already mention that already.

I understand you wrote the new TOS, but I'm not sure how you are understanding Goog's TOS. It's always opt-in. probably the only opt out i know of is from their search crawler for websites.

I would say everyme has a good TOS/Priv Stmt, compared to google, if it says "this privacy policy stands forever, and will not be changed". I know you can't promise that, and I will not ask you to, but that's only case where I would have more trust for keeping the data with you compared to google's. Or I would trust goog's policies better it addresses the legal aspect of it, while being humanly readable and understandable.

The only thing that differentiates you (as in everyme, most references are same)and goog is they have to cover base for billions of people they are handling.

Even if it's snarky (though I didn't make it so), why would someone downvote it rather than disagree with a comment (HN guidelines please). Please downvote if it doesn't add to discussion. What we had above is discussion.

I don't think any founder would take their role for granted or change their position with anyone else - but when you are in the hot seat and you feel the weight of so many people on your shoulders to do well by them and for them, there are days where you wonder if you should just go work for someone else and let them make the decisions for you.

I would venture that the worst feeling in the world is one of being trapped and not knowing what to do. When you are a startup founder, you are trapped all the time, and constantly between rocks and hard places. You need to learn everything but you don't know what exactly. You need to improve growth, improve product, improve retention, improve revenue, improve profitability, but you don't know how sometimes and you don't know who to ask, and a lot of the time you don't even know how to measure success when it does happen until well after the fact. Being a founder is not like anything else in the world, because it's the one societal role where up until you actually accomplish and build something of value and sustain it for a long period of time, there's nobody but your parents to say how proud they are of you.

He is a she, Deena Varshavskaya ~ https://twitter.com/#!/siberianfruit

excellent, thanks for the correction.

Exact method: sha1(bcrypt(sha1(md5.'othersalt').'salt').'anothersalt') and a few more salts + sha1s

As someone who has worked in security for years--in particular, application security assessments--thank you for taking the sometimes hard-to-swallow criticism well, and deciding to actually fix things rather than just deflect the issue. You probably have no idea how many (even reputable) organizations decide to "accept the risk" and ignore security findings. (Edit: More so than the SSL issue, I'm talking about fixing the CSRF)

>The user is not a known quantity and it's his/her first submission to HN, it's very possible he/she is hoping that PayPal email addresses/passwords that you put in match.

There is nothing wrong with the logic in this statement, but you also need to be careful how far you take it. One could argue that any of the small "Show HN" posts around here are hoping to harvest credentials. In fact, I'm sure that some of them do. When using software as a service--or indeed, any web application--there is an inherent degree of trust behind it. Even if the user had made many HN posts, or not bought the pre-made site (which looks nice, IMO), or purchased an HTTPS certificate... credential harvesting is still a real threat.

Even bigger services that claim to encrypt password databases have often been shown to in fact do nothing of the sort (eg, sending password reminder emails etc).

This is why security guys worth their salt will always suggest using random passwords for every service you sign up for and keeping them in an encrypted file a la KeePass or a TrueCrypt container with a long, complicated "master password" for the archive. Additionally, it's always a great idea to enable 2-factor authentication where ever possible (for example, Google accounts).

As to the fact that this is my first post here, I've been a lurker for a long time, and finally had something good to post. I've been on reddit and a few developer forums under this username (and interwhos) for much longer.

Thank you for writing this.