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Re:Show HN: Venture Dealr – Visualize and turn the knobs on ... by raymondgh on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @02:18PM (#10347839)
Awesome page, learning a lot. As someone who never really understood this song and dance, here's my feedback. I think you should include a more direct explanation of pre- and post- money valuations. Sure, it's really simple: Premoney+money=postmoney, but that doesn't mean it's common knowledge. Second, the explanation of the option pool shuffle is important to understand the example; it shouldn't be a subtext of an asterisk in the second column. I would also recommend being more direct with the definition of effective valuation as well at the time of its introduction.
Re:Show HN: Venture Dealr – Visualize and turn the knobs on ... by raymondgh on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @02:36PM (#10347980)
It may also be interesting to add levers for duration of time between financial events. Then we can look at the exit analysis from an investor's point of view and understand a little bit more about investing at different stages... then you could add levers for success rates at each stage (Dave McClure tweeted a visualization of this recently)!
Re:Show HN: Venture Dealr – Visualize and turn the knobs on ... by floatrock on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @04:01PM (#10348616)
Can you link me to that? Would love to understand better what's important and what people look for in that sort of analysis.
Re:Show HN: Venture Dealr – Visualize and turn the knobs on ... by raymondgh on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @04:30PM (#10348852)
https://twitter.com/davemcclure/status/647824009992626176

If you look at his account around that date, he has a few more tweets on a similar topic. I don't think it's really necessary to understand your main topic, but it could be fun :)

Re:Show HN: Venture Dealr – Visualize and turn the knobs on ... by floatrock on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @04:09PM (#10348681)
All good feedback! Thanks!

The option pool math is kinda hard to visualize, and that link's "we think you're worth $x, but let's create $y of new options and call their sum your pre-money" quote is probably the most succinct way of explaining it. Did the blue bar with the dotted component for the new options make sense, or was that too subtle? Any other suggestions for how to show it?

Re:Show HN: Venture Dealr – Visualize and turn the knobs on ... by raymondgh on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @04:29PM (#10348845)
That quote of "worth $x, let's create $y" was what made it click for me. Great way to explain it. The dotted lines only really helped me to label the data on the bar chart, but on the right-hand column, I didn't quite get it. What if you underlined 8M with two colors: one for the 6.5M effective valuation and one for the 1.5M New Options (lengths based on makeup ratio)? Also one thing that might help is modifying the horizontal lines; at the same weight, I wouldn't infer a Sum calculation, but if the bottom line were bolder, I might think to add up the numbers