I agree heartily with the general thesis, that fundraising rounds shouldn't be put on the pedestal they are. About your comments on the tech press, what do you realistically think they can talk about if not funding rounds?

Most forms of impact for early stage companies are typically communicated by traction numbers which you want to keep private from your competitors.

Hi Michael! How do you (& ycomb) feel about startups that require huge amounts of money to function? Vroom, OpenDoor, etc?

Totally fine to need a lot of money. Actually there are a lot of fintech/alternative lending companies where debt fundraising is a big milestone because debt/capital is core to the product. This is relatively rare though.

Is OpenDoor a startup, or a REIT ?

We're a startup that builds software to simplify real estate, and we use capital markets to power that experience. The ability to buy the home directly allows us to put the homeowner in control of their timeline. I like pg's definition of startup here http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Internally, we talk about fundraises as "moments" but not milestones. Fundraising takes work and is critical to growing our business, so we recognize that effort but don't celebrate rounds as successes for the business or for our customers.

their operational side looks/walks/quacks like a startup, so i think something important gets lost in translation if you look at the balance sheets and call OpenDoor a REIT

I suspect this is often used as shorthand as a measurement of progress because it's announced publicly and has some (imperfect) correlation to traction across all companies who receive it.

If you were to define a new standard milestone for "success", what would it be? Revenue, for B2B companies, and active user growth rate for B2C?

I'm not an expert, but I'd probably say a mixture of revenue, gross profit, EBITDA, and growth expectations.