Re:Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
by southerndrift on Friday September 27, 2019 @05:46PM
(#21096566)
Where do you get the people to entrust millions or billions? The organization will be flooded with networks of people who will scam away all money.
Such an organization has to be grown slowly. But that takes too much time if you have the opportunity to manage huge amounts of money right away.
Re:Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
by seem_2211 on Friday September 27, 2019 @09:12PM
(#21097703)
There has been disappointingly little success from all of Google X's many investment dollars. I think with the hundreds of managers, institutional knowledge and helpful infrastructure comes a bureaucracy that kills a lot of what it creates.
Re:Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
by wp381640 on Friday September 27, 2019 @10:23PM
(#21097973)
you're right that Google X is a money sink - one of the first things Ruth Porat did when she came in is take an axe to it as it had been a sore point with instutitional investors for a while
"lets do Google X but with $100 billion" is a laughable business model
Re:Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
by tim333 on Saturday September 28, 2019 @12:17AM
(#21098406)
>Google X is a money sink
Dunno. I'm not quite sure of the figures but in 2015 they put in $3.5bn for the year. Against that Waymo which came out of X was recently valued at $105bn (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/waymo-valuation-cut-40percen...)
Re:Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
by seganddr on Friday September 27, 2019 @10:43PM
(#21098066)
Unless your goals are wealth redistribution and job creation and science...
Re:Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
by jacquesm on Friday September 27, 2019 @04:56PM
(#21096201)
You're describing Ycombinator.
Re:Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
by ineedasername on Friday September 27, 2019 @05:10PM
(#21096324)
Sure, though from what I found the Vision Fund is about 10x larger than Ycombinator, so doing the Ycon thing at a VF level would probably involve some scaling challenges. But fundamentally, it seems a better way to go about things than putting nearly all of your eggs into late-stage start ups with highly correlated business models & failure modes.
Re:Dog-walking startup Wag raised $300M, then things got messy
by the_watcher on Friday September 27, 2019 @08:59PM
(#21097651)
Since when did YC have hundreds of managers?
Come to think of it, it has many similarities to Google X. But that's extremely hard to build.