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A comment on Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company. Parent comment

Re:Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company by jrm4 on Sunday July 09, 2023 @04:09PM (#36658380)
"It is true that playing the lottery doesn't work out for everyone, but it worked really well for us!"
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company by reducesuffering on Sunday July 09, 2023 @07:12PM (#36660052)
It's sad that are multiple retorts about "lottery winners." Apparently, just on HN, we have about 25 lottery winners. Quite the coincidence!

(cloudflare, shopify, databricks, coinbase, stripe, openai, freshworks, gitlab, dropbox, hashicorp, amplitude, vercel, plaid, hubspot, quip, notion, twilio, etc)

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Re:Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company by jrm4 on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:39AM (#36662166)
Out of....
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Re:Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company by reducesuffering on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:47AM (#36662217)
Certainly not 1 billion, which is what the lottery chances would be to win 25 times. (1 in 42m)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company by graton on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:22AM (#36662432)
I don't understand this logic. The US has the Powerball lottery.

So far it has been won 403 times[1] what seems around 20 year time span. With a US population of around 360 million. So not sure why 25 winners would require a population of 1 billion.

[1] https://www.powerball.net/winners

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company by reducesuffering on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:58PM (#36669192)
I was using some state odds. Ok so 1 in 1m for Powerball, yet HN is ~3m, so we have 1 in 100k on HN. Already an order of magnitude difference. Then, of course, not even 1 in 100 here are actually giving a startup a serious go. So comparing successful startups to the lottery is easily 1000x off.
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Re:Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company by jrm4 on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:23AM (#36662436)
Do you understand what a metaphor is?
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Re:Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company by reducesuffering on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:55PM (#36669139)
Of course. Stats say it’s a bad one though
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Re:Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company by jrm4 on Monday July 10, 2023 @02:30PM (#36670877)
Not really; the "lottery" includes all the stupid smaller games too.
[ Parent | on HN ]