>There is no way where Bird becomes a viable business that grows into its absurd valuation.
I was recently chided and reproached by the HN mods for knocking scooter companies (even got the old “this isn’t personal, but don’t...”).
the point is with any SV funded company you don’t need revenue or even to be a viable business. You just need SV money (I think Bird has already burned through $415M and now asking for this $300M) to launch the business and “grow” the user base and/or metrics(someone here once fittingly described the model as selling $5 bills for $1).
So now you raise $500M sell $5 bills for $1, the startup staggers their sales so they show constant growth month over month, in reality you raise additional rounds to get more VCs to buy in and help market the company, then finally when you show tremendous growth (metrics), show revenue of $100M, then you file for a IPO and explain away the losses of $400M by saying at any point you can “flip the switch” and cut costs by no longer reinvesting in growth but make profits. Then at IPO you cash out and dump the shit company that’s never made a dollar on the public because all they see is the media pushed by SV/VCs with the media contacts, the big SV investor names, 100% growth month over month metrics, and the hope they to will get rich.
> I was recently chided and reproached by the HN mods for knocking scooter companies
On the contrary, I chided you for posting in the flamewar style (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20347016), which we don't want on HN and which the site guidelines ask you not to do. We don't care about scooter companies, we care about the signal/noise ratio of HN threads.
Well not to rock the boat or beat a dead horse here, but it would appear my down voting/flagging privileges have been removed since this post, could they be reinstated?
This is a very cynical perspective. The public markets are generally very unforgiving. This is why so many tech companies are choosing to stay private longer. If it was all about duping the public, they would IPO asap before the ship sinks.
Sure, there are examples like Blue Apron that seem to fit your narrative, but they are the exception.
If your narrative was correct, hedge funds or other intelligent investors would quickly catch on and short funds that purely track tech IPO's and make a killing. Obviously playing the markets is not this easy.
>The public markets are generally very unforgiving. This is why so many tech companies are choosing to stay private longer.
Can you even explain what that means?
In my estimation the companies are staying private longer so the VCs can blow up the valuations pre IPO higher than anytime in history, whereas, if the startup IPO’d from the start there is no way to continue the growth while sustaining the loss (in the real world business have to make a profit to continue) and VCs couldn’t make the same profit they do now, but in all other respects the risk would be the same.
Anyway it wouldn’t be to hard to look at the IPO of VC backed tech startups and determine what % had profits vs operating losses (obviously my guess is the majority are IPOing at losses). Then, a further analysis could be done to see if the average startup company valuations/market caps declined post IPO and how much pre IPO investors/shareholders took off the table.
Edit: looks like since 2010 there have been 100+ tech unicorns ($1B+ valuation) and ~2/3 didn’t make profit. Wish I could readily calculate how much VCs made taking those companies public, maybe someone can link an article/data.
Sure, many of them are intelligent, and factor in the risk they're duped. Nevertheless, they are all looking for a good investment, and "growth" seems like a good metrics. From an investor's perspective, if you pass on a company like Bird, they will find another investor, and if they succeed, this will be a lost opportunity for you.
The only thing special about Bird is the quality VCs that got into it at seed and series a. Investors will be taking a second look at these funds. If second and third tier VCs had been Bird's primary backers, we would all care a lot less about this failed company.
>From a computer science perspective, what should Google do to train its models in a privacy conscious way?
Install these devices in the homes of google employees, executives and offices and allow the public to listen in. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and all.
Maybe when google has trained the systems enough to not need to train them by collecting and listening to customers conversations, then they enter them into the stream of commerce.
I'm not sure if Google has a diverse enough employee base for this to work. I'd imagine most Google employees are tech workers so the training data collected would not accurately represent the general population.
Because the US doesn’t care about helping people who would take public transportation...instead we prefer VCs funneling money into innovative startups disrupting transportation by littering scooters all over our public walkways and allowing them to eventually take these companies public for billions in return.
God forbid you have an opinion other than US transportation is the best, US healthcare is the best, US education is the best...you can’t even look at other countries models or actual global rankings showing the US outspends every other country in those area yet our outcomes are nowhere near the top.
Please don't post unsubstantive flamewar comments to HN. I don't mean to pick on you personally, but rather on this category of comment: high-indignation, low-information. What kind of discussion follows from something like this? Worse discussion.
>Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations.
What do you mean by this?
Generally if a corporate name is registered (example: ABC, INC.) most states will not allow another “ABC” to be registered (even if ending in another suffix like “Corp” or even if another type of entity like an LLC).
I had a client in a certain state who registered their entity name as MSG HOLDINGS and wouldn’t you know I got a call from General Counsel of Madison Square Garden one day making an offer to purchase my clients entity solely for the name.
>I mean if a name is available to use, you can just use it. There's no negotiation, no price barrier, nothing.
How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it. And the "price barrier" for domain names was less than filing incorporation paperwork, in my state anyway.
>I think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry.
At least with domain names you can negotiate with someone. If someone else registers a company name before you, good luck. Same situation, look up the registered members and try to talk them into giving it to you, I guess?
> How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it.
Because in the absence of price caps the registrar can choose to increase the price on "valuable" domain names (for whatever arbitrary criteria it decides means a domain is "valuable").
He wasn't speaking about .org domains specifically:
>The whole domain market experience is utter crap. Commoditizing domain names has created such an unbalanced power dynamic between buyers and sellers where the sellers hold all the power. Gatekeeping at it's finest.
He's speaking in the present/past tense, so obviously he can't be referring to what may happen in the future with .org domain names.
So I'm comparing incorporating a business purchasing a domain name, today.
Not anymore, that's exactly what the article is about.
> ICANN has agreed to remove price restrictions on .org domain names, letting the domain’s manager, Public Interest Registry, charge as much as it wants for the domains. (It also agreed to let .info manager Afilias charge whatever it wants for .info.)
You are wrong. All .org domains will be priced the same as will .info domains. They can't decide a particular .org domain is worth more than another (that has already been registered and is being used). They can charge what they want but they can't differentiate between domains. And the quote you gave essentially says that.
This is different than a completely new tld whereby they might decide that a name is premium. The point is no legacy domain will be priced as premium. I guess in theory if it expires they might be able to do that but the 'can charge what they want' will not impact existing domain registrations. And in the case of a valuable domain if that were released it would be grabbed at auction and not available for the simple registration fee.
Maybe Satoshi should have built in such a feature into bitcoin (you don’t use it you lose it). That would have been a much more interesting dynamic (maybe) insofar as the original concept of P2P cash which morphed into digital gold/store of value (ie no incentive to spend, create a market/economy).
Because bitcoin is inherently anonymous, it'd be very difficult (impossible?) to prevent someone from making a new address and just bouncing the coins around. It's an interesting idea, though.
I think that's fine, because then you know that at least the wallets still exist. I wonder how many bitcoins are forever gone from the early days when they were literally cheaper than dirt. I know I had some and failed to backup the wallet properly.
I thought about that, and it’s just spit balling something off the cuff, but address to address self-spending may have positive impacts on the network vis-a-vis additional transaction fees for miners.
And of course Schlegel diagrams which are commonly used for visualizing four-dimensional polytopes.
It’s been over 100 years (very close in time to the publication of flatland) and I don’t think anyone has proposed an alternative diagram of a 4 cube/hypercube/Tesseract.
>People complain about 20U$S copays on doctor visits that bill 400U$S to insurance.
Well if that’s the case...it’s because the $400 bill isn’t the real cost for the service and insurance actually pays $0 of the bilked $400.
What happens is the patient pays $20 copay gets billed ~20% of the $400, or $80...then everyone but the patient is happy, Dr. gets his $100 for the visit and gets a $300 tax deduction, the insurance gets its premiums from the patient and gets their 80% waived by the provider effectively shifting 100% of the cost to the patient while still being able to account for the 80/20 split on the books.
Unless there's a weird provision I'm not aware of, you could be over representing the value of the deduction.
The best thing for the doctor is to get paid (and pay taxes on) $400. The $300 deduction is of no value to them because they never recognized the $300 as income. The deduction is basically "Hey, sorry you couldn't collect your billed amount. You don't need to pay taxes on money you didn't earn".
Sorry if you fully understand this already. The lack of understanding of basic taxes is a pet peeve of mine. People make statements like "Johnny was looking for one more tax deduction, so he donated to my charity". Johnny probably cares about the charity or at least looking good in the community, because he'd have a larger net worth if he just sucked it up and paid taxes rather than donating it.
>The best thing for the doctor is to get paid (and pay taxes on) $400.
No...the best thing is for the doctor to not upset the insurance company and get dropped from their network and lose all their patients.
Remember the famous line if you like your insurance/doctor you can keep your insurance/doctor. Turns out the president has no control over whether insurance will outright drop doctors from their networks.
As to your point on accounting, it simply depends on the doctors/hospitals accounting practices. It’s possible there is no deduction as you say (no big deal to the doctor, they got paid their fee anyway) or they can use an actual method of accounting and carry the loss forward.
In fact you may be understating it a bit. If the doctor uses cash accounting, then it's not that the $300 deduction is of no value, there is no $300 tax deduction.
As you point out, a cash basis taxpayer pays taxes on actual income received. Money you may have hoped to receive but didn't isn't income, so there is no tax and no deduction related to it.
If the doctor filed taxes using the accrual accounting method it would be different.
As I mention to a number of other comments...it simply depends on the accounting method.
It can be waived (not treated as income at all as you say) or it can be treated as income (taxes paid) and the loss carried forward for future deduction.
> Johnny probably cares about the charity or at least looking good in the community, because he'd have a larger net worth if he just sucked it up and paid taxes rather than donating it.
You are assuming that Johnny isn't the one that doesn't understand tax deductions.
The only way the doctor would get a $300 deduction is if they use accrual accounting and had already reported the $400 as taxable income. It's isn't a free deduction that comes out of nowhere.
With accrual, you report income when you bill for it, not when you receive it. Suppose you treat a patient on December 31 and bill the insurance $400 on same day. You report the $400 as income and pay taxes for the entire $400 in that year.
The next year, insurance only pays $100, so now you have a $300 loss to report in the new year. But you only have this loss because you've already reported the $300 as income.
If the doctor uses cash accounting, there would not be a $400 income entry on December. There wouldn't be any income to report until they are actually paid, and then the income is the actual amount they are paid, $100.
There is no opportunity cost deduction. Unless the doctor can show that he is losing money (amortized cost of office/staff overhead etc) on that $100 service, there is no deduction. They can't arbitrarily say they sell their services for a certain amount and deduct when they don't reach that amount.
If you have a widget that cost $50 to make/market/sell and you sell it for $100, then have a "sale" or "friends and family" discount to $60, you don't get to write $40 off your taxes. If you sold it for $40 you could write the $10 loss off of your taxes.
Just to add one more note to this lengthy thread... :-)
> Dr. gets his $100 for the visit and gets a $300 tax deduction
I think that is the phrase all of us have been jumping on. What you wrote there is simply not true. There is no scenario, regardless of whether the doctor uses cash or accrual accounting, where they get $100 for the visit and a $300 tax deduction.
There are three possible situations here:
1. Doctor uses cash accounting. The $400 invoice is not a taxable transaction. Doctor gets paid $100, reports it as income in the year it is paid, and that's that. There is no $300 deduction.
2. Doctor uses accrual accounting and is paid the same year. They report $400 of income along with a $300 loss in that year. Net income is $100, and doctor pays taxes on the $100 income. Their tax for this transaction is exactly the same as if they had used cash accounting.
3. Doctor uses accrual accounting and is paid in a subsequent year. They report $400 of income in the first year and pay taxes on the entire $400. Then, in the year they get paid, they report a $300 loss, because they were only paid $100 out of the $400 they previously declared as income. The only reason this $300 loss exists is that they already reported the entire $400 as income in the previous year and paid taxes on it. They aren't getting $100 income and a $300 deduction, they got $400 income in one year and a $300 deduction in a subsequent year.
As you mentioned in another comment, there may be reasons why a doctor would want to do this. Perhaps they just started their practice and are in a lower income bracket this year but expect to be in a higher bracket next year. In that situation the accrual method may help balance their income across those two years: they can pay taxes on the accrued (billed) income in the year that their tax rate is lower, and then take the loss in the next year at a higher tax bracket.
There may be other reasons to do this as well, but none of them change the fact that accrual accounting would mean they reported $400 in income along with the $300 loss, whichever years those happen to be.
It's not $100 in income combined with a $300 deduction, whichever way you account for it.
There is certainly a difference between a list price and a negotiated rate, but there isn't some sort of secret "we'll tell the patient in writing we're paying $400, but actually we'll pay you nothing" rate.
That’s insurance based healthcare in a nutshell. Insurance doesn’t negotiate just rates but the actual reimbursements.
The real fraud is the fact that insurance companies have been buying up health care practices/hospital systems and dropping all other providers from their networks and forcing the patients to go to the insurance owned providers (often times unbeknownst to the patients). Although there have been a couple successful large class actions by both doctors (who got dropped) and patients as well, but this hasn’t changed anything in practice just provided a little hush money.
I dont think that deduction idea makes sense. You would have had to actually report the income of the 400, pay taxes on that, and then deduct the next year. Unless there is trickery involved I'm not savvy of.
That’s exactly how it’s done under accrued accounting. And in health care paying taxes on uncollected Billings and carrying the loses forward can make a lot of financial sense.
> gets their 80% waived by the provider effectively shifting 100% of the cost to the patient while still being able to account for the 80/20 split on the books
>I don't think these are Google's customers or users.
Think about how both yelp and TripAdvisor both built out their websites to comply with Google SEO rules (for organic search) and used Google AdWords (to pay for keyword ads to drive traffic and convert sales).
Google used their market dominance to learn everything about these markets and created competitors to both yelp and TripAdvisor. Google’s spin off companies then bid up the same adword keywords (so where yelp and TripAdvisor May have paid $1/click now google is bidding them up to $2 and these businesses can either pay or lose out to these new google businesses).
Google shouldn’t be able to use their market position to enter new markets in order to drive up costs to their existing ad customers and ultimately the end users.
>DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.
Bing has 5% market share of search.
You also don’t see Microsoft leveraging the 5% market share to create competing businesses and then self bidding on search engine keywords to bid up the costs to existing customers.
The problem is google has a dominate market share and unfairly leverage its dominate market position to the determinate of other businesses and consumers. Say I’m an airline and use google ad words and pay $2 pay per click for the term “x”, google knows I can afford to pay more, so they create a spin off company and they bid up “x” to force me to pay google more for the same AdWord or lose out to Google’s new flight aggregate business. Either way this drives up costs to consumers and is unfair to a competitive business landscape.
I was recently chided and reproached by the HN mods for knocking scooter companies (even got the old “this isn’t personal, but don’t...”).
the point is with any SV funded company you don’t need revenue or even to be a viable business. You just need SV money (I think Bird has already burned through $415M and now asking for this $300M) to launch the business and “grow” the user base and/or metrics(someone here once fittingly described the model as selling $5 bills for $1).
So now you raise $500M sell $5 bills for $1, the startup staggers their sales so they show constant growth month over month, in reality you raise additional rounds to get more VCs to buy in and help market the company, then finally when you show tremendous growth (metrics), show revenue of $100M, then you file for a IPO and explain away the losses of $400M by saying at any point you can “flip the switch” and cut costs by no longer reinvesting in growth but make profits. Then at IPO you cash out and dump the shit company that’s never made a dollar on the public because all they see is the media pushed by SV/VCs with the media contacts, the big SV investor names, 100% growth month over month metrics, and the hope they to will get rich.