I may predate you! We were shared an office with Heroku back during their/our YC days.
Fun memory - James and bitscribe helped me with my prior startup. I remember them brainstorming a 'collaborative IDE' while they helped us set up our servers.
You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?
Heroku <feedback@heroku.com>
Tue, Nov 6, 2007, 1:03 PM
to jason
Hello -
You've been invited to the Heroku beta by your friend james@heroku.com.
They included this message:
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So we're up and running, and can officially talk about our YC funding now. You are probably outside of our audience, but feel free to kick it around and send me any feedback you have. Going to invite Colin and the Bracy's too.
I got you beat, Oct 25, 2007 - the original post I mentioned that they had a bug (a before_filter for authentication on the invite route) so it was unusable before they fixed it based on my report - a classic rails error! Vintage stuff, great nostalgia.
> You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?
It's been so long I had to go back and find my prior post, but I think so!
You have the dynamic mostly correct, but the motivations reside more at the partner level than the VC firm level. Individual partner IRRs are determined by the mark up they can report for the specific deals on which they have attribution.
When a VC pushes for a faster burn which then necessitates a new VC firm to fund the next round (perhaps prematurely relative to the founder's perspective), it's so that that individual VC can mark up their personal IRR.
Which may be relevant to their firm and the firm's fundraising plans to LPs. But could also be even more relevant if that partner is thinking about changing firms or starting his/her fund own. Individual IRR, based on deals with attribution, is the resume of a VC.
The effect of this is, junior partners push for this type of behavior more than senior partners that are already set with an impressive personal IRR.
Agree that much of this is partner dependent, but I've seen the dynamic play out happen with senior partners who have great track records and with younger partners out to prove themselves. In each case, I think the motivations differ slightly, but the same theme is at work.
It's actually less of question of whether you're right or wrong. Since most of us are usually wrong most of the time.
Really good engineers don't want to be told what to do, because they want to run experiments and see the result for themselves. The best can do so very quickly.
Fun memory - James and bitscribe helped me with my prior startup. I remember them brainstorming a 'collaborative IDE' while they helped us set up our servers.
You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?
Heroku <feedback@heroku.com> Tue, Nov 6, 2007, 1:03 PM to jason
Hello -
You've been invited to the Heroku beta by your friend james@heroku.com.
They included this message: -------------------------------------------------- So we're up and running, and can officially talk about our YC funding now. You are probably outside of our audience, but feel free to kick it around and send me any feedback you have. Going to invite Colin and the Bracy's too.
--------------------------------------------------
Heroku lets you create web applications right in your web browser. Follow the link to activate your account, then create Rails apps instantly:
http://heroku.com/core/invitation/accept/6d1c4cdb60
To learn more about Heroku, check out our public website:
http://heroku.com/
Have fun, and don't hesitate to drop us a line with your comments or questions.
- James, Adam, and Orion
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