Tag: business

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Sage: Open Source Mathematics Software: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

Companies can be incentived in various ways, including:

  • to get to the next round of VC funding
  • to be a sustainable profitable business by making more money from customers than they spend, or
  • to grow to have a very large number of users and somehow pivot to making money later.

When founding a company, you have a chance to choose how your company will be incentived based on how much risk you are willing to take, the resources you have, the sort of business you are building, the current state of the market, and your model of what will happen in the future.

Source: Sage: Open Source Mathematics Software: RethinkDB, SageMath, Andreessen-Horowitz, Basecamp and Open Source Software

Good article that outlines an open source business model that may work without VC investment.

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Because profit is more important than innovation, high school testing still relies on the TI-83 graphing calculator.

But this is also a world where high school math students have to shell out $100 for the same TI-83 graphing calculator that their parents used twenty years ago (or one of its descendants, at least)—instead of using a free app that they could simply download to their phone. Why? Mic reports that the main reason is tradition. Texas Instruments has managed to get its calculators written into the standardized tests used by many schools. And inertia being what it is, it’s really hard to change something like that once it gets set down on paper.

Source: In an age of tablets and e-books, high school testing still relies on the TI-83 graphing calculator | TeleRead

This should serve as a reminder that it isn’t just the legal world that drags its feet when it comes to new and obviously better technology. The world is awash in examples of this sort of thing where a powerful incumbency holds back or outright blocks the adoption of new tech simply to preserve some profit margin. Ignoring, disregarding, or suppressing innovation in the name of maintaining profits especially in a near monopoly market is practically a rule of business.

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Convertible notes are a founder friendly way to fund a seed round

A convertible note is an investment vehicle often used by seed investors investing in startups who wish to delay establishing a valuation for that startup until a later round of funding or milestone. Convertible notes are structured as loans with the intention of converting to equity. The outstanding balance of the loan is automatically converted to equity at a specific milestone, often at the valuation of a later funding round. In order to compensate the angel investor for the additional risk of investing

Source: Convertible Notes | FundersClub

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Who Really Owns America’s Large Mutinationals? It’s Hard To Say According to Penn Law Prof.

There is no way to tell whether America’s largest multinational companies – the Googles, Apples and Ciscos of the world – are in fact American-owned, a surprising gap in financial reporting that has important implications for U.S. international tax policy, according to new research by a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor.
The research by Chris William Sanchirico suggests that the extent of foreign ownership of U.S. multinationals is unknown even to the companies themselves, due to the way many shares of stock are purchased and registered.
Sanchirico, the Samuel A. Blank Professor of Law, is co-director of the Center for Tax Law & Policy. His research paper As American As Apple Inc. was recently issued by the Penn Law Institute for Law & Economics.

via Who owns Apple? New research from Penn Law argues no one really knows • Penn Law.

Interesting article that highlights an intriguing issue with America’s largest multinationals: who benefits from the tax benefits the corporations receive? Since it is often not clear who owns stock in these corps and the businesses take advantage of US tax law to move profits offshore, any sort of tax break given for repatriating those profits may actually have more benefit to foreign than US stock holders.

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Some Automattic Shareholders Cash Out to the Tune of $50 Million

…there has been a large secondary transaction in Automattic stock, about $50M worth. “Secondary” means that it’s existing stockholders, like the earliest investors or employees, selling stock to another investor versus money going into the company (“primary”)

via Automattic After-Market | Matt Mullenweg.

What this means is that a small number shareholders of Automattic made a decision to sell some of their shares to an outside investor, turning paper wealth into actual cash money.

Typically these sorts of transactions aren’t about the company, but more about the folks buying/selling the stock. A company like Automattic probably has a pretty long list of folks interested in acquiring some stock in the company. At the same time there are stockholders who for various reasons may want to convert some of their shares to cash.1» Of course this sounds like a straight forward market transaction, but since Automattic is privately held the rules are different and the stock isn’t simply traded like Google or Microsoft.

The bottom line is that Automattic continues doing cool things with WordPress and more and some folks have an extra happy holiday weekend.

 

A little cash just in time for summer can be a good thing.Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5