Good on them.<p>Secondary sales are, anecdotally, getting more common these days, despite the fact that many VCs dislike them. They're so obviously in the best interests of founders and early employees, and the VC arguments against them are frankly odious, that I'd wager we see a realignment on how acceptable this term is seen to be.<p>The argument advanced against secondaries is, phrased to be maximally charitable to it, that having founders and employees in the same boat as having to wait for an exit to really reap the rewards of the company keeps everyone's interests aligned and avoids causing any bad blood at the company caused by founders getting a very happy outcome prior to employees having gotten one.<p>Phrased less charitably: rich people (VC partners) think paper-rich-cash-poor people should continue being cash-poor so that rich people have better negotiating leverage over them.
<i>This is our intention with this new round, to really set a precedent for multiple liquidity events going forward. Different investors will have different stages at which they’d like to get liquidity, and now they’ll be able to cash out at the time which is comfortable for them. New funds which are more focused on later stage capital can invest as we grow more and become more stable and predictable with our growth and revenue. The same applies for team members: if someone wants to put their kids through college or buy a house, they can choose to sell some of their equity. Others might not have as many commitments and may choose to keep their shares.</i><p>So basically the Silicon Valley VC ecosystem is reinventing secondary markets for equity shares. This scheme has the same basic purpose as traditional stock markets (i.e. capital formation for companies and liquidity for investors), but is limited to a restricted set of participants, and price formation occurs only during specifically timed liquidity events (rather than continuously). I wonder if investors and founders are really happier this way than they would be on the public markets. If you are an early employee and you want to buy a house (or whatever), would you rather be able to sell your shares at any time to the best bidder or be stuck waiting for the next liquidity event at who knows what price?<p>I think this is an interesting development for a couple of reasons. First it probably is indicative of the huge regulatory burden involved with going public (Sarbanes Oxley &c). Second it shows how much capital really is available in SV VC these days. There is so much money that founders and early investors don't even care about access to capital available in the public markets because they can get all the cash they want without having to leave the VC world. I wonder if we will see a shift back to the public markets if the VC money ever dries up for whatever reason.
Pretty awesome watching these guys grow. I also love how they question the norm in the VC/startup world of being poor until you hit a real homerun. You only get one life. Don't let a VC dictate how you live it just so they can hit their IRR projections.
Bold move to take most of the round off the table for founder liquidity.<p>Edit: I think this is great for the founders and I hope they gave a similar option to their employees who have been with them a long time.<p>High fives for the massive transparency success of the business while maintaining a positive work culture.
I think Buffer is creating a third way for startups in general. Everything i've seen and heard these guys do since launch has been unorthodox. They're outliers and I mean that as a big compliment!
If one of the founders is reading - why not taking the money in the bank as dividend right before the fund raising (with full disclosure to the future investors, of course). You get a similar amount of money (although sharing it with the early investors), but all the money you're raising goes to the company, which I assume is a simpler model. Wouldn't that be simpler?<p>Best of luck with completing the round, and with future growth!
This is an interesting and unusual (but not unprecedented) move that actually aligns interests.<p>99% of founders have a goal (it may not be the primary or secondary, but trust me it's there) to be "F you" rich. Maybe 99.9%.<p>This move doesn't make either of the founders remotely close to that. If the founders checked out now, they wouldn't be able to retire - they certainly won't worry about paying for college for their kids, but they're sipping pina coladas on the beach either.<p>Taking "just enough" money off the table de-risks the whole operation for everybody. The risks in a startup this size are<p>a) Founder fallout / burnout<p>b) Running out of enough runway to really scale the biz and make the right long-term product investments (being cash-flow positive doesn't mean you can do this - plenty of breakeven startups out there just treading water who are one bad product cycle or market shift away from biting it)<p>c) Inability to hire and retain the right people<p>This helps tackle all three.<p>Win-win for everyone.
I've been hearing a lot about Buffer lately. I'm about to release my project and wanted to earn some money with affiliated marketing.<p>Everywhere I turned, people mentioned Buffer so I grabbed an account a couple of days ago.<p>Its a great service that falls in that "why didn't I think of that?" category. Really cool.<p>I'm happy for them and I hope they can go very far with this venture. They have paying customers and as word spreads around more and more about the need to utilize social media to market your online business (There's a CNN article recently released about it <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/01/world/europe/bloggers-six-figure-salaries/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/01/world/europe/bloggers-six-figu...</a> ), the need to organize content release is essential.<p>So, congrats guys at Buffer!
They're doing pretty well for how much little info is on their website. What do they do? Apparently they're the easiest way to publish on social media...but there's not much more info
Congrats! Just a comment. Your landing page seems very sparse. I hadn't heard of you before and from that landing page I had no good idea of what your app does or how popular it is.<p>I feel like adding your blurb from the about page + including something about who uses your website along with a bigger button for businesses would at a minimum be worth A/B testing.<p>Also it seems a bit awkward to navigate with no navbar at the top and for the business landing page you have to go all the way back to the first landing page to go to any of the other pages.
FYI: This was all over TechCrunch, so if someone knows the BufferApp team, please tell them they'll need to file a Form D 506(c) exemption with the SEC.
I've learned about buffer while looking for job. (probably from who is hiring threads) Since then, I've been reading their medium posts.[1] Their values, hiring strategy, salary transparency and managing remote teams seems perfect to me and I really liked reading their posts. (Highly recommended)<p>[1] <a href="https://medium.com/buffer-posts" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/buffer-posts</a>
[OT/Ask HN] Is there something wrong with the check for duplicates?<p>I sent the same post about 25mins after [1] (clearly, I didn't see this one) and I was able to post it. Just reporting the issue.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517105" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517105</a>