Finance on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

Book Review: Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:21:00 +0000

“>As someone several years into a successful venture backed enterprise software startup, I find myself spending a lot of time looking at the green grass on the other side of the startup fence: angel funding and quick flips. People have mixed opinions on flipping, both the practicalities and the ethics of quickly flipping a company. Ethically, I tend to agree that “Flipping is Good“. But practically, there are a lot of moving parts in a company and lining them up for a quick windfall seems to require more than a bit of luck. It was in hopes of better understanding these practicalities that I read Basil Peters book Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists).

Analysis of May 6th: The Importance of Near Misses

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:05:00 +0000

Since writing about stock market crashes and normal accidents, I spent even more time talking about the events of May 6th. Good analysis is starting to come out. The best I have seen so far is Nanex’s Flash Crash Analysis. Their conclusion is that the crash was precipitated primarily by a queuing and timestamping bug at NYSE, which lead to understandable but unfortunate flash mobbing by high frequency trading firms attempting to execute against the delayed prices being quoted out. I recommend their analysis and the supporting charts, which are quite compelling.

Normal Accidents and Stock Market Crashes

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:31:00 +0000

In the weeks since the precipitous and brief stock market crash on May 6th, I have found myself answering questions about it from people outside the capital markets and discussing it with insiders on many occasions. While I have some thoughts about what went on, I’m often unable to satisfy people’s desire to blame a single precipitating cause. I think what is going on is that too few people understand the nature of complex systems and what is called a “normal accident.” Given the sophistication of the markets, the number of safety checks and balances, as well as the complexity of the implementations, it is not surprising that events such as May 6th happened, nor should people think it is possible to entirely eliminate them.

End of the World Insurance: the Financial Halting Problem

Sun, 02 May 2010 21:30:00 +0000

In computer science, the halting problem is very well known. The problem states that it is impossible to build a software program that can analyze other software programs to determine if they will eventually terminate, or halt. This is a useful problem to understand, because many software problems that look possible at first can be reduced to the halting problem and thus demonstrated to be impossible. It’s common to hear someone say “actually, that seems like a halting problem” when discussing compiler optimization, program analysis, and related problems in computer science. This is much like a physicist might say “but that’s perpetual motion.”

A Computer Scientist Bids on a House

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:33:00 +0000

I was going to favor you all with a post about Java’s System.nanoTime. That post will have to wait until tomorrow. Instead, I spent the day (arguably the weekend since 3:15pm on Friday) putting in a bid on a house. I won’t bore you with the details of property, inspections, financing, etc. However, I think the details of the bidding process are quite interesting.

To quote a friend of mine, when asked how we much we should bid on the house:

Valuing Startup Options

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:52:00 +0000

Nearly everyone who goes to work for a startup gets options, and the first question they ask is “how much are these options really worth?” When you are considering a job offer, particularly competitive job offers, it’s important to understand the value of the whole package. Putting a value on an option grant in a pre-IPO startup is quite challenging, and there are many opinions. I’d like to share the way I think about option valuation.