Billy Gallagher
@GallagherBilly
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Cofounder & CEO, Prospect. Find startups worth betting your career on. Prev: BD & Special Projects @Rippling , VC @KhoslaVentures
New York, NY
Joined May 2012
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Pinned Tweet
1/ The way you’re doing a startup job search is wrong.
You join Ramp instead of taking guaranteed cash from FAANG because you believe the equity will be worth more in the future.
This is a VC decision and you need VC tools to make it.
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Instacart is a wildly successful startup that just pulled off one of the largest IPOs of the decade.
Yet employees who joined after the Series B would’ve earned higher returns joining FAANG or being paid in cash and investing that in the market.
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Join a startup early and you can make millions. Join a growth stage startup and you have way better odds of seeing an exit.
But what stage offers the optimal tradeoff between risk and reward?
We looked back at 14,000 startups that raised in 2014-15 and found the highest…
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Conventional wisdom says you should send VC's a pitch deck. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Here's how we raised our $45M A
@ripplingapp
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Wow
@espn
is the worst.
@BillSimmons
rightfully calls out Roger Goodell
http://t.co/nGjF7EsSSK
& ESPN suspends him
http://t.co/llfEdJ9F3e
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2/ Prospect helps you find startups worth betting your career on by giving you an independent projection of what your equity is likely to be worth. You can use Prospect to kick off a startup job search & compare job offers:
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7/ Check out our launch in
@axios
today by
@imkialikethecar
We're also on ProductHunt:
And find your next startup role at Prospect:
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Our analysis resonates with this take from
@jrichlive
- if you are joining at Series C or earlier, you are taking VC risk and can earn VC returns. If you are joining in the late stages, you should think deeply about whether the company still has venture-like growth ahead of it.
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I wrote a book about Snapchat! How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars comes out February 13th. You can preorder it now:
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3/ Prospect was inspired by my job search in 2018, when I used what I learned as a VC at Khosla Ventures to join Rippling before its Series A. Our data scientist Ben built Opendoor's first consumer-facing pricing model.
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We've made lightly edited versions of our Investor Memo and Metrics Deck available for download here:
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@jrichlive
Full post (including how your odds vary if you restrict exits to >$500M and if you work at a startup backed by top VCs) here:
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The brightest mind in our industry
@JeffBezos
banned slides in favor of narrative memos () yet founders are still told to rely wholly on decks
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Watching
@DougBaldwinJr
on Monday Night Football. Friend: "That guy dunked on me at Arillaga. It sucked"
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We used the Internet Archive to find real job postings dating back to 2013 and combined this with data from Instacart’s S-1 and Pitchbook to show what employees would have made if they joined at Instacart’s Series A (a lot) through Series I (less than their alternatives).
Full…
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4/ We’ve built and backtested a predictive model that considers a wide range of inputs, including fundraising and valuation data, investor quality, growth metrics like revenue and revenue growth, founder and employee backgrounds, and more.
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6/ No one–not even the best investors–can tell you exactly what will happen in four years. But we can take a systematic approach that drastically improves your odds. You can take a few swings and get a hit that will dramatically accelerate your career development and earnings.
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We now go live to the Comcast Center in Philadelphia for the company's reaction to today's FCC ruling
http://t.co/itWaeZYi0t
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On Thursday, Loom sold for $975M to Atlassian. For most employees, it was a massive success.
Even employees that joined after the ‘21 Series C saw returns (-43%) in line with the BVP Cloud Index (-40%) that tracks public tech cos like Shopify, Zoom, and Square.
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Loved interviewing
@hamburger
on his fascinating career, particularly his insight on how he uses thoughtful design to spot winning founders:
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1/ Reading the tech news the past few months, you see stories of layoffs and plummeting valuations.
Despite this, now is the best time in at least the past five years to join a startup.
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5/ We purchase data from the same vendors top VCs use (including Pitchbook and headcount data brokers), pull traction metrics from press articles, and in some cases get traction metrics directly from the companies themselves. We have also validated the model’s outputs by…
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Had fun today talking Snapchat and How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars with
@emilychangtv
&
@sarahfrier
. Thanks for having me on!
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@danprimack
This assumes employees act like rational investors. Many more see the higher valuation as an indicator of a breakout company and lower likelihood of failure
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@devahaz
@luke_metro
Need to dig into the numbers more but at first blush it looks like a good outcome for employees who joined before the '21 round
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Could not agree more
@paulg
. Trading prime years of your career for equity is a VC decision. At Prospect we built a predictive model to help job seekers make the most informed decision possible:
In a domain that contains startups, the problem of choosing an employer is pretty much the same as deciding which startups to invest in. And there are specialists who work full time at that.
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Really enjoyed doing this pod with
@cory
talking Stanford, Snapchat, lessons for founders, and my new book How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars!
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In an hour talk at Stanford, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned one startup by name: Snapchat. Called it a "super interesting privacy phenomenon"
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@NellieBowles
I wonder (perhaps hopefully) if these IPOs will unleash a wave of people leaving SF once they see how little $X million gets them in the housing market
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Snapchat wants to be everyone's camera. Fully understand that & you understand the company.
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Should I leave my current startup?
I get asked this question a lot these days. Employees know spending years at a startup that doesn’t pan out has a high opportunity cost, but are wary of jumping ship too early.
Rather than relying on rules of thumb, we looked at how metrics…
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@eladgil
@SlackHQ
@zoom_us
@threads
@ripplingapp
:) remote & distributed asks HR & IT folks to level up and they need the best in class tools to do so
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Y Combinator Will Teach A Class On Startups At Stanford This Fall
http://t.co/YZ4aZNVC6N
cue the Stanford is too close to SV hand wringing
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Congratulations to the Class of 20OHMYGOD
Today, Stanford accepted 9.5 percent of applicants to its restrictive early action program. 745 students were admitted to the Class of 2020.
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How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars comes out Tuesday! Grab your copy here:
Ever used
@Snapchat
?
@GallagherBilly
has a new book coming out explaining how the platform came to be and how its fighting to survive. Very interesting stuff..
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"The degree to which Twitter...is increasingly a tool for stamping out independent thought in Silicon Valley should be a real concern for an industry predicated on “Thinking Different.”
Striking that the best SV commentary comes from
@benthompson
thousands of miles away
Tech and Liberty
The First Amendment is not about a law, but rather a culture — specifically a culture of liberty. It is essential to tech, and in this context, Facebook is mostly right about political ads (but can still do better).
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"I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn."
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WhatsApp CEO seems to both hate and not really understand Snapchat
http://t.co/a43WA6tLJX
http://t.co/qsiY6ecGdB
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For startup employees if your cash comp is "just enough" & route to wealth is equity, taking lower cash to work outside Bay Area makes the company more capital efficient.
The key q is does the gain from lower burn outweigh the loss from face to face productivity
are comapnies going to pay employees at the same level if they’re living in Wyoming that they would be if they’re in the valley ?
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/21 Trillion Dollar Coach - Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg & Alan Eagle. Disappointing. I had really looked forward to reading about Bill Campbell. Authors are too close to the subject. I enjoyed the biographical parts—would love to read a Walter Isaacson Campbell bio.
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Can't remember the last time I opened Uber in SF and it wasn't surge pricing
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Thinking of raising a VC fund so I can tweet we are CLOSED for business every downturn
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@nealkhosla
Any time you do backward-looking analysis with startups, you have to caveat that the future won't look exactly like the past.
I think we all agree '20-H1 '22 is an aberration. But the interesting Q is moving forward, will rounds today look more like the '14-15 vintage? Or…
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Enjoy Ch 31: Fear And Loathing In Menlo Park from my book here in
@WIRED
then grab your copy of How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars for the long weekend
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@stevegraham
@atlas
@stripe
@BankMercury
@tryramp
@pipe
Forgot hire and manage employees through
@Rippling
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Stanford & Oregon have scored on 87.5% of drives, making it slightly easier to score in Oregon than get into Oregon
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@Kazanjy
I can probably state this more clearly in the post, but I think the trade employees are making is not "I will pay $50K to exercise these options" but rather is "I will trade my labor for this $500K equity package." And the alternatives are trading that labor for an equity package…
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When I did my last startup job search, I was disappointed by how many careers pages only listed roles for sales and engineering.
I created a job for myself by 1. Reaching out to companies regardless of whether they were hiring 2. Creating job seeker-company fit
I wrote about my…
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Home for Thanksgiving
Mom: are you dating anyone?
Me: so I made the playoffs in both of my fantasy football leagues...
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"Do u think techcrunch would b into a startup about cat photos that disappear?
#felinephemeral
#snapcat
" -
@ssavitsky
&
@steph_web
killin it
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Confused yet again by Snap's new redesign? Read my book on Snap's rise from frat house idea to multi-billion dollar company (on shelves this Tues) and you'll finally understand the company & app:
Mm just saw the new Snapchat.. I don’t know how i feel about it! What do you guys think?
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101K
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What does a Stanford player have to do to win the
#Heisman
? Be the consensus best player? Break the single season yards record?
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Is there a worse job than Raiders head coach? Maybe PR at Clinkle...
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Very excited about this launch! Use Rippling inventory management to ship, retrieve, store, and set up employees' laptops 100% remotely
Rippling launches computer inventory management as more workers remain remote by
@christinemhall
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Roommate found his iPod classic from middle school. Bar mitzvah jam sesh over here
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Proud of the progress we've made so far and so fired up about the road ahead. We're hiring
@Rippling
for a wide range of roles please DM me if you or a colleague might be a good fit
this will be the greatest founder comeback story of our generation.
@parkerconrad
’s relentless product focus is creating a completely new software category where
@rippling
becomes the system of record for all employee data. congrats to parker and team!
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@nbashaw
Looked into starting this before I joined Rippling! My big worries were longer feedback loops with IP than tech, difficult publisher economics, and I didn’t think I had a clear advantage in picking winners. Fascinating idea though
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Eat food? Drink Water? You're likely contributing to the California water shortage!
http://t.co/chZddZRH4O
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10/ History of the Future -
@blakejharrisNYC
. Couldn’t put this down. Thrilling read from the origin story inside Luckey’s trailer to the Machiavellian politicking inside FB. Expect this story esp the ending will be discussed a lot more in SV (or at least should be)
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Where can I get a Clinkle T-shirt? Trying to put together my Halloween costume
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Really excited that we’re launching a PEO
@Rippling
: . A PEO is an employment structure that lets startups save on HR & health coverage costs and automate their state-level tax registration when they hire remote employees in new states
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Things get a lot more interesting when you think of Snapchat as the next YouTube, rather than the next Facebook
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/45 That Will Never Work -
@mbrandolph
. Great, brilliantly honest anecdotes from the earliest days of Netflix and how they found their way through the idea maze
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Really enjoying this expansive housing history from
@ConorDougherty
. Particularly the
@anniefryman
cameos!
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My roommate gave me 1989 for my birthday (best gift ever) and now we are all trying to figure out how to play a CD
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Love this! Thank you Sean
"As the Director of Operations at an early stage start-up such as Terane, one tool has made my life easier above all else, Rippling."
I love using
@ripplingapp
so much, I wrote about how I think its a must for start-ups
@mamoonha
:
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@nmoryl
exists! My favorite ones are the "donation to an org you despise" and the alarm clock that runs away from you
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SF folks, come out this Monday night! Gonna be fun
Come see a live Q&A with me and new Snapchat origin story book author
@GallagherBilly
Monday 7pm at SF's Books Inc to hear how sexting really was the start
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Fascinating to watch
@doordash
grow from Palo Alto Delivery to $17.3M round from Sequoia. National expansion next?
http://t.co/5120CCZ8b8
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3/ Venture Deals -
@bfeld
&
@jasonmendelson
. Felt like I needed to keep sharp on the basics. Very clear on some fairly complex topics, particularly the convertible debt section. Wish I had read this when I first started working in tech!
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There is a grown man in a speedo on the steps of the Stanford bookstore pitching his startup idea to anyone who will listen
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9/ Culture Code -
@DanielCoyle
. Wonderfully broad array of organizations from navy seals to upright citizens comedy to jewel thieves. Favorite anecdote was on Gregg Popovich taking the Spurs out to dinner after their brutal Game 6 Finals loss to the Heat
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Regent has one of the most fascinating missions of any company we've rated on Prospect:
They're hiring for a ton of roles:
We're excited to co-lead Regent's $60m Series A
A decade ago we said we wanted flying cars and instead got 140 characters
Our investment here is us continuing to double down on the thesis that flying boats are the predecessor to flying cars
And Japan Airlines agrees!
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ESPN suspended
@stephenasmith
for 1 week for this: &
@BillSimmons
for 3 weeks for profanely criticizing Goodell
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2013: that's a dumb idea, there's already Grubhub and Seamless
2015: Hallelujah! Doordash is finally live in SF
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That's my dream use case for Google Glass: differentiating between oatmeal raisin & chocolate chip
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Endorsing someone for Microsoft Word is essentially saying "yes, I'll vouch that this person is literate"
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@maiab
Good Q--we looked at that for specific startups like Instacart & Loom ( , )
Interesting to think about it more systemically
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Pro tip: when writing your startup description, make sure people know you are both innovative AND disruptive! And definitely ignore grammer
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I’ve read a few chapters of History Of The Future and Blake’s grip on the narrative has constantly improved as the story got crazier and crazier. Page turning while not being overwritten. Must read not just for gamers but for those interested in the inner politicking of FB
Well, it only took 2 years longer than expected (and turned out twice as long) but finally—finally!—THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE hits bookstores today!!
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We're hiring for a bunch of interesting roles
@Rippling
right now, including a Director of Content and a Senior PMM on the Apps Team who I would work closely with. If you're interested, my DMs are open!
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