Cleaning

That’s okay — you can skip this. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Everyone safely gone? Cool!

The sun is out, which makes me manic and uncomfortable. I’m hiding as much as I can, but even so, it seeps into me and I wind up deep cleaning. Yesterday was the lazy susan in the corner cabinet in the kitchen. Today was under the stove and the cabinet next to it where we store oil and vinegar. Other recent areas of focus have included taking a sharp knife to get dirt in corners, dusting baseboards, dusting walls (yeah, normally I would agree with you that this is Insanity, but when the sun is out, *shudder*).

So far, I have been reasonably successful at not undertaking any major projects, which is an improvement (spring! Make a plan to do something big! Watch it go off the rails in summer, when the kids are around a lot more. Etc.) over many previous years. With Brexit dragging on still, my hopes of going to Europe this summer and also visiting the UK continue to remain hopes and not actual plans with reservations and transportation and so forth.

But between the whole bug / encasement project, and now this, the house is _really_ clean.

Oh, I also discovered when I was cleaning the toaster oven that it had melted the insulation on the cord for the stand mixer. We have done some rearranging to make sure that can’t happen again (yikes!) and R. will be replacing the mixer cord.

I adore Matt Levine. But I think he just got suckered here

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-27/leaving-the-enchanted-forest-is-scary

The last of the stories covered (before the link fu at the end) is about Masayoshi Son supposedly <— yeah I don’t believe it for a second — having the opportunity to invest in Amazon.com in the “early days” but he “only” had $100 million and Jeff wanted $130 million.

*blink*

OK, so this _cannot be true_ and it is pretty fucking easy to prove that it _cannot_ be true.

There was angel investing, and then there was Kleiner Perkins, and then there was the IPO.

https://www.cnet.com/news/how-john-doerr-the-old-prospector-finally-struck-google/

Kleiner Perkins put _$8 million_ into Amazon during that round. (Doerr got $60 million back at the IPO, and wow, my perspective on these numbers in 2019 is soooooo different than it was at the time.) (Motley Fool book says that was a 15% stake.) (_Entrepreneurial Genius_ by Landrum says 13% stake, and that Kleiner Perkins paid $2.35 / share in the spring of 1996. But Spring can’t be right — it was in the summer. Also, so funny — they paid more per share than I paid for mine; I paid $2.)

There was NO point where Jeff would have been going, hey, dude, your $100 million isn’t enough.

[ETAYA: It is _just possible_ that Son actually meant 100 million yen / 130 million yen, in which case, NOT a lie.]

This is a _blatant_ lie.

I’m a little disappointed that Levine just believed it. I mean, seriously. Really, fucking obviously, NOT true.

I now think that Masayoshi Son is actually The Bubble, personified.

ETA: If you click through to the Rubinstein interview, he _specifically_ says in that interview the disagreement on value was pre-IPO. So this wasn’t some post-IPO loan deal or anything. Lie lie lie lie lie.

ETA some more: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/15/jeff-bezos-amazon-ipo-frank-quattrone-sparring-john-doerr.html

Yeah, because Jeff would spend 2 hours on the phone trying to get a few million dollars more out of the IPO if he had just turned down $100 million.

ETA still more! OVP likes to tell a story about losing a handshake deal 20% of Amazon for $2 million dollars, screwed out of it by the 11th hour arrival of John Doerr. I have no idea if this one has any validity to it at all (handshake deals!), other than to note that El Jefe _really_ wanted Kleiner Perkins more than anyone else.