Florida's GDP is $748B. Suppose 1 in 300 people in the state are mentally ill enough at a given time to warrant living in a mental hospital. If that costs $1B, about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population. Seems very reasonable to me, without any more specific numbers to go on.
To throw out another number for comparison, medicare and medicaid together cost about $50B / year in the state.
Assuming your numbers government spends $15k for every 1 of those 300 people. That number seems pretty high.
The Tampa Bay investigation's violence refers to violence in the hospitals itself and not the general violence in society. For 13.5K per year you might reduce the hospital staff by 10% but that is unlikely to result into chaos that the report seems to suggest.
> about half as much of the economy would be spent on them (per capita), compared to the general population
Your math only works if mentally ill people receive no other services from the state whatsoever. Assuming the mental hospitals receive supplies by road, this is not true.
Ok, sure, you can add in roads and it will change the numbers in a small way that will be irrelevant to the thread. You can spend an infinite amount of time making rough estimates more accurate, if that's what you're into.
No I think it's very relevant to the thread. You have not accounted for any other services that people receiving mental health care receive from the state at all. You're ignoring most of the state's spending. Your estimate is not just rough; it can't possibly be anywhere near the mark.
Really, you are claiming that if a company raised $570M and sold for $3B, the common shareholders will get screwed? Do you have some information we don't? The publicly reported valuation at the last funding round was $1.4B. Those would have to be some impossibly harsh terms to not leave well over $1B to the common shareholders.
The price in these "the business model didn't work so let's save the investors and sell" type deals is primarily driven by paying off the early investors. Term sheets typically say these investors make a decent return before anyone else gets paid.
Conversation at the deal table is usually something like "we need X valuation to meet our term sheet with investors so the founders and a few others get paid." The rescue buyer generally doesn't care about what the employees get, in fact it's very much in the buyers interest that the employees don't get too much.
In other words the size of the valuation being bounced around is likely not driven by the value of assets for shareholders but rather the size of the contractual hole in the ground that founders dug with their investors... to escape that hole $X is needed.
> "Those would have to be some impossibly harsh terms"
Harsh terms yes, but not uncommon.
Preferred shares are common for investors that pay out at a multiple of the common shares, so in an exit the preferred pool can be paid at a dramatically higher rate than common shares.
Funding often also comes with guarantees on return - i.e., if the exit price is below a threshold, the investor gets a guaranteed minimum return before other are paid. This works out for the company if it's a smashing success (the upside is also capped) but can wipe out common shareholders if the company sells for anything less than stratospheric valuations.
This should be a lesson to anyone thinking about working for a startup: a company raised $570M and sold for $3B, and in all likelihood the employees will receive very little from this sale.
In the modern startup fundraising scene, and the way startup equity is structured for employees, if your company exits for anything less than a mind-boggling headline-making valuation, you are almost certainly receiving little to nothing.
I feel you just haven't proved your claim given the numbers. Even if the last round's investors were guaranteed a 3x return, that only takes up $1B of this $3B.
Granted, I don't think many engineers are making out with seven figures here, but they should be making whatever their shares were supposed to be worth at the most recent valuation. That's if they joined after the last funding round, more if they joined earlier.
Sure, but the salary cap (or lack thereof) isn't decreed from on high, it's the result of a nominally market-based negotiation between each players union and the corresponding league. If NFL players thought they could push the salary cap to $200M without killing the golden goose, they'd do it.
I have a hard time calling the result of negotiations between the single cartel of teams and the single (probably less-skilled) cartel of players a market.
An Uber engineer at a conference said that none of the open-source NoSQL systems could handle their load, and they they had to heavily hack one of them (which I think was Cassandra but the memory is vague) to get the last bit of performance out of it while they were building Schemaless.
They seem to be running Cassandra still, at least as of last month - "Running Cassandra on Apache Mesos Across Multiple Datacenters at Uber" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2jFLx8NNro
To throw out another number for comparison, medicare and medicaid together cost about $50B / year in the state.