What startups do y’all love (can’t be your own)?
Unless you live in North-Africa or the Middle East or places like that, you can't do justice to what Iliana and Laila are doing. Many of these countries are prisons with flags. Isolated from the world with pretty much useless passports. Isolated from monetary flows. Isolated from the global job market. Scrutinized at every airport. These people's only sin was to be born there, and they're paying a dear price, especially with the cultural values of sticking by parents/grand parents. Some of these countries actually forbid their citizens to build an estate or own something in another country, many have non-convertible currencies that make it hard to do business and black markets, even black markets for visas.
In other words, if you were born there, you're screwed unless you muster a disproportionate amount of grit to get to a baseline.
Go Iliana, go Laila!
If you know people in North Africa or the Middle East, that's a great way to improve the situation.
Running a startup with a social impact mission is a dream come true. I hope more people will launch businesses aiming to solve important challenges. Our world needs the creativity, talent, hustle, and funding that are so easy to find in startup communities.
I'm really hoping they take over as the premier web host and normalize the use of these services vs raw AWS or GCP. It makes devops soooo much lighter and stabler. It's a night and day difference between this and the in house pipelines I've used.
As a dev, I love that I can just deploy UI and business logic and know that it will work, instead of fighting some esoteric build pipeline every step of the way.
Costplus is not going to make a dent because they are not willing or able to invest the billions needed for R&D and clinical testing of medicines, and then release the IP/patents to the public. Nor are they going to build and develop the factories needed to make the medicines.
Hence costplus is just an increase in the supply of middlemen, not an increase in supply of medicine. When they develop a new medicine to treat hemophilia and give it away for cheap, then they can be said to have walked the walk rather than just talk the talk.
https://dallasinnovates.com/mark-cuban-cost-plus-drug-co-top...
> In one example of the savings the startup delivers, the leukemia treatment Imatinib typically retails at $9,657 per month. But through MCCPDC, the price is offered at only $47 per month.
https://www.goodrx.com/imatinib
It will be interesting if they deliver on manufacturing genetics at lower prices, but I do not think they have yet accomplished that. But given Cuban’s history, I would not hold my breath.
Finasteride 5mg 30 count at safeway pharmacy: $57
Finasteride 5mg 30 count at safeway pharmacy with GoodRx: $7.32
Finasteride 5mg 30 count at mark cuban's thing: $4.50
When all the other middlemen are basically an overpriced cartel, a new middleman can be very groundbreaking.
All I know is Costco has a far better reputation than Cost Plus or Cuban, so when someone claims they can get margins lower than Costco, I am skeptical. Cost plus is not even a pharmacy, they outsource all the hard and expensive parts like liability to Truepill. And adding middlemen to get prices lower makes no sense.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pharmacy/comments/wvd964/comment/il...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pharmacy/comments/wfsyif/costplustd...
Now if CostPlus had built factories for medicine and were selling it at a lower price because they developed a novel way to manufacture or have amazing management that figured out how to reduce COGS, I would be interested to learn. But given the nature of Cuban and the fact that they went with a viral marketing stunt with no substance, I am going to guess there is another angle to play here.
If they have higher prices than Costplus, that’s not a good sign. They’re a top tier company for logistics and price controls. Sounds like Cuban’s just eating the difference
I'm seeing that they price items at a very consistent 15% markup in a forbes article.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/071015/3-rea...
Of course, this does not mean Costco’s pharmacy sales cannot have huge markups, or maybe Costco is paying its employees and suppliers too much, but based on their reputation and my experience over 20 years, I just trust they have the right price to quality ratios for me.
I know I am not getting bottom dollar pricing, but they likely are not gouging and I also know they are a good employer, and thus I believe I will be getting a better product from its pharmacy as well.
With CostPlus, they do not even employ the pharmacists, they outsource to a company called TruePill. How do I know what working conditions they have? Usually when a company starts outsourcing core functions, that means they are cheaping out. And not something I want for my medicine.
2020 Net sales ........................................ $ 163,220
Less merchandise costs ............................. 144,939
Gross margin ..................................... $ 18,281
Gross margin percentage ............................ 11.20 %
Meanwhile:
Membership fees .................................. $ 3,541
https://investor.costco.com/static-files/7ef7bed6-c48f-4687-...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/net-in...
But as you can see, these are increases measured in the tenths of a percentage in profit margin, which would not indicate that Costco leadership is trying to fleece customers any more than they have been in the past.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/net-pr...
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Scientists have a big problem. Abstract search can take up a big piece of any researcher's time. They often farm it out.
The quality of results can vary depending on who does it. Researchers in sibling specialties often use different phrases for the same concepts.
Rogobi manages cross-disciplinary search by collecting terms across disciplines and guiding your search as you go.
Like other abstract search engines it also manages PRISMA details, collects and generates result reports for your clients, and coordinates multiple researchers sifting the same results.
The startup's difficulty is finding the sweet spot of a customer with money that also recognizes the pain point (shallow/silo'd searches due to search term fracturing across disciplines).
They've set the benchmark and expectations, and put it ethically high, even if it means ironically not being as open as their competitors. Just like Google set advertising and free software as the norm of the Internet, OpenAI set safety as the norm for AI. If many other companies held the lead by now, the internet would be full of sex chatbots, fake reviews, deepfakes.
I wanted to create illustration for books, produce high end book collections and redirect part of the profit to a charity in Benin and rural China.
It’s hardly possible, you can’t generate any forms of violence. Yet violence is part of life, and pretty much half of literature.
How are supposed to illustrate Lolita or do justice to Dostoevsky with these constraints?
I seriously hope a competitor take the lead.
It was extra special because I work in nlp but so many nlp applications just don't excite me
That being said: they’re making phones that run an unmodified mainline Linux kernel.
What are some of those?
One thing that comes to mind is coming out with a bunch of other products before backers had the first shipment of the laptop they made. Curious if there are others too.
At one point, Purism changed their policy. Under the new policy, customers wouldn’t be entitled to a refund until their order is actually ready to ship, even if that happens several years down the road. For example, a customer won’t be able to claim a refund for their 2019 order until e.g. late 2022/early 2023, when their order is ready.
The questionable thing is: Purism has retroactively applied that new policy to earlier orders, too. So by Purism’s logic, customers whose order is years late can’t get a refund immediately, even though at the time of the order, the refund policy did grant that right.
People are constantly being furious about that, and I wonder whether Purism is doing themselves a favor with this, or if their behavior is even legal.