Same way with games I enjoy. I never tend to buy the "skins" or "cosmetics" unless one _really_ clicks with me.
You aren't spending $25 on video game shit, you're spending $25 on a fun skin to show your pals, or upgrades to help your friends beat some boss, or whatever
Once you get on that path, it can lead pretty normal people to some very dark places indeed
Maybe you've already found a decent app (or realised that your camera has a built-in scanner), but the confusingly-named Barcode Scanner (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.zxi...) scans QR codes without fuss.
I’m on iOS, tried a few but they all wanted a subscription and were a terrible experience without it. So I wrote simplescan.vercel.app / https://github.com/mcintyre94/simplescan which does the job for me! Though Apple have broken using the camera when you save it to your Home Screen and open it as an app which is annoying.
Ah, that explains it! Your usecase explains it, but I'm reasonably assuming Android because recent iOS versions have it built-in.
As does Android, just open the Camera app and point to the code.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/14/spacex-just-bought-a-big-ad-...
Your definition for "a bunch" is a bit questionable, but good on you for posting the source.
I think if it had been $500k or $1M I would've called it a bunch, but $160k seems low.
[1] That's right M is for a thousand, because M is a thousand using Roman Numerals. You thought you would never have to remember that.
The ad campaign SpaceX is buying to promote Starlink is called a Twitter “takeover.” When a company buys one of these packages, they typically spend upwards of $250,000 to put their brand on top of the main Twitter timeline for a full day, according to one current and one former Twitter employee who asked to remain unnamed because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company.
Which means 160k spent is actually well below typical deal and these deals are pretty normal for Twitter. So one may actually be worried that maybe SpaceX got a deep discount or something.
A uses B uses C
C uses A but not B
B uses C
"Ooooo, A uses B I should use them for C!"
Just selling to other early-stage startups doesn’t generate much growth/revenue or make you look like a solid business to a sophisticated investor. SaaS/B2B companies that make it big do so because they get huge numbers of small-medium businesses using their platform, not just startups - E.g., Slack, Stripe, Square, Shopify, Canva, Zendesk, Zapier, Segment.
Having other startups using your product is a good early source of product feedback and a strong signal to very early-stage investors, but that alone doesn’t give you the huge growth you need for bigger funding rounds.
It’s very different to the scenario PG was describing in the late 90s; in those days, a startup would be founded, quickly IPO to raise several $million from unsophisticated retail investors, then spend much of it on advertising on Yahoo to drive traffic and artificially push the share price up. Hence when the music stopped in 2000 all that ad spend dried up and Yahoo’s share price crashed.
All those companies I mentioned above are going fine; slowed growth, sure, but they have real businesses with broad customer bases well beyond the startup ecosystem, so they’re all able to continue operating and keep doing OK.
It sounds good to perpetuate the "but Amazon.com had extra capacity they could sell" but it's not true.
With that definition, AWS is a startup. So was the iPhone. Both invented their respective markets, and had to grow quickly to do it. If either of them had needed to raise money from VCs, smart VCs would’ve invested. But they didn’t need to raise capital, since they were already a successful company.
But, when the gold rush is over, the shovel-seller may have to do big layoffs.
Nothing wrong at all, it's good to bootstrap an initial customer base and get some user-feedback, but until the chasm is crossed to "real" customers, one could argue that this is the same case nowadays. So the dotcom time was no better nor worse than right now in terms of startup viability.
There is a way to rate and classify derivatives appropriately, you just can't hold the ratings people hostage. I don't think there's a way to do that with crypto.
The banks weren’t to blame for 2008 any more than were the hoardes of FOMO buyers - in that they were both pretty culpable but neither of them were the real problem.
Lax regulation of the rating agencies was the real smoking gun. I’m not even sure it was ever addressed given all the banker witch hunts that ensued, and will next time too.
Dave Chappelle was on Saturday Night Live this past week and did a bit in the monologue about why we can’t have good regulations. Worth checking out:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_m-gO0HSCYk
(Starts at 8:50)
The spent their HELOC and never had to pay it back, they took the "first time homebuyers tax credit", and many of them lived in the house they "bought" for a year or two without paying any mortgage payment until the bank finally took it back. They never paid income tax on any forgiven debt, and they never paid income tax on the imputed income from living in a nice house for a couple of years rent-free until the bank finally was able to take possession of it.