When the infrastructure we rely on functions well, our community can be ignorant to the fact that we are reliant on this infrastructure.
This past week we saw a breakdown in one of our critical inputs. As a result, you are now hearing stories from people that helped work to fix the problem at a layer in the stack we don't usually think about.
Think about this more as a glimpse into a technical domain that has always been there, but you are generally able to be gleefully ignorant about. It's interesting!
> Distribute- Distribute aimed to be the Alibaba of the US, mostly with wholesale drop shipping.
> Materialist - an e-commerce solution, [...] trying to bring wholesale housing products to market.
> Dave - personal financial management app
> Vizit - Image Analytics
> txtsmarter - Communications Surveillance Service
We might have different opinions on what counts as "innovative" I guess.
Only Iridium was my company, which built a pretty unique app that was featured in the App Store in its very first year (of the App Store).
You conveniently left out Omnivore.io, the only other company I built. Ask anyone in the restaurant industry in the US what it is.
All the rest were just employers.
edit: Since I can't reply below:
Omnivore was the first company that offered API access to over 80% of the installed point of sale systems in the US, including direct injection of web orders into the POS instead of needing a tablet next to the POS with manual order entry. We allowed over 1,000 partner companies to bring unique and innovative solutions to the restaurant space. Thanks for not reading my LinkedIN profile, just what sector my company was in.
> Omnivore - PoS + hospitality services
Definitely haven't been done before, you got me there :)
> I really don't think personal attacks are called for.
I don't think it's a personal attack, you brought up "My other companies are all innovative technology companies" so I was curious to see what you consider "innovative", thought others might be curious too, so listed what I found here.
> We might have different opinions on what counts as "innovative" I guess.
might have made it seem like you were doing more than "simply listing" what you found?
We might have differing opinions on what constitutes a personal attack, I guess.
For brand new comments that you want to comment on you want to click on the timestamp and comment from there. Otherwise you have to wait a couple of minutes.
So it's just a feeling, but it's not of happiness - it's of profound sadness and disappointment.
This isn't equity funding for a business idea. It's basically buying a claim on a bank in receivership. It doesn't matter if that claim is held by nextbigthing.com or Apple. Those claims are backed by SVB's portfolio of T-bonds and MBS so they are very solid. The benefit to users is acceleration of receipt and certainty. It's hardly a lark.
The OP was planning to target this offering to startups, which are only fraction of SVB's depositor base.
Someone saw their community in distress and thought to use their connections to put together a solution, for a modest profit. Sounds fine to me.
You don't understand my sadness. The money is there from wealthy individual investors to rescue SVB depositors who might miss a payroll or otherwise risk solvency, but it's not there to rescue other startups who are already going bust. Amazing that $300M just can appear like that over a weekend to save startups in one case, and yet doesn't exist in the other case. And it makes me sad. It's a feeling, and you might feel joy or even excitement. But I feel sadness, and that's just how I feel.
The worst thing about this is how many comments I read saying that startups shouldn't have kept their payroll money in a bank in excess of $250k. When your startup is a handful of people, who's really got time to focus on that, unless what you're really focusing on is financial movements and shenanigans, to the detriment of technological innovation.
Suddenly it strikes me that "startups" could fill a similar finance niche in this decade as "subprime mortgages" (of mortgage backed securities) once did.
Only, the risk of subprime mortgages is knowable if you dig, whereas the risk of a startup is unknowable.
This might be very attractive if you're a financier trying to create the illusion of high-grade securities.
This is what success looks like.