adam

I would be curious to hear about other examples where the idea seemed truly terrible, but then exceeded beyond their wildest dreams. I hear partners regularly citing this - and then they talk about AirBnB. Who are companies 2-10 who actually make this a pattern, or is this just bias because AirBnB was such a smashing success and it's a good anecdote?

I just experienced this with a bike I bought my wife on Amazon. Amazon offered free assembly at a bike shop about 5 miles from my house. The bike was shipped to the shop, I was notified it arrived, and 3 days later I got a notice it was ready for pickup. The shop was friendly about the exchange and we ended up buying several accessories while we were there.

I agree with you, but I find the whole vision to be pretty sad and fighting against what we intrinsically value as humans: deep connection.

How does this work when some people have families and don't want to live and be friends with work people? Are they ostracized? What if I have hobbies, friends from HS or college, siblings, etc. and want to spend time with them instead of increasingly with my workmates. This sounds like it's going to increase cliquey-ness, not improve culture.

There is already an old model out there that sort of already lives this way: IT or management consultants who travel every week. I did this for 10 years. You become great friends with your colleagues - until the project ends or some other break occurs. Then...nothing, unless keeping in touch on each other's birthdays on Facebook is enough for you.

In retrospect it all felt very vapid and superficial - just people trying desperately to make connections to get them by, but not much "built to last."

Congrats on the move. I grew up in Champaign. I wanted to get out of there by the time I was 18, but now I get back at least once a year and have a new appreciation for the place. Go to Papa Dels pizza if you haven't been. Get the deep dish. It will change your life.

Thanks for bringing up this simple fact. Being skilled in hunting, fishing, etc. still doesn't mean you're actually going to be able to find game with any kind of sustained outage going on, unless you are in a very remote part of America given the numbers of people (and fellow skilled hunters) who will be in your same predicament.

I would highly recommend not spending time as a single developer submitting proposals, and instead start trying to build relationships with some of the winners/participants of past IARPA tournaments. They regularly bid on these IARPA programs and have some level of success. Getting on one of their teams as a SME or with a specialized offering is a great first step. If you're in the area, the proposer's days can give you an opportunity to get up in front of everyone and talk for a couple minutes about you and your capabilities to get your name out there.

Wonder if Apple is making a conscious choice to market this as a speaker vs. a Home Assistant. A speaker seems far less creepy to the commoner (no ads, supposedly not listening to every command you request, etc.) and is something everyone can already understand the functionality of. With the nice processor, they clearly are thinking about this as something more than just a speaker that they can upgrade in the future.

I'm the co-founder of Cultivate Labs (https://cultivatelabs.com), which is based on a lot of the work I did at Inkling Markets (YC06). We’ve been working on prediction markets and other crowdsourced prediction mechanisms for awhile now, but have always just sold a platform to large companies to run internally.

TinyCast is a "lite" / free version of the stuff we run with big co's and government agencies where we’ve tried to make it a lot easier to get predictions from your team or even your customers to ascertain not what people WANT to happen or what they think you want to be told, but what they think will ACTUALLY happen.

We also track/measure everyone’s predictions (using Brier scores) so you can see who was the most accurate and give people feedback about where they're strong/weak, how they might be biased about certain topics, etc.

We’ve been using TinyCast ourselves on our team to predict some of our internal metrics which I blogged about here: https://www.cultivatelabs.com/posts/have-your-team-predict-y...

Industry trends, competitive intelligence, KPI’s are all fair game and great uses of TinyCast. Would love to get any feedback anyone has, especially areas where you might have gotten tripped up or any questions about how this could be used in your company.

I've found that having some sort of background noise going, whether it's music or news or whatever, really helps minimize the extreme "skin crawling" feeling I get listening to people eat, breathe loudly, slurp soup, or whatever it may be. So now I will rarely sit down with my family for dinner without putting on some music first!

Or perhaps we can just stop referring to them as "medium success" companies. "Medium success" for whom?

$100M in revenue/year to anyone but a very very small percentage of people in the world is a wildly successful business you just built.

I'm always glad to see PLATO getting its due. We had a PLATO terminal in our house - beautiful wood frame with an orange plasma screen, hardwired in to the University of Illinois mainframe at 1200baud. Besides remembering playing a lot of Empire with the college kids, there was also a cyber-nanny called "The Enforcer" which admins could place on "educational" accounts to limit access to games at certain hours of the day (or if games were taking up too many resourced on the mainframe.) My Dad used The Enforcer as a very effective incentive to get my homework done.

We often have people participate anonymously - either anonymously among their peers, or in certain instances, anonymous from anyone in the company and we serve as the 3rd party arbiter of all the data. It really just depends on the organization's culture and how transparent they are ready to be.

Minimally though we're looking to establish an ongoing dialogue between the different levels of an organization. Our belief is that people on the ground building product, interfacing with clients, etc. aren't consulted nearly enough about predictions that inform big strategic decisions. Instead, leaders are making decisions based on input from a limited number of SME's, data analytics, and their own beliefs. None of these are bad per se, but not leveraging your own people we believe is a huge opportunity lost.

Happy to follow up live/over email if you'd like. adam at cultivatelabs

We make prediction market software for companies to use internally: https://cultivatelabs.com/forecasts if you want to chat sometime.

You should read Tetlock's other work about foxes and hedgehogs in Expert Political Judgment. It presents a theory of why some people are indeed better forecasters than others. It's not lucky or genius, it's more about people who are able to consider several different data points, consider historical precedent, and make a relatively unbiased judgment about what's going to happen. These are the same types of people he sought out for the Good Judgment project, and its these same types of people who were considered Superforecasters making hundreds of forecasts over the course of a year about geopolitical issues.

I just went through and made wills for myself and my spouse. Excellent interface and indeed, it took about 10 minutes which just kills (no pun intended) what I was about to go through with a lawyer.

Only point of feedback - you say you're going to email the people we appoint as guardians etc. with their responsibilities. Would be good to know what they're going to be sent, when, and be given the option to add a message to what they're being sent. Might also be nice to even be copied on that message. These are obviously sensitive conversations so seeing exactly what someone is going to be getting from you seems important.

I live in Illinois and you guys don't support living wills there yet - do you have any sense of timetable for the states you aren't supporting yet?

I had an opportunity to visit the Chicago regional center a few years ago to meet some of the controllers and learn how their systems work. Everything about the space is meant to keep these guys calm and focused on their job. It literally feels like being in a bit of a cocoon. Dark lighting, very large screens at each workstation, some physical controllers to quickly modify their on screen views. Their training also focuses quite a bit on constant recall of what they're looking at (in the event their systems suddenly die, they need to always know what planes are in their sequence and where generally they are) and of course stress management.

I'm glad The Atlantic has highlighted ATC in this instance. They are definitely an under-appreciated workforce.

There are a few companies that have made it in to YC from Chicago over the years.

This system could always fall back to the more general populace review if there isn't enough data from your friends/acquaintances.

I agree a 5-star rating system tells you little. But it's at least some signal and combine that with also displaying how many people have contributed ratings (which would be trivial in these mockup examples) and you now have a pretty strong signal as to the quality of the place without ever touching the content of the reviews. This is a sample of one of course, but of the probably hundreds of restaurants I've been to with 4-star Yelp ratings that have over 20 reviews, I don't think I've been to even one where I wouldn't agree that yes - this deserves at least a 4-star rating.

The thing you really have to watch out for here if you have lower prices published is the big guys seeing that and thinking they can get your services for that much too. You have to have your story really nailed of why the 2k-5k services are worth that much more. Usually this is in the form of service level agreements, support levels, response times, security, etc.

As an anecdote, we had "small business pricing" published on our site and organizations like The World Bank, Koch, and a few others were paying $279/month which was insane. We made a few thousand a year on those plans, and a few hundred thousand on "enterprise" clients.

We don't have small business plans anymore.

Congrats on shipping. :) As others have mentioned, I was turned off by the pricing model. Your idea of taking a % of amount saved, or charging me after you've achieved savings would be much more palatable.

That said, if you have the data for it, it would be awesome to show some proof that this is a widespread thing - that prices do fluctuate regularly and there are these drops in price people can take advantage of - if they are using your service. I think that would help your case.

MS has experimented with prediction markets internally off and on. This particular market is being run by David Rothschild who is a researcher at Microsoft. He's run the site http://predictwise.com for quite some time and done a really nice job with it. I've met David in person and he's an uber smart guy with some really good ideas. This is a "labs" project for the time being as the name implies, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some of this work make its way in to MS products in one form or another, i.e. embedded prediction market style questions in Sharepoint or MS Project, or even as ad units on Bing to collect a massive pool of forecasts.

All you need to do is go to Apple's claim they have a design driven methodology. It's fairly predictable then when they roll out something like Apple Pay that they're going to not do it until they have the requisite business deals in place to make it a good experience for the users. How successful they are at the friction point of tech and design varies (iTunes sucks :) but that's always their goal and worldview of how they set out to take on projects like this.

Also the project's official site where you can get more background about the race and what relevance this has: https://sites.google.com/site/dictyworldrace2014/

Biggest thing I took away from this is organize your contacts from the very beginning of starting your business so you can easily turn them in to mailing lists. There are so many different types of people I've talked to over the years of running my business: investors, experts in various topics, journalists, executives and it would be so nice when we have something to put out to just be able to refer to those various lists vs. digging through email and inevitably only finding a subset of those people.

Sorry for that experience, I'll be sure to pass that along and get it rectified. I'm sure you're not the only one who would have an issue with this.

If you're talking about how we resolve questions when the answer is (supposedly) known - we try to be pretty careful about what sources we tap and have a growing list of subject matter experts we reach out to to understand what may really be going on. We also have partnerships with IEEE, AAAS, and a few other professional societies who are helping both author forecasting questions and resolve questions. This is all a public/open effort so if anyone wanted to get involved themselves by posting forecast questions in addition to making predictions, they can do so.

Thanks - I agree (although this is a non-profit effort by a University so technically we're not selling anything.) We'll put a big call to action on the homepage to review the forecasting questions. In the meantime, here's a direct link so you can see what's out there. Hope you'll reconsider coming back: https://scicast.org/#/questions/

This is actually why I posted this. It seems PLATO has never gotten its due for the truly revolutionary concepts it introduced. I remember - in the early eighties - playing networked games and participating in tournaments, sending "personal notes" which were emails, participating in discussion forums with people from universities all over the world, taking lessons to augment my schoolwork...There was even instant messaging. All from a PLATO terminal which was made out of wood and metal and connected to the university mainframes at 1200baud.

Inkling Markets - Software Engineer - Chicago, IL

ABOUT US

Inkling (http://inklingmarkets.com) is changing how decision-making works inside companies and government agencies using crowdsourced forecasting tools like prediction markets, opinion polls, and crowdfunding.

We’ve helped Ford and GM develop ideas for the future of American-made cars. We enable the US Government to plan for the future by forecasting world events. We’re even trying to prevent the Zombie Apocalypse - seriously, ask us about it.

We are a small, but profitable and growing YC company. We have thrived based on demand from our clients and haven’t had to take outside investment.

THE JOB

We’ve got a lot going on here at Inkling. We’re adding a ton of exciting new features to our flagship platform that our clients are going to love. We are expanding our mobile capabilities - which means continuing to improve our iOS app, developing an Android app, and making our HTML/CSS more mobile friendly. We’re also developing a line of new products from the ground up to meet the evolving needs of our clients and to expand into new markets.

We’re looking for a well-rounded developer to join our team and help us grow. You’ll have the opportunity to work in many areas - with different technologies, on different products, and for multiple clients.

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

Above all else, we’re looking for smart people who have a passion for what they do and are excited about learning new things. Specifically, you’ll need:

* Real-world experience building non-trivial web applications

* Value teamwork and collaboration - we’re a small team and work very collaboratively

* You have opinions about UI/UX design

* You know your way around a Unix shell

Bonuses:

* Rails experience. If you haven’t used Rails, you’ll need a willingness and capability to learn fast

* You have experience interacting with clients

* Front-end development skills, Javascript, HTML/CSS

* Mobile (iOS or Android)

COMPENSATION

* A competitive base salary

* Revenue sharing

* Healthcare stipend if needed

* Training, tutorial, and books budget

* Attend a conference of your choice annually on us

* New laptop of your choice

* An opportunity to be a crucial member of the team. You’ll play a part in steering the direction of our products. You won’t be a cog in a wheel.

HOW TO APPLY

Send an email to jobs@inklingmarkets.com with whatever you think best represents you: your github repo, a blog you write, a resume, a portfolio, code samples, etc.

Thank you for saying this. Some in this thread are being critical of the mistakes he made in planning his retirement. That may be, but he's owning it and working his tail off to continue to do what is important to him, namely see his children and remain independent. Much respect.