It’s amazing that Microsoft - given their focus on AI and decades of experience in spreadsheets - doesn’t offer this type of functionality. Corporate bureaucracy vs startup agility!
2,403 karma · joined March 13, 2011
The part that I am not following in your argument is why are we even introducing that variable in the first place. I mean, sure, money, beauty, health, IQ, EQ, and so many other factors are helpful and make everything easier. But why is money so intrinsically linked to Sam Altman's specific path to success? He comes from middle class, and all the money he made came after he was validated in his approach, not before. So why bring it up here? And if you're going to bring up money, why not bring up all the other factors I mentioned above?
I’ll help you out. A bunch of us here deal with board members on a daily basis. Some board members are great, others not so much. To hear that there is a board out there that gave voting rights to an employee makes us experience two simultaneous sensations: 1. Hell yeah!, and 2. I wonder if they picked the right employee.
I’ll leave it at that.
I empathize with the quick back-of-the-napkin math ("if we could just take Bezos' money and give it to the poor..."). But I think there's an important nuance here.
You're making it sound like the only group of people that would be affected by this are the folks with $0 in net worth, so that the upside is $100m. In reality, anyone who's ever earned the first $100m (not inherited or won in a lottery), only ended up accelerating their ambition and likelihood of doing a lot more. Case in point - all of the Paypal mafia - they are all working their asses off every single day, and none of them would have had the upside that you're talking about.
In short, your proposal would basically mean that you're going to force into retirement anyone who demonstrates to be a 1000x doer. In the worst case scenario, the opportunities those people would have created would be lost for a long amount of time (eg: creating a domestic automaker that turns the ICE industry upside down). At best, you would be expecting from unproven people who have not yet validated their abilities to execute on those opportunities with the same level of success as the 1000x doers.
So it seems to me that the question is not so much "what could we do with Bezos' money," but more "how much of Bezos' money are we comfortable with not being generated at all to ensure that he never has more than $100m."
Trustpilot optimizes their SEO to rank for search terms that include the "negative review" phrase.
Once Trustpilot has your profile up on their site, they will quickly start ranking for the "negative" phrase. You will be tempted to squash down those negative reviews by redirecting your positive reviews there, which will then also give them higher ranking for all of your review-related phrases - including the negative one. At this point you're locked in - without your intervention, your average rating on Trustpilot will always be lower than on any other service, and in order to counterbalance that, you will be helping Trustpilot's SEO more than any other service. Game set match.
What to do? I would suggest four main principles:
1. They will eventually get your profile, you cannot escape that. But what you can do is create a profile yourself that will be crippled in SEO (eg: wrong TLD, or slight mispelling, perhaps an extra word, etc). You might have to take several swings at this, but the goal would be to come up with a name for your company that i) ranks for your correctly spelled name in their internal search, but ii) is not competitive in the global SEO race with other companies that have your correct spelling.
2. Pick a different review service that's more honest and will work with you on a good faith basis. I found the BBB to be the most business-friendly of all of them (a bit surprising, I know). They just simply don't operate as a VC-run business that has to grow fast at all costs, and as a result, they won't turn on your like other services do (eg: it's in the services' interest to keep the content on the site, and the BBB will take things down more aggressively than any other service I know). Once you pick your canonical 3rd party review service, make them the #1 in SEO for your name by ensuring that they always have an order of magnitude more content than any other service.
3. You might be pressured to send content to Trustpilot to make up for the bad reviews. Do as little of that as possible, and each time you do that, send 10x more content to your chosen service.
4. Some people (usually those meaning to inflict the most harm) will always choose to leave their 1-star reviews on an external site so that they cannot be taken down. But you can definitely lower that volume by making it exceptionally easy for people to leave a review on your own site. That approach is far more favorable because you have a lot more options to turn the sentiment of the reviewer from negative to positive (assuming you're willing to do some custom coding). You'll still need a 3rd party review service (eg: Yotpo) so that your ratings can show up in Google Shopping etc, but you can collect those by sending all your purchasers that standard "review your purchase" email. If they leave a bad review using that service, you'll have the full context and will be able to react accordingly. Apart from that email, make sure that people can leave a review on your site without having to verify their purchase. In my experience, a substantial portion of customers doesn't realize why unverified reviews are discouraged and often not even available, which drives them to Trustpilot. So regardless if you're using Yotpo or some other service (most of which don't allow unverified reviews), make sure that a customer can click on a "review this product" button right on your site. I'll let you figure out 1) how to make this happen, and 2) what to do if in that case someone selects a 1-star review (hint: put your best foot forward right then and there).
If an office is moved to a less densely populated area, the average commute time of all employees collectively ends up increasing.
The way rich people actually show off to other rich people is by doing what's right for their companies, thereby increasing the value of their equity - which then allows them to buy luxury goods and impress other rich people that way.
Another notable YC investment that I always admired was Immunity Project (an attempt to make a free HIV vaccine) - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/immunity-project.
So, yes, doing your own corporate taxes in the US is likely not a good idea, especially if you hire people across several states. But the cost of an accountant is a minuscule cost compared to paying X% more across your entire payroll (not to mention other aspects).
[0] A lot of recent discussion centers on how many of the most successful US entrepreneurs come from privileged backgrounds, but you should not lose sight of the fact that literally every other country in the world will fare a lot worse in this regard. Many things are broken in the US, but no other place on Earth has lower barriers to starting your own LLC and hiring your first employee.
Why is it a false narrative? The basic premise is simple: company X spends money on ads, then turns those ads off and finds that the revenue does not change. Then the conclusion is made that ads don't work. On the surface, it seems like sound logic, and that's why articles like that do find their way into reputable publishers.
But allow me to make an analogy that will hopefully highlight how absurdly oversimplified that takeaway is:
Company X decides to switch from PHP to Go, and in the process ends up with all sorts of bugs due to how the new garbage collector works. This costs the company a lot of money, and the conclusion is made that Go is a shitty programming language.
What both of these cases have in common is that neither takes into the account the proficiency level of the operator. It's somehow intuitively obvious that as you trade programming abstractions for performance, you will require a higher level of developer proficiency to extract that performance. But nobody makes that connection in the marketing world. The often quoted examples of marketing calamities, Ebay and Uber, have marketing budgets in the 100s of millions, which can be only deployed using multi-channel strategies. In other words, you might give 10% of that to Pinterest, and might be delighted to see that Pinterest reports a 300% ROAS. But it turns out that Pinterest will also report on a much longer lookback window than other platforms, and will use a different attribution model than, say, Facebook or Google. If you turn off your Pinterest spend and discover that the reported 300% ROAS was not accurate, it doesn't mean that ads don't work - it means that Pinterest had bad incrementality, and that it was some other platform that deserves all the credit. In short, in the days, weeks and sometimes months that it takes for a customer to convert, Pinterest had some impact, but much less than its in-platform figures indicated. You can measure incrementality using 3rd party vendors like Measured.com. The fact that Ebay's and Uber's marketing teams were apparently not doing that is inexcusable.
In some cases, the lack of ad performance is not just channel-specific, but true across most channels and sometimes even across the board. For example, some purchases are triggered by emergencies, and that's where search channels outperform TV and social. And in other cases, your customers just cannot be reached by ads at all - eg: military contracts. I am sure we can come up with many more examples that seem to show that ads don't work. But what those examples really show is that there's a certain amount of minimum qualification to make ads work, and a lot of people simply lack those qualifications.
That's alright, a lot of people also lack experience in Golang, but at least they think twice before making all sorts of assertions about the viability of that programming language. Not so much when it comes to marketing topics - somehow there's this belief that if a certain ad channel didn't work for you with your specific value prop and your specific expertise in this field, this is somehow relevant to everyone else. I can see how newbies can make that mistake. But for Rand Fishkin or the CMOs of Ebay and Uber to fall into that trap... blows my mind.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi... [1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/something-is-rotten-in-online-adv...
The other option is to put too much trust in the hands of dictators. Over the course of hundreds of years, that actually seems to work less well (eg: China - given their potential, they should have never had to play catch up). But every once in a while, there are a few decades where an individual comes along that plays all of their cards right and engages in a long game that vastly outperforms the 4-year back and forth circus of democracies.
But I don't trust myself to reliably recruit a front desk colleague, let alone someone with nuclear codes. So democracies it is.
A lot of this translates to the work environment. Someone making $300k might feel exceptionally rewarded for their work, until they find out that their peer makes $320k. Suddenly that $300k no longer looks that desirable anymore. Call it an innate quest for justice, call it culture shock, call it whatever you want - if you cannot see why your individual arrangement might produce a net negative result for the rest of the company, then you're ignoring the reality.
You just have to implement certain rules and treat everyone the same. You're either a full-time company, or you're a part-time company. You're either an on-site company, or you're a remote company. If you allow hybrid, you have to allow it for everyone. And if one person gets to work 20 hours a week, then it needs to be a 0-friction process for everyone else to transition to the same arrangement if they so desire. From a staffing point of view, that last part is an absolute managerial nightmare ("sorry, the project will be pushed back by 12 months because all of our engineers decided to move to part-time, and we cannot hire new engineers, because the existing staff may also move back to full-time at any given point").
There is, however, a solution for you - just work for extremely well-funded early-stage startups, because their CEOs will be more than glad to rock the boat internally in exchange for your skills and experience that they would be otherwise struggling to find in a full-time hire. By the time that startup scales and their CEO starts thinking about culture and retention, you'll be off to the next boat that you can rock as hard you'd like.
For years, I kept experimenting with different approaches to filing my taxes. I started out with TurboTax, and being so painfully aware of their bad reputation, I kept trying out every alternative I could think of - including their biggest competitor TaxAct and three different tax firms. After all that work, I am back to using TurboTax. Obviously, it was not an easy decision given how hard I tried to avoid that path, and no, I didn't return to TurboTax because I got tricked by one of their dark patterns.
The simple answer for why the tax firms didn't work out is that the work they required in their onboarding equaled or exceeded the amount of work it would have taken me to do the whole thing in TurboTax myself. Mind you, this is just the onboarding piece - not including the emails and calls leading up to the onboarding and following the onboarding.
The least sophisticated firm just said: send us everything in a zip file. That sounded appealing until they started following up with a million questions. The medium-sophisticated firm (which was the most painful of all of them) asked me to use their web app which was essentially TurboTax except that the questions were incredibly confusing so that I had to look up a ton of stuff just to make sure I was submitting the right thing. The third firm used a better web app, but it was still the same thing - the onboarding was essentially the same as just using TurboTax.
The obvious added value with tax firms is that they might catch something that you would have done wrong without their assistance, but these days TurboTax does offer the same service as well (and no, I never received some valuable piece of advice that justified the additional time and effort of working with a tax firm).
TaxAct is not bad, and would be my close second preference. In fact, they actually cover more niche cases (eg: filing certain types of corporate taxes). Even so, their UI/UX is only almost as good as TurboTax but not quite. As unpopular as TurboTax might be in this community, I think we can take a moment and appreciate their PM+UI/UX team, who used some pretty delightful copy and super slick design to turn an awful task into a rather pleasant experience.
And that's the ultimate answer to the OP's question as I see it... most people who are aware of the dark patterns in TurboTax know that it is not the cheapest way to file, but it's certainly not the most expensive either - and if you're looking for the easiest-to-use and fastest method to get the tax report checked off your list, then it's hard to find a better solution (granted, partially because they are helping create the world we live in).
Even so, I still think the closing could have been better. His last words are an accusation, and he portrays a landscape where it's hard for Stripe competitors to win. There actually was an opportunity to say something like: "And yet, if there's anything I've learned, it's that in the end a great product can overcome all adversity. That's what enabled us to become the first unicorn startup in the world to have introduced a 4-day work week for all of our 600 employees."
That meaning is exactly that I was looking for. Many people, myself included, believe he's wrong. But what the hell do we know? It feels odd to be giving business advice to a self-made billionaire.
Let's start with the very first argument you presented: getting rejected by YC is a clear proof of collusion.
Getting rejected by YC happens to tens of thousands of applicants each batch. Your chances of getting accepted increase disproportionally if you can show progress since the rejection. To react the way you did is a contrarian move. And it kind of fits the pattern - to publicly insult every VC on Stripe's cap table is also a contrarian move. Not to mention that you also made it clear to all your future potential talent that there's this thing about you not being liked by the VC community in Silicon Valley.
I will skip all the little jumps to conclusions that you also presented throughout your thread, and will instead focus on the big picture here. The whole time I was reading your thread, I was waiting for the triumphant finish (eg: today we're announcing that we stole Stripe's biggest customer). Instead, all I heard was that Stripe is unbeatable, which sounded quite depressing from your company's point of view. I wonder how this will make future fundraising or deal closing any easier. Another contrarian move.
I am not in a position to criticize you because clearly you've gotten very far and something that you're doing must be working. But whatever it is, it's super contrarian. So rather than presenting the Stripe-Bolt competition in the light of a mobster movie, I think a Rambo analogy would be more appropriate - a traumatized but highly skilled fighter declaring war on everyone and their grandmother.
But you're really not in a good position to advocate for open salaries - you're an outlier. Most people deeply, deeply, deeply care about their salaries. It's what gets them out of the bed in the morning, it's what makes their partners respect them, it's what might perhaps provide for private schooling for their kids, etc. Most importantly, it's what makes them feel good about themselves. Yes, those are all wrong reasons, and yes, that's how most people are wired [1].
You'll notice that people who work in academia, military, government jobs, etc all have one thing in common - they are ok with not being able to make more than their peers. They get their happiness from other things in life. But the majority of people out there will happily go the extra mile to get an extra bump in their salary. Open salaries don't allow that - everyone is treated the same, everyone works the same, everyone's output is the same, everyone makes the same salary.
If it sounds familiar to communism, it is - where I was born, everyone's salary was also the same and there was nothing you could do about it. It worked great for people in academia and military (and, coincidentally or not, those are generally the strengths of a communist regime), and it demoralized most people working in other parts of economy where there was supposed to be some competition in the market (which again, coincidentally or not, are the weaknesses of a communist regime). Notably, you won't find a lot of salary transparency in more evolved communist regimes like China, and that perfectly correlated with their economic growth.
[1] Side note: I might sound like I am wired the same way, but I actually took a 6x reduction in salary about 10 years ago and have stayed much below my previous level ever since. Life was incredibly comfortable back then, but I am happier now.
All of these issues are interesting to dive into. The first one will lead with the society accelerating the switch to a highly digital life (think metaverse). A lot of the existing business infrastructure will go out of business when that happens, and a lot of the new infrastructure will be built to support the new lifestyle. My guess is that this will benefit the FAANG + unicorns and will hurt the SMBs.
The second one I find difficult to wrap my head around. I had no idea that someone working as a waiter has enough savings to just quit their job without moving back in with their parents - it certainly was not true for me back in the day. Perhaps that's what people are doing - moving in with their parents for the benefit of not exposing themselves to health risks? Fair enough if that's what's happening, but somehow I doubt it. The other option is that everyone just switched from one type of a low-skill career to another with less exposure (eg: hospitality to remote customer support) - except that everyone is running their call centers at low capacity these days, so what gives?
The last one is the strangest of them all. Where is the money for those extra wages coming from? Surely, there are a verticals here and there with fat margins that can easily pay more and remain profitable, but the efficient market theory would make you believe that this wouldn't be possible across all industries. And yet, the results of this survey indicate that compensation is the main driver for most people on HN. My only explanation is that the HN audience is primarily in the digital space, which as a whole has benefited from the pandemic and can pay more.