ajsharp

Claiming PM tools "kill companies" is obviously hyperbolic, but I can certainly agree that in the early days of a company, they're usually a gigantic waste of time, effort and focus. Especially if implemented via mandate.

Often there's a person (the PM) who has too much free time, and implements said tool for a reason like, "let's use X so we can all communicate better!", which of course really means, "I feel out of the loop and I want to know what's going on all the time."

These tools are best used when they arise out of natural communication tension amongst the team. Mandating everyone communicate and track progress in a specific way, for the benefit of one person, especially if that person isn't the CEO, is a giant amount of overhead to place on a small team. All you'll do is slow down the team.

Cheers to google for properly compensating these guys for their findings.

While convenient to paint a picture of everything being messed up and different than previous generations, none of this is at all accurate. The difference is that we lived through the Bush administration, remember it vividly, and many of us disagreed with nearly everything that happened during those 8 years. And it just happened, so it's still fresh(ish). As the saying goes, "everything's different, everything's the same." I agree those years were really bad; whether they were the worst or whatever is relevant only to someone trying to make a broader point (which I'm not).

Personally, in most cases, I don't have a problem with hiring someone based on their merits, despite what their past job was, or even what their political beliefs are (see: Brendan Eich). Apparently Condoleeza Rice is extremely smart, capable, and, as the former Secretary of State, obviously well-connected in the international community.

And while you made a pretty good attempt at equating her to Dick Cheney, she's just not Dick Cheney.

At the end of the day, this is about Dropbox, not the Bush administration, and if Drew Houston has a spine, nothing will change about this situation.

What makes you say they didn't? They probably just don't care.

This is just silly.

Anxiously awaiting Aaron Greenspan's inevitable troll-sesh on this thread :D

Cool, thanks.

No way. It would require poring through so much more raw data to take raw tcp traffic, structure it somehow and pull out email messages (option a). Compare that against going through structured data in the gmail storage system (option b). Option B is much, much simpler.

Is this new? Anyone know if Stripe supports transactional escrow yet? E.g. when a credit card charge clears, are those funds available immediately in my account balance, for payout or withdrawal? Balanced does this and it's one of the most valuable features IMO.

> In this case, the Right Place (tm) to put these is in POROs / Interactors that can be tested in isolation and re-used across the code-base if necessary.

Key phrase: "if necessary".

It sounds like you're advocating for building abstractions before you actually have a reason to use them. Your reason seems to be "we may need to reuse them in the future" or, "one can see where we might move in a direction where we'd want want to re-use this code", or worse yet, "we're definitely going to build some functionality after this release when we'll want to re-use this stuff."

I've been there, really, I have. Build the abstraction when you actually need it, not when you think you're going to need it, or pretty close to needing it, etc. Because 98% of the time, YAGNI.

> In that case, is there not an advantage to standardising the API for these POROs in Rails?

Not a big enough that I've come across to warrant building domain-specific abstractions and special rules that, as @dhh mentioned, will serve only to raise the barrier to entry to your codebase.

Not hyperbolic at all. This is brokerage 101. It's absolutely asinine that their system fails this hard when doing some "upgrades". A real brokerage (e.g. Fidelity, Schwab et al) would likely be subject to non-trivial fines from the FCC for this type of gross negligence.

Sounds like they need some people who have actual practical experience building financial systems.

While I generally disagree with the sentiment, his observation for the subset he's talking about -- "world changers", e.g. Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Zuckerberg, Brian Chesky, Drew Houston, etc -- is correct.

As a founder of another startup (octocall.com) choosing to host our database with another company (postgres, hosted with Heroku) the decision is a simple one: You trade infrastructure management complexity for a monthly fee. Especially when you're starting out, the team is small, and time is much more expensive than whatever your database provider is charging you per month.

It's a great trade-off for most early-stage companies, because managing databases is hard. I'd rather leave it to the experts who specialize only in managing databases. You and your product team have a thousand and one other things to think about other than managing your database. Your provider may end up making mistakes, but that's part of the risk you take.

Security breaches are a mess for everyone involved, and we're in relatively new territory here in the Infrastructure As A Service space. Overall, I have little doubt that IAAS overall is a good thing. As an industry, we'll learn and improve on how to deal with all things "security", but we're clearly not there yet.

Some people are just trolls, better known as haters. Don't let em get you down :)

How do you figure? Visa sees a piece of every card transaction involving a visa card.

My apologies, I mis-quoted the annual number, which is about $10.4 bln, which is still only about .16%.

Still, your question, "Who gets the other 1.95% of that?", is valid. My guess: the card issuers themselves, who operate the networks (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover). Throw a little on top for Chase PaymentTech and the like.

Yep, you're right, my fault, will fix.

Nothing would be required of customers. They'd migrate the data over to Paypal's setup in such a scenario. Card data is stored with a symmetric encryption algorithm (e.g. reversible), so this type of thing could happen fairly easily.

Growth potential, total potential market size, other possible revenue sources (e.g. Square Marketplace).

Ha, wouldn't we all :) My point is only that it's damn hard to get to that number, and if you're a startup who's raised many rounds of capital, after a few years of grinding an acquisition by a company like paypal (read: ebay) starts to look like a nice option.

To put that Visa number into perspective, according to various reports Square did $15bn in transaction volume last year. So, if you use the same ratio of transaction volume to revenue (0.16%) that would put Square's revenue at $23.2mln. For what it's worth, that's probably a generous ratio, as companies like Square and Braintree are all use Chase payments tech as their processor, which itself has to pay out to Visa and other processors. So these firms' margins are likely much lower than Visa's.

As either a customer or a partner of one of these companies, I'd prefer doing business with a company that's building a base that doesn't essentially require acquisition if they can't grow to Visa's size.

Anyone building a card processing business is going to have trouble finding long-term cash flow because the margins are razor thin. For example, Visa processed $6.7 trillion in transactions and made $10.4bn in revenue.

I'd rather do business with someone like Balanced, who has a larger product vision than "well paypal sucks".

Meh. Welcome to the party, a couple of years late. I'll stick with Balanced. Fantastic product, incredible support. Not even a question. Braintree's bread and butter is card processing. Balanced's is marketplaces / payouts.

You make a great point about the economic realities of pursuing a degree in english, and even worse-so a graduate or PhD.

My takeaway from the piece, however, was that teaching the ability to communicate (writing), is in decline. Both universities and students have devalued the value of learning to write, as it's payoffs are not as great as other majors (though, political science and economics aren't exactly a guaranteed job upon graduation, not in this economy anyway). I see this deficiency constantly in engineering and computer science, and I have little doubt that other industries suffer the same problem.

I'm comfortable saying that most problems that we encounter in engineering are communication problems. Sure, there is the occasional really hard engineering problem (see: getprismatic.com). But most of what I and my peers encounter are not problems requiring major engineering feats, they're problems of human communication.

Thanks again for your thoughtful comment that lays out the harsh economic realities of pursuing english as a course of study. Still, we humans have much to gain in the effectiveness with which we communicate with one another.

My fault, I stand corrected.

FWIW, Balanced has this functionality: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#crea...

FWIW, I think Dwolla still requires the recipient to have a Dwolla account. Stripe and Balanced are white labeled products.

You can transfer to any US bank account with Balanced. Wells Fargo accounts benefit from same day transfers, while all other accounts are next business day.

Exactly.

Come on Aaron. As someone who formerly ran a payments company, you know that going direct from a credit card to a bank account is not possible with today's banking infrastructure. Of course the funds go to their account. You know that, but you're clearly trying to prove a point here. Please, do it somewhere else.

I've been working with Balanced's API since they were Poundpay. I think most of your comments about copying are very misguided. The style of their documentation format is completely irrelevant to the quality of the product (and wrong IMO), which in my > two years of experience, has been superb. Your comments about test cards are just wholly incorrect, and the style of their website and how they present their products is as homogeneous as anyone else offerring a developer product.

Re: UUID's, Jeff Atwood has a good post explaining their pros and cons: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/primary-keys-ids-ve....

> From my complete outsider point of view it feels like Balanced is full of slightly subpar copy ninjas.

I couldn't disagree more. Over the past couple of years, I've come to trust and admire the product as much as any other, including Stripe. These guys know what they're doing.