121 karma · joined April 14, 2015
Goal: make $1kUSD/mo
Making $0 :-)
I know it's from 2018 and maybe something changed, but: they took $115M. They paid $90M in costs, including $38M in salaries and <$1.7M to officers. Look at Part IX. You have all expenses listed. If you run any company ever, you know it adds up pretty quickly. Like other benefits to employees are $5M, pension plan is $1M, and payroll tax is $2M. They had $138M in assets, but only $64M invested in public stocks, and they took $2M from it, which is like 0.03% indicating they held some treasury bonds. So in absolute numbers, it seems big, but when you analyze it, it looks normal.
Imagine you just hire a techy support staff. Let's assume you only need 50 people, each making $100k to operate a global website in all timezones. That's probably like $140k total costs per employee (healthcare, benefits, payroll, all sorts of taxes). You need 50*140k=$7M/yr. Assume you buy AT&T stock with 6% dividend. You need $120M of assets to get $7M. There is no safety here, and also my calculation doesn't include maybe like 5% increase in costs per year.
I often wonder how could I create a fully self-sustainable non-profit: the one, that doesn't require begging for money and wasting time every year. Instead, the one that could operate independently. To make this happen, you pretty much have to invest the money very, very well, and diversify to the point where the yield is low, yet high enough to hire staff etc. (an example of sustainable donation is present in the Thorp's "A man of all markets" wrt. his endowment to UCI math department) For this you must have a pile of money, if you do the math, and it'd make perfect sense for Wikipedia.
Unless they shrink, lay people off and optimize, they'll need $2B to be fully self-sufficient and sustainable. Otherwise, the fundraiser will need to bring $100M/yr at least.
Recently I looked at couple of options of writing some Golang to make a simple GUI app that would look natively on Windows/MacOS (text area, several checkboxes/buttons), and there's no much there to be honest.
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The To-do app they have seems ok too, but I bet it'll be changing all the time, which will suck. Looking for next thing that would be equally inexpensive for OSX/iOS/cloud.
But also: how many people found really, really crappy MVPs to actually work and make sense. e.g.: not scare users.
It's not that CSS/HTML will stop rendering. So you can just stay with 5 year old framework if you want. e.g.: old Twitter Bootstraps and old Angulars will still work, so if you've written code in that, don't touch it. But people get excited about updating, because they like to get features they won't be using.
The long-lived software is hard, and make sure you don't leverage yourself on the other end. Writing stuff to survive many years can be stressful. And you'll see 10-year old hacks and workarounds in the code as well. Just look at some Linux/FreeBSD kernel code. You can also read what Raymond Chen is writing about Windows kernel hacks to make customers happy.
But yeah: embedded, and everything infrastructure related should be long-lived. Even mobile: when writing www.sensorama.org I've mostly used ObjC stuff even though Swift existed for 3+ years now I believe. And all libraries and proprietary apps are and will be ObjC for many, many years. There's just not enough reasons to upgrade.