charleyma

Very exciting to see more companies open up prod + engineering divisions in NYC - I feel as though typical bay area tech satellite NYC offices are go-to-market focused first before expanding out to prod/eng so interesting to see Gusto go the other way first!

"Most discussions around data defensibility actually boil down to scale effects, a dynamic that fits a looser definition of network effects in which there is no direct interaction between nodes."

Good distinction between scale vs network effects, not every company with scale has a network effect...

This is amazing!!

Love that you all have also pre-seeded itineraries from popular travel blogs - any plans on also bringing in tripadvisor data in?

Toxicity in gaming + virtual communities (particularly against women) seems to be an issue that no company has a great grasp on.

I recently gave Fortnite a try and ended up turning chat off due to relentless abuse by someone that sounded like they were pretty young. It made me a bit sad - I met some of my best friends growing up online in irc channels playing CS, WoW, etc - not sure if I would be able to do so today.

Also Polygon article where Ninja talks about why he doesn't stream with female gamers (for whatever reason espn didn't link...) -

https://www.polygon.com/2018/8/11/17675738/ninja-twitch-fema...

Has there been any commercial use case for graphene yet?

I feel as though I've been hearing about its potential constantly for many years, but can't recall any commercial use cases yet.

(side note - it also reminds me of the many hours I spent using the scotch tape method and looking at my chip under microscope to try and identify graphene...)

"Ant says it wants to be known not as a financial conglomerate but as a technology provider or “lifestyle platform,” with future profits coming mainly from fees from institutions using its technology."

As fintech companies get larger in China, interesting to see how marketing shifts as being less a disruptor of banks to being a partner, in order to avoid regulatory attention.

Starting to see that in the US too, as more consumer fintech apps are also beginning to converge with each other in regards to product offerings...

Nvidia is my favorite example of "the next big thing that started out as a toy" ala A16Z's Chris Dixon (http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...).

Literally started off as a device for playing games, and significantly expanded out use cases since then.

Username + password is a huge attack vector, especially for services where users signup and eventually stop using or forget. I wish there was some obligation to reset password or require some form of MFA for applications that experience no usage on my account (especially if the service typically encourages continuous usage)...

Love simple services that do exactly what you would expect

Would also potentially add "voice control" to this list. It's amazing to me that by trying to be "innovative/modern", most car user interface designs have become increasingly user unfriendly.

Case in point, the other day I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to connect my phone to a car via bluetooth (I'm still used to there just being a button for pairing).

Ended up having to search online for the instruction manual to figure it out, turns out pairing is only available via voice command when the car is in park ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Facebook also shut down TBH (anonymous compliment app popular amongst teens) and Hello (a phone app?).

They've also closed some of their APIs around graph + page searching...

guessing a lot of these actions a direct result of the Cambridge Analytic scandal.

I did really enjoy using Moves until they got bought though :(

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/02/facebook-is-shutting-down-...

Meanwhile, CVS + Walgreens lost $6B in market cap on the news Amazon is moving directly into pharmacy space.

It's crazy how competitive Wall Street views Amazon moving into a market; have there been examples of Amazon making a large purchase/move but completely failing? (sure there are, just not coming me off the top of my head)

Interesting answer to Verizon's acquisition of AOL + Yahoo, until all the recent acquisitions I (naively) just assumed ISP's revenue was primary from selling services (cable, internet, tv, data, etc) and reselling the data somehow, but did not connect that they're all very much in adtech...

As it relates to sponsorship transparency, I think platforms such as instagram, youtube, etc have broader issues with their influencers whether CGI'ed or not...

I did find it really interesting that a CGI character could be more appealing to brands as there is much more complete control over image, no past issues, etc.

Reminds me of Hatsune Miku, virtual pop singer in Japan. As CGI continues to improve, wouldn't be surprised if we start to see entire digital labels churning out multitudes of artists/bankds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku

Fully expect this to eventually get settled with no prosecution against any execs.

When HSBC laundered money for the Mexican Cartel [1], just had to pay a one time fine of $1.92B [2] and say "we're sorry".

Would be extremely surprised if the bank's legal teams let it get far into prosecution.

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-s... [2] http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/10/news/companies/hsbc-money-la...

Main goals of a salesteam include building accurate pipeline, and closing that pipeline as quickly as possible.

In B2B, level of touch definitely depends on the size of the deal. Excellent discovery + qualification done quickly is super important for larger companies.

E.g. signing up for Dropbox for my 2 person company is (and very much should be) self service, with transparency around price and what it will look like as I grow in the short run.

Signing up for Dropbox for an enterprise company for thousands of licenses, each with different apps, permissioning, environments, infrastructure, etc should be a much in depth conversation. Typically enterprise clients with volumes also expect to have discounts due to their scale (they know they're worth $$$), and in order to have a properly managed negotiation, a sales team needs to full understand who they're selling to, what they care about, what levers can be moved, decision maker, timing, etc. All of these attributes are typically much more distributed in large companies vs leaner entities with 1 decision maker.

First call closes are great, what I can say is that I've never heard of a $1mm deal close on just one call.

Plaid was just starting 5 years ago :)

we currently don't have an updated official go library for our API, but shoot me an email (charley@plaid.com) and can shoot over some recs for third party libraries

Plaid can pull balance information for asset + investments accounts, so typically the size of the portfolio

Charley from Plaid here.

Correct! We have three environments you can send API traffic into - sandbox, development, and production.

Sandbox + development are 100% free to use, development just requires a quick request through the dashboard after signing up for API keys. (https://dashboard.plaid.com/signup)

Sandbox- gives access to sandbox data to test the integration. Development - add up to 100 live bank accounts Production - add as many live accounts with paid account

I signed up to be a Bird charger in SF and it's been quite difficult to find scooters to charge. All the scooters go offline at 9pm to be charged and then have to be dropped off by 7am the next morning in order to get paid. I've encountered a ton of issues trying to find more "valuable" scooters as they tend to appear to be in unsafe areas that I don't necessarily want to be at night (most of the high value scooters tend to be in the tenderloin and I'm guessing have already been broken down, I can usually tell if it's not there due to the last known location being a few days ago)

I've started to view the expensive Birds as a way for the company to have people try and find their lost scooters, in which case $25 is a pretty great deal...

"The longer a company has been in business – or the less good a founder is at telling a story – the more concrete and certain the metrics of that business need to be. Part of the challenge companies that have raised too much seed money face is that the requirements they face for an A are significantly higher than for those who raise less. They generally wait longer for their As, so investors expect to see associated progress."

The tension that investors look at between time to executve and how much progress has been made is really interesting. Is the the time horizon (and thus expectation) very different for different industries? Is it relative to existing incumbents and competitors?

One of my friend's parents owns a parrot and I didn't believe it when she told me their Macaw could live up to 80 years. I can't imagine having a pet live for a lifetime...

What type of roles are you specifically looking for? Engineering, sales, marketing, business, etc

Also what type (industry) and what stage startup are you applying to?

For example, "startups" like space-x I'm assuming value having a ton of enterprise experience versus something more consumer facing like Snapchat two years ago.

Different stages as well as industries will be looking for different potential + proof of experience and you should highly tailor your resume + interview to those expectations!

If it's more on the business side, happy to chat further if helpful :).

Jumping ahead of the conversation a bit, insert blockchain thread here. (=

answer would be it very much depends, some considerations that I would want to know:

- big difference between 10x revenue vs profit, what's the current cost basis / margin in the product? - evaluating current marketing efforts, how much demand is from inbound vs outbound, what's working and what's not - pricing, is the product being priced correctly - cost factors: support, infrastructure, salary, anything around cost of goods sold - what's the current revenue base? I would argue going from 100k MRR -> 1m MRR is a lot easier than going from 1m -> 10MM, that requires a lot more coordination and most likely enterprise customers - existing customer base, do I have success selling into some enterprise vs selling into longtail b2b segment

if I just had 1 year, I would be biased towards trying to focus on my core products and growing them, however if I don't have a large enough addressable market and I needed to 10x in 12 months, then I would focus much more on product development +R&D

if I had 3 years, I think the strategy would be similar, but with longer time spans to test different strategies

pretty much this.

Would love to see more direct sources/citations, but I thought this reddit thread on what happened to victims jailed to be interesting, most of those individuals still had to serve out their time as the law was repealed vs being ruled unconstitutional

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37yzhw/when_...

I've always found that anytime time a financial outcome is tied to some sort of behavior incentive, weird behaviors come out. This especially comes out in sales, where whether you like it or not, individuals will typically optimize for the best financial outcome, which is not always explicitly connected to what's best for the company.

Agreed, the $35 million penalty was to settle charges that Yahoo "misled investors by failing to disclose one of the world’s largest data breaches".

The breach occurred on Dec 14th 2014 and it wasn't disclosed until 2016 during the acquisition by Verizon.

Taken from the sec's site:

" Instead, the company’s SEC filings stated that it faced only the risk of, and negative effects that might flow from, data breaches. In addition, the SEC’s order found that Yahoo did not share information regarding the breach with its auditors or outside counsel in order to assess the company’s disclosure obligations in its public filings. . Finally, the SEC’s order finds that Yahoo failed to maintain disclosure controls and procedures designed to ensure that reports from Yahoo’s information security team concerning cyber breaches, or the risk of such breaches, were properly and timely assessed for potential disclosure."

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-71

(full disclosure, I work at Plaid)

Some of the more popular budgeting apps that are built on Plaid include Empower, Clarity Money, and Albert.

I particularly like to use HoneyDue, which is built for couples!