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Perhaps they're asking for a "startup discount" like AWS Activate.

A discount because they're a startup and putting trust into you and your startup. If they do well, you'll do well. If you screw up they will be impacted.

Also, you may be able to learn a lot of from them and help more people love your product.

I'd counter with like 25 to 30% for one year and a bit more for two years. Try to find a win-win even if you have to get creative. Perhaps they allow you to use their name as a reference on your website or some other consideration.

These sorts of negotiations happen all the time. Enjoy them :)

Good luck with the SaaS, sounds look you have some momentum!

Thanks, great read! His words from 2007 still ring true today. It was also nice to see how some of the startups turned out.

I never met the man, but wasn't Steve Jobs famous for this too?

I've read supposed accounts where he sounded worse than Nest's management.

At least wait until the man is buried.

The right-winged politicians are posturing to make this a presidential election issue, maybe even a big one.

Electing a president who will in turn appoint a SCOTUS Justice may sway more people to vote. Perhaps the the politicians believe that they can use the normal wedge issues (abortion, death penalty, guns, etc.) to have a strong showing on election day.

I would tend to agree that an open SCOTUS seat would motivate more conservatives to vote. But, these things have a way of back firing for politicians and a lot can happen between now and November.

Perhaps most do but I see a different trend these days. "The network" is a lot more important now since so many things are cloud-based.

Our networking group automated a deployment for the fix and contacted everyone that has ever bought an ASA from our company and updated them. We have ~400 ASAs across the country still have < 50 to go. There are still a few stragglers and the older ASAs need a bit more TLC.

Many of those clients have a maintenance agreement with us that includes these sorts of things and changes. All of them were updated and tested within 24 hours.

We did the same thing for the Juniper exploits (albeit we only had a handful).

EDIT: typos

Thanks, that was a good read. I plan on checking out the source too just to learn.

Perhaps not relevant anymore but here's my take.

My company uses a similar-ish service for our after hours emergency number (AnswerConnect). We pay $149/mo for the service and like $20/mo to the phone company for our own toll free number plus any minutes.

The only reason we pay the phone company is because we have our own toll free number and forward it to the answering service. It costs a little more but if we want to switch we're good and it's our number.

A couple of things that jumped out at me about your service:

- Website looks good to me although the video felt a little "slow." I personally wouldn't have the video start automatically but who knows.

- The per minute pricing would be the deal breaker for me. I'd be happier to pay $100/mo or whatever and not have to worry too much about minutes. Perhaps 1,000 minute package or something.

- If I were doing the copy for it, I'd do something like "cloud-based" phone system, or something like that. For non-tech folks it might take a little bit to figure out what you're offering.

- I can't tell if an actual human answers the phone. Is that on the customer to answer and route, is it an IVR, or is it someone that works for you?

Anyway, good stuff!

Walmart is releasing OneOps. It's supposedly their internal platform to be cloud-provider agnostic. I've not used it (yet) and haven't heard of anyone else using it but it sounds like a step in that direction.

http://www.walmartlabs.com/2015/10/walmartlabs-oneops-open-s...

If it's company equipment they're within their rights (usually in the US) to do it.

What I've usually seen is that they're using something like a Palo Alto/Cisco to do transparent/inline "blocking of bad stuff" like drive-by downloads, etc. and tracking general Internet usage. They could have also done it with an agent on each computer or whatever.

Many times the trigger is some troublesome employee or perhaps a malware outbreak somewhere.

In so far as circumventing it, best thing to do is use your own equipment for personal stuff. I have a VPN to my home office and use remote desktop (Windows 10 on both sides or ScreenConnect to my Mac) to keep things separate. No one can see the traffic, it's minimal, and legit.

We've had this challenge as well at a smaller scale. People would go out to lunch all the time to "discuss work" and expense it. We were paying thousands a month for that.

After a while that, and a few other things, got a bit out of hand.

Rather than just go after that, we've made it a goal (among other quarterly goals) for everyone to work towards a certain amount of profitability that people can have a part of.

In addition to reducing expenses (yes, it's cheaper) it's also created a bit more of a frugal culture in the company. It's great, people watch what they spend themselves and are much more concerned about their departments' budgets.

Mind you, we have less than 30 employees at the company (I'm one of the founders).

Also, all expenses automatically go to your manager and then get reconciled by our accountant who basically has OCD and will question anything that even looks remotely questionable to anyone including management.

Point is, we created this more frugal culture so everyone can have a bit more in the long run.

Well, this may not be exactly what you're looking for but I'll share anyway.

I'm a dad of three younger girls (10, 7, and 2). The 10-year old has tons of friends over all the time from her school and dance class. They compete to see who can do the best on their math/STEM homework.

I'm also an employer at a technology company where we didn't have any women full-time until employee 20 or so (save a temp or two). Now we have 8 women, three in technical positions. They fit in great.

Anyway, the best thing I've found is to just give them the same opportunities and to challenge them. For example, we throw math and science trivia games up on the Apple TV and play as a family or with friends. They have fun and it's helped a ton with their math skills.

Also, I volunteer as a Lego Mindstorms coach. My girls don't participate yet but about half the team of 8 are girls. They all love it. A couple were shy at first but it helps that the other coach is a woman. We've had one or two girls that were really shy and didn't want to participate in the formal Lego matches. I casually talked to their parents one-on-one about how we could help those individual girls and we decided to just have them come "watch." Within like 10 minutes those girls joined right in and did great at the matches. I'd say they're some of the smartest on our team.

Same thing with the ladies at work. Two of them have become leaders and two of the others are working their way there.

It's been a matter of finding their talents and letting them go down that path exploring tech and supporting them by giving them CBT Nuggets or Plural Sight subscriptions. They go home at night an learn, explore, and practice.

The only thing I've really noticed is that if a woman tries to "put her foot down" they can be seen as brash (or worse) especially by male engineers. Where if a man does it he's seen as a leader.

I'm not sure how to handle that yet, but a smile goes a super long way.

EDIT: Typos...

Here's what I got:

- iPhone and iPad

- Broadband, technically not a product I guess.

- Salesforce.com, if you were around during that time, I think you'd agree.

- Touchscreen Ultrabooks, I don't care what anyone says, I LOVE them!

Perhaps they were operating under the mainstream radar for a while and all the advertising was their downfall. According to Wikipedia, Draftkings has been around since 2012.

I'd never heard of them until they started plastering every sporting event I watched with annoying, loud commercial after commercial.

Makes sense. Are there any salient points in the book or passages that you'd like to point out. Having experienced some major success and failures I'd be interested in hearing more.

No, they sync if you set it up that way (DropBox, Google Sync, etc.) and you get revision history on ON including the name of the person that made the change.

Agreed, for quick notes it's awesome especially with it's newer multimedia features. Opening ON on your phone and all that is kind of a pain.

Since I also use Windows the problem I have is getting to those notes on my Windows 10 boxes. The only fast way I've found is to log into iCloud.com. Not perfect but good enough.

ON can sync off of a regular old file share. I've been using it for years. A copy on our server and one on each of my computers (desktop, laptop, Mac) and they all happily sync up. Granted, the iPhone app works best with OneDrive. I'm not a fan of OneDrive and use DropBox instead for a smaller ON notebook that I share with my wife for things like handy pictures of our insurance cards, grocery lists, travel information, etc. Works great for us at work (documentation and pictures) and at home.

I'm not disagreeing that in some cases it's true. But as someone who provides infrastructure for a great many businesses including startups, most everyone changes their tune when their server goes down.

That would be really cool, let us know if you do please.

Crane operators do need to know a lot more than just pushing buttons. If not, cranes tip over, get blown over, and sometimes people die. I've seen it happen.

Truck drivers, not so much. Although, when your truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere during a blizzard and you have a load where you get paid based on timely delivery, I'd bet having some knowledge on the truck's internals would be helpful.

Well, being an engineer at a company that provides private cloud services and a long-time programmer, I'd wait to ensure that application stays secure before singing the praises of easy.

While I agree that making things more accessible is great, "really understanding the network" and "security" are more important than ever. The types of things happening now are similar to 15 years ago when "developers" were making Access databases that are still around today and are all sorts of a mess. I've seen companies dump tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars just to keep them going.

Now, something similar is happening but it's with web-based applications. Much more exposed. If you don't know your stuff you, your company, or most importantly, your customers will eventually get burned.