dlu

I suspect that stuff like this, that tends to be more behind the scenes, is what starts separating Apple from all of its competitors operationally. Healthy margins come from low costs

At a startup, often duct taping is exactly what you need. It can't be worthless code, but good enough is often what's needed.

You need to build something that will get shipped and work for the next little bit. Then, when you have an avalanche of customers you get to replace the engine in mid-flight. That's the dream.

The scenario where you build hugely scalable infrastructure with squeaky clean code is not the dream.

That's the dream

1. I feel like social and productivity are at two ends of a spectrum. Searc, at least in my mind, is closer to productivity. Still seems unlikely to me that they'd build it from scratch rather than buy someone.

2. Interesting that you think of the stack that way. So you think Facebook will encroach onto Search at some point? What exactly is in the full stack?

And an obligatory reference to Apple, is Apple a different full stack or are they a short stack without search?

Now I want pancakes

I'm surprised Dropbox or someone similar hasn't tried this already

Can it be saved?

Totally agree. Setting aside some specific time periods for a big push, having a regular and sustainable cadence is invaluable. Especially if you have big audacious goals that require you to be clever. It is terribly hard for people to have that "aha" moment without sustained cadence. Hardly anyone is clever when habitually sleep deprived

Taking $100,000 can't have that much risk involved... plus you could always go back to college if you really wanted to.

Data Visualist

Or I'd go with a designer role. Designer within the Data group? Something like that

I'm not even sure why he thinks they're heading in that direction. Until they do something like make a big productivity acquisition, I can't see them shifting over over from social

They do this everywhere with a major office. Silicon Valley is this plus a handful of other equally huge companies

Always liked the single player vs multiplayer framework of breaking out products.

John Gruber's podcast, touches upon this in the recent episode with Ben Thompson as a guest https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2015/01/24/ep-108

This seems to happen a lot. Sheryl Sandberg talks about this too especially with mentoring which requires a lot of a one on one meeting

Yep, this exactly. Your estimates will get better as you have more information, so keep everyone updated as you get into the thick of it. This is why Agile has daily standups. If you don't have a daily status call, do try to get into some sort of routine update.

It also helps if you know what is the highest priority and what can get sacrificed.

If you're late, talk about it in your retrospective. Taking time to look back will help you make better estimates in the future. Often times I gauge how reliable an engineer's estimate is based off of how many questions he/she asked me during the kick off meeting.

Weird that they say Verizon is notably missing. Since Verizon is on CDMA, they don't have SIM cards anyways. Is it really a surprise that Apple SIM doesn't work with them?

I like your idea that the first marketing hire at a startup should have "growth as their true north."

Part of the reason I wince when someone says, "growth hacker" is that too often I've seen someone with that title parachute in, turn all the knobs up to 11 and then run off to be airlifted into another team's domain. I think a lot of folks treat growth hacking as magic pixie dust that they can sprinkled around to make numbers go up. I'm sorry to say that my introduction to the term was well after it became bastardized.

Personally, I think we a new phrase for all this.

I read this as I was eating lunch at my desk... nothing spices up a meal like a guilt trip. Yeah ok, maybe I should go take a real break.

I usually try to take a real lunch, but it is tempting to get a bit of extra time back during midday. It ends up being a slippery slope where it silently goes from once-in-a-while to all-the-freaking-time.

I also probably end up physically leaving my desk, but spending my whole lunch spinning the wheels in my head and that's probably just as problematic.

Hello! Evernote employee here, I first wanted to say thanks for posting. Its always good to hear from our users directly. I've been at Evernote for a while and it is still weird to see us show up on HN.

Anyways, I enjoyed your comments wanted to give my personal opinion & point of view for at least points 1 & 2.

1. You're right that scaling is very hard. If you want a closer look at it, we have a tech blog that even I can read and understand. https://blog.evernote.com/tech/ Perhaps the most reassuring thing I can say is that Evernote runs on Evernote. Err... maybe this is more clear, Evernote (the company) runs on Evernote (the service). We eat our own dog food as they say, which means I've lost count of how many water cooler conversations turn into "there's something weird that Evernote's doing on my computer..."

2. Our Mac and Windows apps let you export your notes into HTML (including resources). Both these apps run natively against local files so you could export if you were offline or if for some reason our service was down. We try to compete by making a great app and a great service. In fact, we don't make money unless we've done a good enough job for you to upgrade to Premium. It seems like your main concern is that your text-only notes export to HTML instead of plaintext, which is a fair point. One of the nice things HTML is that there are third party applications that can convert from HTML into a number of other formats, so we're relying on that if you want your notes in RTF or as a .txt or something else.

Sorry to hear that, it sounds super frustrating. "Not qualified" is a less than eloquent phrase, but companies can sometimes be terrible at explaining their reasoning.

It could easily be a scenario where they would rather see much fewer features that were well written and painstakingly cleaned up. However, their question/prompts may have accidentally led you to over-value quantity of features completed. I've seen a number of interviews go side-ways because of miscommunication like that.

It is really hard to tell what happened. If you can get feedback from them, that could be very useful. Otherwise, keep on plugging away.

Good luck to ya

I get the frustration with the litany of crazy startup ideas that no normal person would consider a business.

But somewhere in that crowd, there are startups that do great work. Everpix just shut down, but they had a gorgeous product and a 12% conversion rate. With another round of funding they might done quite well.

It may be great that Amazon's investing activities are heavy in CAPEX, but that doesn't mean that is how all tech companies should operate. Especially since the companies mentioned have rather different lines of business and business models