emdowling

I agree that ARM is a threat to AMD as well, but AMD has two things going for it:

1. Stronger x86 design: AMD's recent CPU releases have shown they are inching ahead of Intel on x86 design, and are able to achieve significantly better cost per $. At the same time, AMD are already well into shifting a big chunk their 7nm manufacturing to TSMC. Intel has only just started this process.

2. A strong GPU business: Yes, they are second to Nvidia, but given the design skills they are showing on the CPU side, I expect that gap will narrow very quickly. Both Sony and Microsoft have chosen AMD for CPU and GPU in the PS5 and Xbox Series X, with support for full 4k ray-tracing. Given how long this generation of consoles will be on the market for (likely 5-10 years at least), it is a strong forward indicator of roadmap strength.

tl;dr: I expect AMD will weather* the ARM storm better than Intel.

* Originally a typo as "whether". Thanks for the correction!

Hey Peter! Former client, And used your firm for several employees. You’ve become an expert in this space. How do you think about scalability and succession planning? What motivates you to keep being so hands on? What has motivated you to become a leader in this field?

100% this. University exposed me to a much wider range of society than I’d ever encountered before. Those social interactions have been foundational to my career. The knowledge you learn in classes is secondary to the skills you learn living and working with people who are nothing like you. Embrace it.

So nostalgic and brings back many memories of my teenage years. I had way too much time when Windows XP was being built - would hang out on IRC and download leaked new builds every week or so. devils0wn is forever embedded in my memory (if you know, you know). It was such a fun time, downloading new builds, installing hacks to disable product key checks. A golden age.

It’s pretty simple to reverse engineer an Android binary. While most Android apps ship with code obfuscation, it’s relatively easy to get around. Using that method, one could determine if the publicly available app came from the same source code (it would at least allow you to determine no extra nasty bits had been added).

iOS is a little harder. If you have the dsym files it’s pretty trivial to the same exercise as Android. NHSX could choose to release them so people could again verify it more or less matches.

I’m a former TransferWise employee and I cannot speak more highly of them. Yes, they aim to make money like every business, but I’ve never seen a company so focused on transparency to customers. The CEO intensely interrogates roadmaps from the customer perspective, and fairness to customers is non-negotiable.

Their economy of scale enables them to offer increasingly lower fees, but I can speak first hand to the pain felt by everyone at the company when costs have to increase.

Anyway, I trust them far more than any bank and cannot recommend them more highly both as a customer and workplace.

I agree with all of the above, but unfortunately no matter how good the intention and clarity of market ("high quality software targeted at a specific group of users"), if that user group is not willing to pay, then you are doing a bad job of solving their problems.

We can lament how sad this news is - and it is - but it does expose that, at some level, the company was not able/willing to meet the needs of their (potential) customers.

Some friendly feedback: Your pricing table lists the most expensive plan as being "for big boys". This is really not appropriate and looks immature; it will put a lot of people off. I assume this is not your intention though!

Real time feedback for the author: Good content but the excessive abbreviation use makes it impossible to easily read and digest.

Ditto for gaming desktops. All I want is a really nice, subtle tower that doesn’t look like it belongs in a 13 year old’s bedroom. The Xbox Series X design looks exactly like what I’m after, just in PC form.

This seems like the right response. For Americans who are used to driving everywhere, it is hard to state just how critical the tube is for all people to get to work. Very few people in London have cars, so shutting down the tube entirely would prevent critical workers from getting to work. Looking at the stations to be closed, it seems like a reasonable list; buses will still offer a reduced timetable to connect affected areas.

100% this. I think you've built something that has a lot of potential. Speaking from experience, the biggest trap you'll fall into is trying to find a feature set and a pricing model that caters to every segment who could possibly be interested in.

Call/email/meet with a wide sample of users and understand the exact value you're delivering for them. Then find people who aren't using it but are in the same market as them and see if they find it valuable. If you have a hit product, you'll find a market segment where you're delivering 10x value over their previous solution. Once you find that, focus and go all in.

One-size-fits-all is rarely a viable strategy for SaaS tools.

The two caveats/differences you mentioned are the biggest complaints against Medium. Medium is a fantastic platform for finding an audience when you don’t have one already. It’s an awesome way to just write and get your work out there.

As the post mentions, Ghost 3.0 is targeted at people like Ben Thompson (in the extreme case) who have an audience passionate/supportive/large enough to pay them directly and who want to own the entire relationship with no middleman.

Salary payments are typically still BACS and I think Faster does have a transaction limit in the 10’s of thousands of pounds range.

I want to, but the online requirement for seemingly basic commands like “next track” renders the feature useless when I need it the most: the London Tube. I often have no hands free when travelling in peak hour and connectivity at stations is patchy at best.

Looking forward to TfL finally rolling out cell coverage from 2020 though. Long time coming.

You know you have a killer product when your customers will literally fly half way around the world just to use it.

When I started my company (since acquired) in 2012, Stripe was so game changing I flew from Australia to the US to open a bank account so we could use it. While we could incorporate in the US online, we had to turn up in person at a bank to open an account.

The only alternatives in Australia at the time were PayPal, which had outrageous fees and a terrible experience for recurring SaaS billing, or a merchant account with a bank which was going to require a $30k deposit.

It cost me $750 to incorporate a US entity, $1250 for airfares and hotel (oh to remember SF was that affordable!!). I stayed at Hotel Whitcomb, which conveniently has a Chase branch right next door, and 1 day later we had a US bank account and could turn on our Stripe integration. We didn’t look back.

I love Stripe Atlas, because I intimately relate to the problem, and wish we had it in 2012.

I co-founded a company called App.io which ran from 2012 to 2015. We let people run iOS apps in the browser and we did it by streaming the simulator from virtualised macOS instances. We were running EXSi on Mac Minis colocated in data centres around the world and the system ultimately worked really well (we definitely had scalability issues with such an unconventional setup).

We were quite tight with Apple. We had meetings on campus with senior executives that led to a pilot program with iAd where people could actually play games as an interstitial ad unit. We had employees at Apple who were dedicated to working with us to run this pilot program. Apple ultimately decided to shut down iAd which doomed our collaboration and possible acquisition opportunities.

So this move is really fascinating to me personally. Apple knew how we were doing it and embraced it, probably because we weren't competing against them or undermining the security of their OS.

Only 1% of Australians are fully excluded from financial services (no transaction account, no credit card, no general insurance)[1]. I doubt this law will have much of an impact on that small population.

[1]According to this report from 2013/2014: https://www.nab.com.au/content/dam/nabrwd/documents/reports/...

At no point did I say more vegans do this than non-vegans. I would say the proportion of people who engage in this behaviour is broadly the same regardless of diet.

My point is that being a vegan in the name of the environment and animal cruelty, and still engaging in drugs and long-haul travel, which is far more harmful than a diet change, is hypocritical.

If you’re truly a vegan for environment and ethical reasons, abstain from travel.

You sound like one of the exceptions who practices what you preach.

I, and the people around me, mock vegans because 50% of vegans I've encountered are hypocritical.

They don't eat meat or animal products, because of the "environment", but then eat fruit and vegetables that were imported from thousands of miles away by air. On a weekend, they drop pills, the trafficking and cultivation of which costs lives every single day. And never mind their flights halfway around the world for vacation twice a year, which do more to harm the environment than a year of not eating animal products.

Vegans make an earnest attempt who practice what they preach, across their entire lifestyle, have my utmost respect.

Encryption for a business chat app limits the potential users rather significantly, as I understand it. A number of sectors (like banking) have strict rules which require keeping a record of company communications. How does Keybase deal with this, or do they choose not to play in that market?

I would almost be tempted to drop iOS. The holy grail for a product is to find the problem you can provide a 10x better solution to. I wonder if you’ll ever be able to be 10x better for creating a website for the vast majority of iOS users. But I would bet a lot of money that you can be 10x better for a majority of Android users. Earning revenue from that market is harder, but it’s not an insurmountable challenge.

Anyway, you know what’s best for your product. Great work on what you’ve done so far.

You need to get this on Android. For the majority of iOS users, they have access to a larger screen so will prefer creating on that. The problem this solves is less pronounced. But for emerging markets, their Android phone is the first and only access to the internet. Designing a website on a phone isn’t a novelty, it’s the only way they’ll ever move beyond social media profiles to establish an online presence.

While DO is not without fault in this story, any Fortune 500 company would have to be pretty stupid to work with this company after they admit to not storing backups in other places. I feel for you, but a backup is not a backup if it’s subject to the same weaknesses as the master copy.

Not to discount the hardware, which looks absolutely beautiful, but what strikes me the most is the business model.

A new game, every Monday, delivered wirelessly to your pocket.

What excites me about Playdate is that it is something only an outsider with no attachments to existing business relationships could make.

Games released today are still encumbered by the regional and geographic thinking of traditional software distribution. While Steam, the App Store, etc have certainly democratised some aspects, they are still an exception to the traditional model that generates the most revenue.

Episodic games tried to bring seasonality to gaming. That didn’t really work (Episode 3 anyone?). Fortnite has been the most successful at it, but it is still a AAA game attached to a big publisher. It’s the evolution of the old model.

Playdate and Apple’s upcoming Arcade feel like the beginning of a new model and that’s really, really exciting.

Twilit has been on an absolute tear over the last 2 years. I wasn’t sure what they would do next to innovate, but their evolution to customer support products, authentication solutions and now this are inspired.

What sets them apart is that, although they are a US company, they think globally. This product is for a global market, just like their app-based push authentication is (the huge market being Europe which has mandated 2FA requirements for finance companies coming into effect). Too many companies build and think about the US as the only market, then try to bring it to other markets which doesn’t always work well.

Product Managers should never be mini-CEOs. That is a model naive, ego-driven junior PMs adopt.

Good PMs should be servant leaders, doing whatever it takes to ensure their team can have maximum impact and ownership. A big part of that is identifying new opportunities, both within the org and outside of it, and empowering engineers and designers to own what they are working on.

Still not resolving in a lot of places, also making your app not work (I’m in the UK).

The App Store gives you discoverability and could be argued as being one of the reasons for a 30% cut.

If your app can be distributed as a PWA, then the question becomes: is the App Store (which gives you discoverability) worth the 30% revenue cut? For some PWAs the answer will be no.

Number 2 is a lot more possible now than just a decade ago due to the rise of smaller, more efficient aircraft (A350, 787) over jumbos and the popularity of point-to-point (rather than hub and spoke) airline networks. This decreases the cost of establishing a new route and popularising a new destination - Europe is leading the way here.

Croatia, Georgia, Estonia and others have all been opened up substantially by cheaper airfares.