fab1an

Italy got caught by surprise - they only found out that they had cases when a 38 year old (!) walked into an ER with advanced symptoms. Given that this age bracket is not commonly affected by these harsher symptoms it is clear that they had long ongoing community transmission which has now culminated in the current catastrophe.

Germany is doing a bit better in this respect, it took them 1000 cases to 'get' the first death, showing that they have caught it very very early, due to their decentralized testiing system. That said, NPI must be ramped up significantly...

The US is maybe the most troublesome target for this virus in the developed world. A healthcare system that works well for few rich cancer patients is the opposite of what you want for a disease like COVID19.

I thought the the argument against it is that survivors develop antibodies that neutralize the virus in vitro.

One of the advantages of running your own business is that you set the tempo and values of it yourself. You. No one else. If you end up with something that isn't working out for you, you're doing it wrong.

At my previous company, one of our (somewhat implicit) values was "suffering is not a KPI".

And even though there are times when things are rougher, these should be exceptions, not the rule.

At the same time, working 100 hours per week is the most bullshit business myth of all.

This is usually touted by the type of person who spends a lot of time in meetings or 'catching up on important news', and within industries where people are flat out lying to each other about how much they actually work (management consultants come to mind, and certainly some investor types.)

When you meet these people IRL you realize many of their 100 hours are spend sipping coffee in another part of town while having casual meetings, prior to running some personal errand. While some of this may qualify as 'work', it is not the type of 'work-work' that a naive coder/entrepreneur is pursuing en route to their burn out!

This could swing both ways alas.

The optimistic case would be how swine flu played out, where initial estimates for fatality where in the percentage range but ended up in the per mille dimension.

However, for SARS 1.0, it was initially estimated to have a fatality of 2% - the final number was over 10%.

It's simply too early to tell.

Unfortunately, the latest WHO report suggest there isn't that big of an iceberg of undetected cases, which would sadly mean a higher CFR.

Yes, but one would assume there is a lot of AC in Singapore.

It is difficult to provide useful feedback without much more context, but - very generally:

- since you are just starting out, it is likely that your pricing is too low. Again, hard to say without understanding more about your product and market.

- at your stage it's probably best to try and close a few customers. Having >0 real, paying customers will help with fundraising (and maybe eliminate the need/desire to do any fundraising, who knows?)

- make a few extremely specific customers very very happy (instead of already aiming for "a lot of different industries and company sizes" as you put it.)

- pricing: once you have an idea on what type of customer to for first, figure out what your likely customer acquisition cost will be, and extrapolate your pricing from there. If it costs you 5k $ to get a customer, you probably want to get at least 3x from them over their lifetime.

SEEKING WORK - Remote - Berlin, Germany.

I am exploratively beginning to offer M&A coaching for CEO/founders of smaller startups (less than 5M in ARR). This is basically a service I wish I have had access to when (and before!) I sold my own SaaS ML company last year.

I will share everything I have learned about the small-time M&A market and process, including:

* managing your own psychology and expectations as founder/CEO

* working with M&A advisors, 'banks' and your lawyers

* managing and preparing your shareholders/investors/team

* negotiating term sheets and valuations

* housekeeping and getting through due diligence

Note that I will not introduce you to a buyer or get your company sold. Instead, my goal is to help you as a founder to be more "M&A ready" when the time is right.

Email me at fabian at fabian.ai and we will take it from there!

Do take a look at Korg Gadget - it is a tremendous piece of software. VERY easy to pick up and just jam even with the vanilla synths (Chiang Mai is one big sweet spot), but really also deep enough to produce pro level tracks. The additional KORG synths (especially the wave station and ODYSSEi) are high end emulations and basically indistinguishable from the original hardware.

I doubt this would work in any more structured interview process for a regular job at a larger company (with the likely expection of VP+ level jobs), but it could be very effective for interviewing at startups, especially when they're small enough for you to be interviewed by one of their founders.

A good way to do this is probably not to take charge immediately upon concluding the small talk, but to simply ask whether the interviewer would be interested to set aside some time to see some ideas you had prepared for their business (shows binder)

Cognitive scientist and first time dad with a 2 month old daughter here.

'Electronically' created white noise is indeed extremely effective to calm down a fussy or crying infant. It also often works instantly, making it certainly a welcome and powerful tool in the arsenal of the sleep deprived parent.

That said, I found its instant effectiveness to be somewhat concerning, as it almost seems to flip a 'brain switch' in your baby - quite different from the longer and more laborious procedure of shushing it to sleep the old fashioned way (which likely works on the same principle, but involves lower volume, more frequency variation and, last but not least, actual parent-infant interaction). Bit of a no free lunch situation.

Driven by concerned temptation, I did some digging, but ultimately couldn't find any large scale studies on the safety of exposure to white noise in human infants - there is one study in the rat model though that suggest delayed auditory cortex development in baby rats that were exposed to white noise 24/7. (http://www.hhmi.org/news/white-noise-delays-auditory-organiz...) - which btw is exactly what sensorimotor contigency theory would predict. (http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/Synthese/MyinFinal.html)

While I don't think the majority of SNOO users will operate the device this way, I would imagine the effectiveness and convenience of the device may mean that there are quite a few babies who will spend a lot of time in the SNOO, approaching long term exposure to white noise.

I am not suggesting that this will cause long term problems to the infant's auditory development as is the case in the animal model, but it is something to be mindful of.

What makes you think that there aren't "more" lifestyle businesses?

One thing to not underestimate is that owners of lifestyle businesses, unlike their VC-funded counterparts, often really aren't that interested in getting press features - in fact, many will actively want to avoid it, as press features just increase the likelihood of someone wanting to emulate / imitate your success by competing with you.

It's easy to read this and agree, but quite a bit more difficult to then turn down discussions with Big Co once you've quoted them 1M ACV and they didn't flinch.

If you feel you must pursue such a deal against this advice, one way to counteract the negative effects is to bake in a break up fee in the evaluation/trial phase (don't call it that, though).

Most 'Big Deals' will come with such a trial / prototype phase. One way to structure a 'break up fee' is to say: the trial will cost 10% of the final annual contract value - if we close, this will be counted as a rebate against the final price, if we fail to close, startup will keep the 10% to cover their costs of the phase.

Optimizely is now focusing on the enterprise segment, which requires a different culture and skillset than you'd need when selling to smaller businesses. Doing both at the same time, for most products, will almost always require two separate cultures, which is difficult to maintain (unless you're a giant corporation with different departments). An exception to this rule may be Slack, where price points grow linearly with company size.

In website testing, specifically A/B testing, the enterprise segment is likely more valueable as smaller customers tend to exhibit vastly higher churn rates. Also, a 1% increase in conversions will translate to millions in incremental revenue for established companies, making it much easier to justify higher price points.

As for which pricing strategy works better when working towards an IPO, it seems that the data doesn't favor one approach over another: http://tomtunguz.com/no-mans-land-saas/

Great move to make this transparent to founders, even at an early stage. I'd argue it even makes sense for founders to file their entire paperwork in a folder structure that reflects this set up from the get go.

What looks like an unnecessary distraction in the early days will save you time and headache later down the line.

You have to file your documents either way, so why not make sure they are already in a format that's ready for due diligence - once an investor or acquirer comes knocking, you basically have most of your data room ready.

No framework, but I'd very much recommend reading up on "Difficult Conversations"[1], which has been very helpful for me ever since becoming CEO.

Giving feedback, more often than not, will constitute a difficult conversation, and the concept helps a lot with navigating those in a way where both parties can learn and grow from both emotional and 'semantic' conflicts.

[1] https://www.amazon.de/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-What-M... Brief summary here: http://www.fscanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Difficult...

Sound is such a context-dependent experience. I vividly remember taking a walk with my parents in the Alps through the most pristine landscape. It was beautiful, except for the annoying sounds of a nearby highway. A few minutes later, we expected to see that highway across one hill, but were astonished to find a glorious waterfall. The instant we saw the water, the experience of the sound was transformed to something entirely beautiful.

No app / software / system, and this is very subjective, but I've found that for myself the following principles work well:

1. Every hour of sleep before midnight is 'worth' 2 hours in terms of good sleep. Going to bed at 11pm already provides huge improvements in morning mood and productivity. See -->3.

2. In the evening, write down the 3 most important things you wish to achieve on the next day.

3. Early mornings work hours (even in your pyjama) are vastly more productive than any other time of the day.

IANAL, and this depends on many many factors, and probably many more than you currently have on your radar given the way you've phrased your question.

Best way forward here is likely to sit down with a great lawyer and talk through the technical options you have, which will vary based on jurisdiction and setup.

If you have a good relationship with the 16%, there is probably a way to readjust the ownership levels in good faith - they will want you to be properly incentivized. You will have to make a good case for this and explain how the readjustment will work best on a technical level, and why this is going to be win-win.

This is one of the classical two-layered 'did you know' /'podcast' memes. The first layer is about a well known, but not necessarily universally known historical event/idea that's been a interesting tidbit of knowledge for decades, usually well suited for metaphors of all kinds ("Bitcoins are like Tulip Mania 2.0). The second layer always asserts the opposite of that meme, or rather the did you know this isn't actually true position. The likely Truth is ultimately a somewhat boring synthesis of both positions, that may make for a good, but not a great smarty pants podcast topic. I love those.

>An eye that can receive extra wavelengths is useless without the Neurons that can perceive and project into our conscious mind.

Not necessarily. For example, consider that neurons in our auditory cortex aren't different from neurons in our visual cortex!

What is different about them (and the "subsequent" perceptual/conscious level) is that they receive different inputs, and have learned the systematicity of how these inputs behave in relation to the body's own actions.

This is related to the "Sensorimotor Contigency" theory of consciousness [1], which would predict that it should in fact be possible to process entirely different types of sensory input, given long enough exposure and a clear systematicity of the input signal.

[1] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Sensorimotor_theory_of_c...

Pardot (B2B Marketing Automation SaaS) was afaik entirely bootstrapped and sold to ExactTarget (now SalesForce) for ~100M. https://www.saastr.com/a-real-life-saas-case-study-eloqua-ma...

One thing that bugs me about these types of 'we hear you loud and clear' statements is the stylistic use of the 'corporate first person plural'. I feel the "we" in this contexts sounds a lot less authentic than a first person singular statement from the founder / CEO.

While companies certainly do have a specific and sometimes even unique culture, do we really think that _they_ have "core beliefs"?

It sounds like Producthunt + Kickstarter could have possibly helped a lot here.

Incidentally, this post may prove to be another great channel - imagine this wasn't a post-mortem, but a pre-Kickstarter update on the process & journey of working on the book...of course, making the HN front page these days requires quite a bit of luck.

Hands down one of the best articles on the topic I've read - so many "wish I had known this years ago" types of insights.

The video contains bits that aren't fully reflected in the post itself, so it's worthwhile to watch the whole thing. The most important part IMHO is that you absolutely have to start with a known problem and work out the solution from there, not vice versa. This is a trivial insight for most startups, but a surprisingly common trap for even the smartest AI/ML people. It's very easy to get blinded by the sheer awesomeness of the data/model you stumbled upon, all while ignoring that you haven't fully grasped the problem space yet.

Oh man. Civ 1 was the first computer game my father purchased for my brother and me in our earliest teens. We got to choose ONE game from a store, based purely on its packaging, and obviously pending approval by our dad.

I vividly remember the magnetism of the pyramids depicted on the game's box - it had to be that one. Little did we know that we accidentally purchased what is probably the best game in computer game history.

Fast forward a year (and many hours of Civ) later in history class, when our teacher asked the class (somewhat rhethorically..) whether anyone had an explanation for why the Roman Empire became as successful as it was.

Before he could give us his explanation, I blurted out that it must have been their invention of the aqueduct, which eventually allowed the roman cities to grow as large as they did (which is, of course, the game mechanic of aqueducts in Civ). Regardless of whether that's true or not, let's just say that this wasn't the type of answer our teacher expected from a 6th grader!

As someone else noted in here, it's Paradox Interactive games that have somewhat ruined all advanced Civs for me (the exception being Civ 1!). If you're a grown up gamer looking for something to recreate that ol' Civ feeling, give Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings a try.

The fundamental equation you need to get right in SaaS (esp in a bootstrapped business) is to have a customer lifetime value that's vastly higher than your customer acquisition costs. Lower prices than your competitors mean that you'll also need to be able to get customers at much lower customer acquisition costs. This is A LOT harder than one might think.

Worse, and contrary to popular opinion, lower pricing _does not_ necessarily mean lower customer acquisition costs in SaaS!

Are you a marketing/growth expert with a proven track record of doing just that? If no, prepare for years of learning a lot of fundamental basics the hard way. If yes, well, do get in touch with me! ;)

Another aspect to consider is that, assuming you're looking at B2B, lower pricing doesn't mean that your product will be more attractive to B2B buyers. If anything, you'll often find that the opposite is true.

If such a database existed, I think there'd be vastly more interesting use cases and applications implied than 'replacing an extremely specific minimal subset of photography' - for example, seamless visual world-travelling in VR?

Correct. The bet here is that 1. we're only seeing the very early stages of what's possible with GPU-based DNNs and 2. while Wall St is certainly considering the future applications their fantasies are on the conservative side.

The main risks to this thesis are that 1. DL could turn out to be a short-lived trend or 2. a new semiconductor technology emerges that is 10x better suited for DL/ML (Google's new architecture?)

The 'problem' with the stock market is that most of these expectations are usually already priced in, i.e. NVDA's market cap today reflects expectations of massive future growth.

That said, NVDA's stock just went 7% down due to an analyst's downgrade (which in the long run is relatively meaningless), so if you'd want to buy NVDA stock and hold it long term now might be a good time.

Disclosure: I am long NVDA, and my stock picking track record is atrocious.

My #1 advice on pricing (esp for bootstrapping SaaS/software) is to think about your Customer Acquisition Cost (=CAC) first, as in: how many customers will you reasonably be able to acquire given your marketing/sales plan and at what cost? Don't cheat here, but consider the fully loaded cost of doing sales+marketing and divide that number by the number of customers you'll be getting within the same cost period.

That'll give you a lower boundary of what you absolutely will have to charge to break even + an idea of the multiples on this you'll need in order to become a successful business.