frankdenbow

I've been putting out videos from (mostly) bootstrapped entrepreneurs who are outside of the normal tech news cycle in a youtube channel called INFLECTION Community: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsO80DSMypJSSDcgdDywgdQ

Same with Planet Fitness, they got me for a year with this strategy

There are a ton of these.

He spoke at my CS commencement right before he passed, was inspiring then and continues to inspire to this day. Coincidentally this is the book of the week in my book club so I've been re-reading it.

The Last Lecture book can be read as a series of short stories and often I just pick it up and read one quick section. My favorite is where he argued with his mother about his name. Yes, his name. He didn't like Randolph and protested, especially by being burdened by an extra "olph" <joke about a bout a computer scientist named Rand here>. Their negotiation ended with "R." but when his mother would send letters addressed to him at college as "Randolph' he would mail it back, unopened, marked "no such person at this address". As he got older, he recognized that "I'm so appreciative of my mother on so many fronts that if she wants to burden me with an unnecessary "olph" whenever she's around, I'm more than happy to put up with it. Life's too short. Somehow, with the passage of time, and the deadlines that life imposes, surrendering became the right thing to do."

Already a customer, this is a lovely company, wish you more success. Had some of my first interviews done this past week, solidifying information our family hasn't fully shared with each other. Its invaluable.

Been ideating on this for a long time, it's great to see you put together a platform that captures this deep inefficiency in the market. I would say to go after youtubers as brands like Gymshark did, the music space will always make it difficult for you to extract value for your company if you're touching major label content. Congrats on launch!

OnlyFans isnt a porn site in the same way that Twitter isnt a porn site. Many of the high profile users are in the adult industry but people use onlyfans for other types of content as well.

Clean and works well, nicely done! Are you able to pull in embeds from the various platforms as well? You may also want to consider adding analytics to this and charging for it, something along the lines of smarturl.it that many artists seem to use (example: Alicia Keys https://smarturl.it/xALICIAx)

Exactly, you cant even read past the title to pull out the most important part (hint: the definition of the word "new" isnt the most critical thing to talk about)

It doesn't have to be a new concept to be necessary. Why do people on hacker news constantly have to miss the point? Most ideas are revised versions of things that have been done for centuries. The cult of "new" is ridiculous.

I believe this as well, thats why we created: https://inflectioncommunity.com/nation

Agree with you that we should be gentler on people when they are just introducing ideas to the world. I disagree that this is not HN's culture. Example, read the dropbox launch thread, among many others. Usually when I come to HN I expect the top comment to be some pseudo-intellectual takedown of someone else's hard work.

Similar to you, a lot of what I have learned in CS/programming has been through experimenting (personally I like the Jennifer Dewalt method of just doing a lot of small projects: http://jenniferdewalt.com). You are not bad at studying! We all just have our own learning methods that are most comfortable. A proper education system would ask you what ways you like to learn, then have multiple versions of the same curriculum taught in different ways. Somebody build that please.

This makes it pretty clear, point #2 is a tough one that I hadn't considered!

Using this type of method to check form makes a lot of sense. There were manny Kinect apps that did this.

This is awesome and has a lot of potential to be a platform for fitness instructors to use to deploy their classes and do online training. I have had online coaches for a while and there isn't a great solution that is formatted for this use case. If a trainer can do a live class, with 20+ students who are paying, and have them be able to check everyone's form i a simple view, you are going to go very far.

Maybe >5 years ago, culture has changed under Satya :)

Makes sense if you think of them as separate companies (which is how they are run)

Microsoft lets Github run independently https://www.businessinsider.com/github-coo-microsoft-azure-e...

Seeing a lot of companies doing these for b2b applications. Are you fully focused on b2c?

1) YC may not be, but fundraising is a competition (https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/09/sequoia-is-giving-away-21-...)

2) Herd Mentality: There is subtle signaling if a company being presented right beside you already has 50% of their round closed, vs a company that hasnt received this early interest.

These are not my ideals (I'm a fan of self-funding and sustainable growth), just the reality.

This is the part that baffles me. Surely someone at Sequoia would have asked Stripe what they felt about the deal before it closed?

We support bootstrapped/self-funded founders!!!

I even created a community for these types of companies http://inflectioncommunity.com

Maybe that wasn't clear from the language, but the thought is that we can only really introduce you to sales leads once you've figured out product market fit.

If you don't have product market fit and a sales rep starts introducing you to leads, it's not going to end well for anyone.

It's not really about scammers (I can't remember an internal conversation that centered around people scamming the program), more about making sure it's going to be useful partnership.

Frank here, I work at Microsoft for Startups.

Validated equivalent means that you don't necessarily need to be a company on the fundraising path in order to make it into the program.

So if a self-funded company comes to us and shows they have sales traction, then we can take them to our field sales team, make a target list of companies, and get them intro'd to the right accounts to close deals.

No, this is not out of the goodness of our hearts (although I do know my team has good hearts also :).

The point of the program is to get companies on Azure (a strong platform from a technical perspective), and the best way to keep companies on Azure is to provide value via technology and sales.

If you're closing more deals with us, you will have to consume more Azure in order to service those deals.

Win, meet win.

P.S: On the side, I run a community for profit-driven entrepreneurs who have not raised venture: http://inflectioncommunity.com

Definitely because of the core DNA of the company, and structurally how the business model of Microsoft works.

I work at Microsoft for Startups.

We are focused on B2B companies (for now) because those are the companies we can best support.

Microsoft has a vast partner network, enterprise field sales team, and marketplace, where mostly B2B customers interact.

We decided to leverage that network for startups in order to push sales their way (hence the $1BN in sales pipeline we are pushing in 2020 to startups), in addition to the other technology benefits (Azure, Dynamics, Office 365, Power Platform, Github, etc).

Eventually we will come up with a focused solution for B2C businesses, but for now, we realize our limitations and are focused on where we can best be helpful!

Info in BIO if you have any questions!!

I meant more on the shipping side. It must be more expensive to ship 19 different shipments?

This looks cool and can see many use cases. Hingeto I believe is also in the space. How do you deal with shipping multiple items in an order from different suppliers?

reminds me of http://getrevue.co which uses an extension to make it easier to create newsletters to send to others

I would say being patient is what she is talking about here, but are there other jobs that would be more fulfilling for you? Happy to chat and help. It gets better!