goeric

Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it's just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community/VOIP area and there's not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, etc.

Startups are hard. I don't know Ryan personally, but he really started PH as barebones as possible and grew it to millions of uniques. Without being on the inside, you have no idea the pressure or stresses he was under. Why are people so critical when they see a startup exit for less than a billion dollars? I am sure it's a huge learning experience for him and I congratulate him and wish him the best.

Somewhat painful? Try the most miserable four days of my life (not sure where several weeks came from but mine only took four days).

I had LASIK in one eye and PRK in the other (not as any sort of test, there were medical reasons, I would have preferred to have LASIK in both). The LASIK eye took roughly four hours to heal to point of no discomfort and the PRK eye took four days. My PRK eye sees about 20/15, and my LASIK eye sees about 20/20.

I would 100% do it all over again if given the choice.

You sound like an awesome developer. Would love to keep you in mind for projects down the road. Would you ping me at the email in my profile so I can have your information? Thanks.

A significant amount of revenue is being made through YouTube as a platform in a grey area that Google doesn't really currently touch (integrated content through creators).

Creators and MCN's benefit the most from this. By starting to control the medium brands and creators connect with, they at least get a piece of the action.

Naritiv (Techstars S14) | Venice, CA | Full-Time | ONSITE

Naritiv powers content for the biggest brands on Snapchat including Fox, Disney, and Coke. We're a Series A funded startup backed by the best entertainment/tech investors in the world including Disney, Greylock Partners, and Third Wave Digital.

We're looking for a Lead Back-End Engineer (~$130K) and Sr. Designer (~$90K).

If you're interested please ping me directly at eric (@) naritiv (.) com

Adding a thought here. It's easy to find a reason not to apply. But 100% of the companies accepted into YC applied. Don't let any stat deter you, you have to start somewhere.

Huge props to Geohot for getting this to market (barring it ships). Curious - if it replaces the rear-view mirror, then what do you use as a rear-view mirror?

Discord will likely grow to the value of Twitch was at (when it was acquired by Amazon) in the next couple years, it's a really big space.

First of all, congrats on the venture and I wish you the best of luck.

For the streaming portion - you can use YouTube but you can't hide the video (it violates their terms), so be careful.

Great to see competition in this space that isn't a PEO. There's still a lot of room for disruption here.

Startups that scale that quickly are bound to make mistakes. Breaking the law is not okay, and there was some bad judgement there. But you'll find a lot of negative comments about the competition, too. Nobody is perfect. But Zenefits is free.

I've had almost all positive experiences and they've saved me an immense amount of headaches. Did I mention they're free?

This is great. I've added it to my startup onboarding guide blog post (which already has Clerky as an immensely helpful service): https://goeric.quora.com/Startup-Onboarding-Guide

One of the largest MCNs (YouTube networks). They're owned by AT&T and Chernin Group now.

This must be a really rough thing to go through, but I am sure Parker is doing what is best for the company at this time (whether it was forced on him or voluntary). Zenefits is the greatest thing to happen to SMB's in years, and I am excited to see it continue to grow.

Maybe Parker will make a triumphant Jack Dorsey-like return when the time is right. Or maybe he'll disrupt another multi-billion dollar industry. Whatever it is, smart people will follow him.

* disclaimer: I am a very happy Zenefits customer

I think it's great that DO is offering this, but it's a little shocking they don't offer this to fellow Techstars alum. We only get $10K in credits, which is a stark contrast. We are loyal to Digital Ocean because it's a great service but also because it's family. We could have just as easily went AWS. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt that it's a slight oversight and they'll bring this offer to their roots.

Great post from somebody I respect tremendously. One thing I feel like he didn't touch on, which I feel like is most important, is that there's no public comments on Snapchat. People post without much need for validation and without fear of backlash.

Despite all the bugs and the short-falls of the Mac app update, it had the best snooze feature that I've come to live by in my email workflow. It looks like Polymail is an evolved Mailbox (with a eerily similar design/features) and Nylas N1 has a lot of potential as well.

I would like to see the hold times for Zenefits decrease. The customer service, once getting somebody on the line, is very good. But to be fair, I also have hold times for Gusto, too. I had to put in a call-back number today.

I sent the same email to them, but I did get a response:

We're fundamentally different than Zenefits in a few very important ways, so accessing all of Gusto's features still makes sense: 1) Payroll is your system of record in your back office and quite simply, we believe computers follow rules a lot better than humans do. Zenefits functions on a “hub-and-spoke” model… they’re the hub, we’re the spokes. But that's already an outdated functionality-- there should be no spokes when it comes to payroll and benefits—they are really just one single hub functioning in unison. Removing the spokes and human operations that Zenefits uses removes the opportunity for error.

2) We’re a customer service organization, not a sales organization. With the technology comes the vital human touch—you’ve got your dedicated Care Team trained to support your benefits just like you have a Care Team trained to support specific payroll needs.You also have your dedicated and experienced Benefits Advisor for business and benefits strategy planning. This way, you can go to one partner for all your back-office needs rather than using an intermediary to control several different disjointed resources.

3) Because it’s all in one place, you get one beautifully simple experience for your entire team—administrators/managers and regular employees. That means onboarding your employees' payroll and benefits in one place while we help you navigate the confusing world that is US Health Care Reform. Basically, we love you as a customer and we want the best product experience for you. That happens when you use the full Gusto platform to combine payroll, benefits, and compliance.

It wasn't very convincing to me, and I think it might be an even harder sell now that Zenefits is launching payroll. I love both companies but I definitely would prefer to have everything integrated in one platform.

Zenpayroll & Gusto customer here. Looks like the biggest difference will be that Zenefits is free for payroll if you use them for everything else (vs Gusto at $29 base + 6/person per month). I wonder if Gusto will extend a similar pricing model for those who use Gusto for benefits.

But Zenefits handles more than just benefits for us. It's a fully-featured HR platform, which makes employee on-boarding super simple. I wonder if Gusto will go that direction, because I'm so tied to Zenefits right now I can't imagine living without it.

Very excited about this! We definitely have been waiting for it.

Former professional Counter-Strike player here, can confirm. A lot of the top players still play on 1024x768 even on widescreen monitors (some have it stretched, some have black bars on the side). While I can't explain the technical reasons behind it, from experience I can definitely say the blocky nature of low-resolution gives you does feel like it's easier to get headshots. I always performed better at low resolutions, even with a gaming PC more-than-capable of running at 1080p 200FPS+.

Really well done. Could you also calculate their overall network stats? Average creator earnings? Etc.

Agreed. The coin absolutely failed me. It didn't work far too often for me and I always had to carry backup cards (my debit card because BofA's ATM can't read it, and my credit card because I still want my rewards on purchases when my Coin fails). Needing to carry 3 cards completely defeated the purpose of the Coin, and I ended up ditching the Coin just to have one less card in my wallet. The irony.

Just awful. My condolences to his family and friends. Josh accomplished more in 28 years than most do in a lifetime, yet he had so much of his life left to live. Life is precious, and we can't waste a second of it.

Yep, Sidecar has been doing this for a while.

That silly business concept you're referring is Scan.me, and it got acquired by Snapchat for $50M. That provided the base for what is now Snapcodes, which are extremely popular by Snapchat users.

Use ZenPayroll. They've had a good relationship with Zenefits since the start. And they're both YC, so it's unlikely that will ever end.

Really clever. 1Password should make a custom keyboard so I don't need to leave apps (and navigate to the 1Password app) to fill out passwords.