jmacd

We do have Tier Cloud with customers actively using it, but it has been invite only so far. It's a fair point though and I think we can put pricing up now in advance of making it publicly available.

The dealership quoted me $25,000 for a new battery, plus labour, plus they said I had to manage the recycling of the old battery. They estimated that at $6,000. My head was spinning.

Eventually through a few Facebook groups I was able to find a battery technician. He happily opened up the battery, checked the cells, found the failed cells, repaired them and then had to do some work on the vehicle diagnostics to get it to forget there was ever a problem.

Voila, it was working just fine. Took him 90 minutes.

In this case, nobody was actually being sold a defective product. Salesforce is very careful to “safe harbour” their statements about future products and their actual customers know that.

While I was there after having sold my company to them, I launched several products and features for others. Every time we developed a concept, shopped it to early adopters and found design partners to test it.

Incidentally, salesforce customers often pay handsomely for some of that engagement. That is because they know that if Salesforce is serious about the product, this is their best chance to get the functionality as a customer.

Also, if you go in to a meeting with Parker Harris and you end up getting fired, I would place a bet any day of the week that YOU are the asshole. Parker is just a fantastic human being based on my experience.

re: trucking. I agree the industry essentially gets "free infrastructure", although in their defence the "gas tax" concept was designed to cover these costs and heavy users are the top payers of that tax. (I do realize gas tax is now just general revenue pretty much everywhere)

It is no longer possible for Canadian provinces or cities to make any effective use of infrastructure that we had built and maintained for over 100 years. My city had developed a plan for light rail, but required some access to CN tracking, and CN refused to even review a proposal. They also launched a major lawsuit against the city/town to try to get out of their commitment to maintain some safety infrastructure around their property. Their attitude seemed to be "we have deeper pockets than you".

In my own neighbourhood, there is a track that runs through a railway cut. A group came together and had built a beautiful multi use trail. They asked for an easement on a part of the CN right of way/property that was nowhere near the trackage and had been used as a path since time immemorial. What did CN do? Within weeks they erected a 6 foot fence around the entire property. They never even responded to the letters.

They freight business absolutely did benefit from private ownership. The workings of the capital markets have created an efficient machine.

The trackage they run on should never have been privatized. In return Canada will never have any decent passenger rail and no city pairing in Canada will ever be able to build a reliable or reasonably fast rail network.

Failure of privatization is in a lot of ways a failure of aptitude, or an exercise in grift. I'm not sure which exactly. It was either not well thought out, or very well thought out... depending on which side of the table you might have been sitting at.

Over the years I had several chances to meet Doc Searls and David Weinberger and it was a case of it being a good idea to meet your heroes. They were just very nice to an eager young kid.

A pure SaaS model for billing doesn’t do much more for you at then end of the day other than to apply billing ratings and generate an invoice (which Stripe can and is doing for you already).

I’d love to learn more about what you’d like to do with Stripe and how you are handling entitlements, plan versioning, etc

The owners have either (at great pain) developed a sufficient capital base and succession plan to provide continuity (which would require significant ongoing investment in R&D out of cash flow in order to develop competitive products), or they must find a plan for the business. Going public solves this problem for them, so does selling privately. Neither option really eliminates the requirement to remain competitive.

Plenty of privately owned businesses IPO and become subject to the same forces. Less than 50% of publicly listed companies are VC backed.

His objections and anecdotes are all very instructive. There is nothing wrong with shedding light on the motivations of people and the incentives in play when it comes to any social construct. Some (many) of those things should be changed.

It's hard to see where his criticisms sum to any singular great point about something bad that is going on. If you want to be (economically) reductionist, there is nothing wrong with someone else being social maximalist. Is the total social good not better than all the reductionist arguments in sum? Some say yes, some say no.

He's smart. Here he's being smart about specific little things. However, I did not finish reading the article with the feeling that Peter Thiel had some greater holistic and informed point of view than any of the people and institutions he is railing against.

The most likely reason that had a big impact was that I am not sitting on the couch and thus not snacking late at night...

There are a further ~10 full circulations of internal air through the full filtering system.

That level of air movement remains comfortable because we have a lot of ducting (we detailed in a lot of grilles, not just one single one per room) so it is a low-velocity high throughput system. You never get a lot of air blowing out of one place, but you get a lot of placed blowing a little air.

Long story-- the house is comfortable, yes, but we also just don't get nearly as much transmission of viruses between the family. Of course plenty of colds get passed around with 2 adults and 3 kids, but anecdotally we just seem to be way less sick and rarely all sick at once.

My alertness level is also never an issue like I remember it being, but I have made many other lifestyle changes which could be having an impact on that.

Creating those UIs was so rewarding, as you really had to focus on the goals of the user and figure out the branching that could get the right user to the action or activity that they needed to perform.

My first "startup" was a tool for life insurance agents to recommend products to their prospective customers. IUIs were perfect for scenarios like that. You could abstract away a lot of complexity.

They were also great for accessibility.

1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/appuistart/i...

"In recent years, there has been a notable shift in online activity from the Social Graph, where users connect and interact with their friends and family, to the Content Graph, which emphasizes the discovery and consumption of the latest and most engaging content.

This transition has changed how people use social media, with many users prioritizing content consumption over social interactions. The focus is now on viral videos, memes, and trending news from unknown sources. No longer do we spend our days reading the personal updates and activities of friends and acquaintances."

A lot of "fine" mid size and large VCs are going to have much less appealing overall profiles.

I mostly thought he was just... wrong. In retrospect it's interesting that his intuition was completely different than mine (and a lot of ours here).

His first and only response was "well, how do you know that's even related? Most people get killed by somebody they know." and I was like "well, yeah, but San Francisco is bad right now" and the conversation moved on.