josh_carterPDX

Oh man I can look at this all day. What an interesting take on how we do city planning and how it really hasn't changed over the years. I'd be more interested in taking this a step further to look at the infrastructure overlay and how that has changed over the years.

I remember when Cloudability first did this to manage AWS costs. They ended up getting scooped up by Apptio, but what they built was pretty awesome. It was especially useful for big teams who often spun up a large EC2 instance for testing, but forgot to take it out of service.

As someone who started a company in my 30's and is considering another one in my 40's, my advice to you is that you just have to be more pragmatic. I have a wife, kids, mortgage, etc and I spend more time vetting the idea than I did in years past. I talk to more people about the idea to see if I'm onto something or if this is just an idea destined for failure. By spending a lot more time ensuring that the idea has legs I'm giving myself more data and also laying the groundwork if it is something worth pursuing. I would never quit my job unless I knew the startup could sustain my livelihood for at least one year.

So the short answer is that you can absolutely do this. It's about how you approach it and ensuring the people close to you are on board for the ride as well.

As someone who is building a VC firm with a focus on social impact I can say unequivocally that this can be done. You can be focused on doing good while also being a capitalist. It's not a binary. If an investor is interested in only making lots of money, there are plenty of funds that do that. However, there are a tremendous amount of investors who are happy getting a lower return on their investment if it means they can contribute into something that is making a difference. I don't see how this is any different.

"Keep the advertisers happy, but try to reduce the reliance on advertisers."

I actually think the opposite is going to happen. He's already said he wants Twitter to be the most prolific site for advertisers saying that he thinks advertising can "delight, entertain, and inform you."

If he introduces a subscription model TikTok will pull ahead and take over the entire social media space.

Just makes no sense that this app has been given so much leeway here in the states when it has been proven time and time again that the Chinese government is using TikTok as a way to track US citizens and to influence our young people.

Also, Douyin (owned by the same company as TikTok) focuses on education in China while TikTok promotes the dumbest videos in the states. As the article below so eloquently articulates, "TikTok is making you dumb."

https://www.opindia.com/2022/07/tiktok-china-engineering-oth...

I completely disagree. I think WeWork and Theranos are causing a ripple effect in all stages of VC right now. No one wants to be the investor of the next catastrophic failure.

Investors are looking under the hood to ensure the company is real, has something that can scale, and that the team can legit do the work.

Anything else is a dated view of how to grow a business. If a CEO wants to be an influencer then run the marketing department and let a real CEO run the company.

In every recession we have seen a big uptick in startups being created. If you look at the last big one in 2008 a number of notable startups got their start including Twilio. So I would imagine the same will happen if we dip into a big recession. We are starting to see some of that happen now. I read a report that in 2021 VCs invested in double the SaaS companies than they did in 2020. However, 2020 was a bad year for all VC funding, but it says something that the growth in VC backed SaaS companies grew so drastically while the market has struggled for the past two years.

I don't know that this is normal. It's certainly not unheard of. In this case I just think it's such a huge acquisition that they probably just want to hold off until they get a clear vision from Elon. Why spend a bunch of time and money on something if Elon will come in and advocate for its exclusion from future features? Though I will say that I don't believe that Elon will have a tremendous amount of sway when it comes to drastic changes. I think it'll be a good year or two before we see substantial changes to Twitter as a platform.

I want to see their returns 5-8 years from now based on this new model. I've always thought of YC as the ultimate "throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks" type of program. Should be interesting to see how other programs respond. If nothing else, it's a GREAT time to be a founder.

Maybe. Checking it out. Thanks.

Yup. josh@1859.vc

I currently work for a startup program in Washington state and it's my third program. One of the biggest challenges we have (that I am sure is not unique to our program) is that we have a large community of mentors as well as founders and when we want to connect our mentors and founders together it takes a manual email introduction. I've also put together an Airtable where founders can connect with our mentors, but again it's a manual email for them to set up a time to meet.

I'd like to build something where mentors can list their profile as well as their skills. Founders could then sort those mentors by skills, book time (perhaps connected to the mentor's calendly), and connect via a conference call with something like Twilio.

I know something like this exists today, but it's a platform for a very specific community and cannot be white labeled or partitioned for another specific community.

Thoughts?

Love this! Congrats on the launch. Can't wait to try it out.

I find it interesting that the only reason the investors took any action was because of the attention this is getting in the press. As many have already read, Garg had a reputation for bad behavior yet SoftBank and his other investors let it play out leading up to their SPAC.

I feel like we watched this movie before.

**cough**WeWork**cough**

Because if you need a private 5G to solve your own supply chain problems, why not set it up so you can also make money off of it.

Digital Trends has a good article about this. You can read it here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/5g-vs-wi-fi/

Not sure I agree here. 5G offers lower latency and more bandwidth. Also, what I've outlined is just one use case. If we're talking about a port there are multiple layers of operations in which a high speed network could make things move more efficiently. So while 4G might be less expensive it also would only incrementally improve current operations. I would imagine this is the same for other use cases in which there are multiple layers of needed high bandwidth.

Tacoma, WA is planning on deploying a private 5G network to make port operations more efficient.

You can imagine containers coming in and out of ports are slowed when someone has to physically inspect them for damage. There are a few companies using AI to detect damaged containers and having a higher bandwidth allows those images to be more clear which in turn allows the AI to be more accurate.

Amazon is known for doing this to early startups. They "partner" with a small team, learn what they do, and then copy it which screws the original team.

They have teams of lawyers so suing them does no good.

EDIT: I assumed this was a partnership. I have no clue if they partnered here. Just speaking broadly after watching a couple of my founder friends get screwed by Amazon.

We tried to do this back in 2016 with BrightWork. We got a lot of traction, but it came on the heels of Parse being shutdown by Facebook after acquiring them for a ton of money.

The lesson I learned from that experience is that there is still a tremendous amount of distrust in platforms that make it easy to stand up something quickly. Even prototyping.

Even if you make it easy for users to export their code from your platform you will still run into scalability questions (i.e. what happens if someone builds the next Flappy Bird on your platform?).

All that aside, this is great! Congrats on launching Caffeine. :)

Great build! I won't go through the glitches that people have found since they seem to be pretty common.

I would, however, like to have the ability to automate my contributions to savings and the pension (like in real life). Other than that, I am going to park this in front of my high school senior to see what kind of decisions he makes. Thanks for building this!

Probably something having to do with knowing they were going to go public and hoping no one would catch that!

Interesting.

It's a good question. From what I've seen a lot of it has to do with their network and the founder's ability to sell the narrative that what they're building is something no one else can build and/or execute. In those early days of a startup investors look at the team more closely than the product. If you're able to show that you're focused on revenue from day one it tends to shift the leverage. Very few investors are funding ideas anymore.

There are some useful nuggets here, but every company and founder are different. Having run three different accelerator programs I have learned to STOP assuming what makes a good or bad idea. Some of the companies I thought were certain for failure have raised multiple rounds, found product market fit, and are growing just fine. The first 18 months of a startup should include one thing, "GET SOMEONE TO PAY FOR YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE!" Everything else is just iteration.

Unfortunately the only way to get around this is to have agreements in place with independent artists for the site that you could then provide to the RIAA when they come knocking. If you post music by artists signed to a label it's out of the artists' hand even if you attempt to put something in place directly with the artist. The RIAA is aggressive and well funded. Their entire objective is to make sure artists get paid whenever their music is played regardless of whether the site is free/no ads.

EDIT: Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, etc do not provide APIs to embed their players into other sites without some sort of licensing agreement in place.

I love that these type of apps are popping back up. However, I fear that the RIAA is going to ruin all the fun like they've done in the past. I used to run a site in which we just played random music with no ads/no revenue. We still got a cease and desist letter giving us no choice but to shut it down. I get why they exist, but they are more about stomping out sites rather than working them to figure out a path that is lucrative for everyone involved.

And in other news, water is wet.

It's becoming increasingly frustrating that a platform meant to make it easier to trade crypto can go down so frequently. It leads to more skepticism by mainstream entities when Coinbase is their only experience into the cryptocurrency market. I echo the other comments here that they need to figure out their stability issues prior to their IPO. There's no way they can go public with such a poorly run platform. And I say all of this as someone that is an active user of Coinbase.