I've been thinking about adopting Celery for a new product launch. Not sure if I want to go with the Pre-Order system. However, I believe that Celery also works for Real-time orders.
IANAL. First, get legal advice from a lawyer. Some law schools offer free or inexpensive clinics with law professors and law students.
It does depend on your contract, common law, and legal precendent. Contracts can be modified. Some companies and organization require that you get outside activities or employment approved by management and human resources or ethics.
I looked around for a simple pay solution to integrate into my site and chose wepay about a year ago. It was one of the few services where I didn't have to become a "pay API code ninja" to use. I got an email that they will also phase out the easy-to-use buttons.
I want to focus on delivering value to my customers - I'm not trying to become a pay button implementation expert. I'm not very happy about wepay making this move. I think I am going to be switching to stripe.
The key question is how you determine the difference between skill and luck. Is that difference statistically significant and is their a different set of inputs that lead to this output?
For instance, Taleb's example of fund managers that beat the market for five years in a row. You start with a cohort of 10,000 and a 50% chance of beating the market each year. There will be a group of 300 or so fund managers that consistently beat the market 5 years in a row. This does not differentiate the lucky from the skillful. 1) Analyzing other cohorts that had higher success rates and 2) their investment strategies and decisions would be necessary to make the determination.
Well, a broken clock is right twice a day. Someone who always calls for a market correction will eventually be right. The real question is how will the investment strategy fair over decades or longer.
We may have different takeaways from the book. My takeaway was that one should invest in becoming skilled (learn strategies that work in the long run) rather than seeking or worshiping those who may just be lucky.
I think that you may be missing the point of Fooled by Randomness. The point is knowing whether your success came from luck, skill, or both. It also shined a light on people who took high-probability, "sure bets" (selling out-of-the-money options) that paid off most of the time but would eventually bankrupt them if the stock price jumped.
I think you have a point here. Money is a medium of exchange (check) and a store of value (?). Fiat currencies are backed by the country of origin. Monetary policy for each respective currency is managed by their Reserve Bank. Who or what backs the full faith and credit of the Bitcoin? Which individual or governing body sets the supply of Bitcoins?
Investment returns may not follow a power law given that they can come from "normalstan". The distribution of startup values for both funded and unfunded startups (including IPOs AND failures) would come from "extremistan" due to the presence of outliers. The data from extremistan will more likely follow a power law distribution. The terms normal and exstrem-istan come from the writings of Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable.
In a way, this speaks to the concept of journalism in an echo chamber and being fooled by randomness. Ultimately, people (including journalists) are bad at prediction. The "accessible" founders that get noticed first get the press' attention. Next to market companies get labeled as [First mover] for [niche].
"Accessibility" has a lot to do with one's connections with journalists and perhaps location to some extent. It seems like a broken model is being used to determine what is newsworthy in tech.
I met Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian at a book signing recently. Alexis mentioned that Digg was all the rage in the press when Reddit was on the rise. I understand you saying that this company has a small audience, bad timing, and an insufficient hook. However, it seems that experts often make the same mistake over and over again. As Nassim Taleb would say, tech journalists appear to be Fooled by Randomness. They latch on to the Snapchats of the world and refuse to explore the hidden gems because they don't fit into the trendy, flashy mold.
This makes me wonder what social network analysis for VCs and start ups would look like. It sounds like this model ensures that the well-connected founders get funded despite the merits of their ideas & implementation efforts.
This is creative. I just had a friend that moved to the DC -area from San Francisco. She works for the Federal Government and mentioned that she felt out of place in San Fran because nearly every one is working on a start up. This post makes it appear that it is really hard to stand out in a crowd.
I remember starting a company several years ago focused on using advanced analytics to improve personal decision-making. This idea morphed over time to a specific use: budgeting. Visualization and making the process quick and super easy are of the utmost importance for "personal analytics".
It seems like economic growth is the only variable being optimized in an uncertain world with many other important objectives and constraints. We could seek to maximize the median income of citizens, happiness, life expectancy, or many other factors. Yet, the goal of Government, Industry, and Academia is to maximize economic growth while mostly ignoring the human beings that should be served by the economy.
Want press? Leverage your relationships with the press and tech bloggers. Sounds fantastic; but, what if you don't have any relationships with the press?
I hear you. My mother enforced a minimum GPA for sports participation. I took mostly Honors and AP courses. I had a C midyear on my report card in a math course and my parents told me there would be no more sports until I had only As and Bs.
Yes, some teachers are hired primarily to be coaches. Some, not all of coaches teach gym class. However, my best teacher ever was a guy called Coach K because he and his father coached football for years. Coach K taught AP physics and engineering courses in high school. He was an Army guy and previously worked at McDonald-Douglass. He made learning fun and exciting. Perhaps Coach K is the exception. Student athletes are there to learn first and a teaching coaches' primary job is to teach.
You made an excellent counterpoint. The improvements in performance were not solely due to dropping sports programs. It may be difficult to tease out the impact that each of the major changes had on performance.
I did participate extensively in high school sports. I think that the benefits far outweigh the costs. In evaluating solutions like dropping sports programs, I believe that other options for performance improvement should both jointly and individually be considered, e.g., minimum GPA for sports participation, uniforms, longer school hours, mandatory summer school, etc.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not yet seen. Even scientific inquiry requires at least a scintilla of faith. One forms a hypothesis with the hopes (but not the certainty) of finding something meaningful at the end of the journey.
I don't think entrepreneurs should be lazy or blind to risk; rather, they should use strategy, options and flexible arrangements to eliminate, minimize, or transfer risk. Big companies didn't want to handle fraud for online payments - Paypal founders figured it out. The OP could have brought the employee on as an independent contractor. Moreover, forming a corporation would help to limit the risk of non-delivery with the $400k contract.
Economic models would show that low wage jobs are such due to lack of specialization and supply/demand for that job. Nonetheless, articles like this make "the Economy" sound more and more like the Matrix. Do humans exist merely to serve the Economy?
A lot of people seem to be sold on the group of founders theory of start ups. Jeff Bezos hired programmers to develop Amazon. I would argue that start ups are not about exceptions or rules - it's about getting your product in the customers hands by any means necessary.
It seems like hackathons and other hacker conferences and events have successfully capitalized on the popularization of start up culture. It makes this* seem like one big fad. The deeper purposes of sharing, freedom, coding and solving problems have been forgotten.
I would not quit what you're doing just yet. You built a product and have a paying customer. Congrats! You mentioned that you don't understand your the needs of your customer. I think you can build on what you've already done. Get out of the building, join your local Chamber of Commerce, and find out the challenges that small businesses are facing. There may be adjacent markets that you can enter by tweaking your product.