6,925 karma · joined October 17, 2010
p.s. It's fascinating how long products like Jira end up existing through sheer market penetration. I don't know a single developer who doesn't passionately hate Jira, and yet it is somehow the "standard."
The reason being, I think, is that Apple Pay with Apple Card is directly integrated into the app, but fails on the web.
Thank you!
While "make something people want," is a good North Star, in a time when making stuff if relatively easy and competition is crazy, this is a great primer on how to keep your sanity while also making something customers actually want.
Take a look tomorrow night. I'll pick out a few juiciest bits by then.
We just "upgraded" our house with a bunch of second-hand IKEA furniture, buying their typical drawers and bookcases for $20 each using Facebook marketplace.
Considering that buying a new piece would be $200, and a used one is $20 and already assembled, and I had to drive 1 mile down the road to pick it up, it was a win.
Now say I am a seller though. I have a bookcase for 200, and it is gently used so I'd get 40% credit back. That's $80, which is of course better than 20, but it would require me loading the fully assembled case into the car (on top of the car?) and driving it to Ikea, all for an additional 60 bucks gain. If I have the car, and able to move it, and have the time, 60/hour is still a good "income" for a lot of people. But boy that's a lot of work for a one time benefit, and most Ikea pieces that can be car-transported when assembled don't even cost 200 bucks.
It's hard to imagine a lot of people going through the trouble, when they can just sell it for a few bucks to a neighbor and forget it.
On the other hand, if you get UHAL, grab 10 bookshelves, pickup and deliver them all to IKEA on the same day, now that's $500 in profit. Someone could make a good side hustle out of it.
Anyway, we shall see.
Take cell phones for example, they were big, expensive, had only one function, and only available for the rich just about 30 years ago. Now they are cheap, powerful, pocket supercomputers available to mostly everyone.
Another example is farming and supply chain. 100 years ago you were pretty limited to the foods available in the local store, but now you can get anything your heart might desire, be that bananas from Mexico for 69 cents, or Sake from Japan for $20. The world has greatly benefitted from advancements in technology that was once only available to the richest.
Most of the mid-class luxuries we enjoy today, from airlines, to hot tubs, to game consoles and books on Kindle, all of that had to be developed and brought to light, first expensive, and then gradually cheaper and cheaper.
Eventually even the buses will drive themselves, and that will only happen if we invest sufficient energy and resources into making the tech available and improving today.
Sure, your chances of getting into an accident while driving your own car are higher, and some dummy could throw a turkey onto your windshield and kill you ...etc, but humans don't think in probabilities (well, outside of Hacker News humans), and while driving their on car humans have an illusion of control, when the car is driving itself and you are sleeping, that control is gone.
The idea is that if you can take an image and predict the distances to the objects in it, you can then create an image that is a transpose of the original based on your predictions, but at a different distance. In case of Tesla moving forward, that would be a split second later, closer to the original image. As the car moves forward, you actually take that second image and compare the virtual to the original.
At this point you probably get it wrong, but you adjust your predictions and recalculate until your virtual transposed image looks exactly like the real image, at which point you've got the distances pretty darn close.
I remember watching a talk about their computer vision, and it was pretty impressive. The challenge is that despite knowing where the billboards are, they still look that way because sometimes, in obscure situations, in little old towns with fuzzy rules, road signs actually do appear in weird places, and that's where the car often trips up because without sufficient data it just can't build a prediction model to know when to respond, and when to suppress the new input.
Today is their launch day, so to speak. Unlike a typical startup, it is a little hard to celebrate something that came out of a rather gloomy experience. On the other hand, this can help/encourage/delight other kids in hospitals, so the best we can do is share the word and hopefully get these care packages to many more babies in need.
Edit: Here's an alternative summary of what they are doing. I find it actually a more impactful and easier to share alternative to the website - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KF6CTBBvbTwIPS4cBng6BrImrBw...
In fact, there are probably only two things that startups can offer that big companies cannot:
(1) A product that when successful it will change everything, think Google/Facebook/SpaceX material. This is good because it puts employees in a position to "change the word," while also potentially getting paid in the long run.
(2) Flexibility and room for the mind to work. No useless meeting, no endless discussions to cover one's ass, no set hours or obscure HR policies. Just hard work and a ridiculously challenging mission.
Outside of that, why would you work at a startup?
Amazon workers would've been required to test frequently and mandatory and without exceptions, very different from test data from the public population, people going to test in fears of having the virus or already exhibiting symptoms.
Amazon also probably doesn't have a ton of really old people working for them, which would have excluded the most sensitive population out of the their tests.
Would be curious to know what their internal data shows beyond the basics!
When they ask a question, instead of giving them an answer, we just ask what they think first. Often that leads to a rather wild/creative prediction, something that comes out of their understanding of thew world, which although limited, is beautiful. We explore forward from there.
Generally, it helps to put kids in charge of their own life in whichever capacity they can at this point in time. If they know they can put on their own shoes, clean their own dishes, make their own breakfast ...etc, they also learn implicitly that they have full ownership of their thinking too.
To be honest, it's hard because very often it's easier for us, the parents, to just have the kids do what we need them to do, rather than what kids want to do, or think is the best way to do it. But, it's a tradeoff. When they get more freedom, they engulf in it.
My 2c.
In my experience, many "experts" in specific programming areas have either gathered sufficient prior knowledge to know the right answer, or more likely have enough prior experience to know where and how to quickly find that answer. That's what makes them the experts.
In much the same way, generalists are quick learners, and your expertise is in knowing how to quickly learn anything so you could find the answers. You are quite literally the expert in becoming the expert.
You might start at 0% knowledge, but you can also get to 80% relatively quickly, at which point you too can function on a near-expert level, at least for a while in a narrow enough scope.
Understanding that, if true, will help you find the jobs that need this ability, even if they don't know it yet.
ps. Let us know how it goes. Would love to learn what you learn ;)
It's a natural process, and there is no such thing as not being biased (as it is a bias in itself), but the signaling of being part of YC is definitely huge, especially first time, and for outside of the Bay.
Investors are people too.
I just did a quick interview with their founder, judge for yourself - https://www.raddadshow.com/episode/anthony-eden
They really run the company for the sake of providing the best service, even if that doesn’t make them the biggest or richest.
Google isn't a Monopoly as much as they just have the most eyeballs because they built a great company. But Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, and a few dozen smaller players, are all the answer to Google's monopoly.
I've just spent a few days testing different ad segments, and for the one I was doing, it turns out Reddit was 5x cheaper than the next cheapest source. Cool right?
What we need is more companies that are able to capture eyeballs, and an efficient mechanism to distribute ads among them.
- If this is a new start up and you're just trying to get product market fit, then you don't need to spend time on making your systems stable to be able to support a big customer. First, you have to do whatever it takes to get a customer, and then a big customer. Plenty of really successful startups have ridiculously messy code under the hood, and that's OK because the job isn't to write clean code, the job is to create product that people love.
- If you are the CTO of this company, then it is your job to figure out what can be done under what time frames, and despite your cofounder needing more features, it is your responsibility to deliver them. Therefore, your cofounder needs to understand this, but since they are non-technical, they probably have no idea. This is on them to educate themselves, but you can help them. Of course, it is also on you to have a backbone and be able to tell your co-founder "No." It sucks, it doesn't feel good, but if you want to be a CTO, then being able to communicate is part of your job.
- What is your assessment and how you are doing financially with your customers? It sounds like your cofounder realized that you haven't achieved a product market fit yet, and they are trying new features to find what resonates with the customer the most. That is a good approach, but even better approach is to figure out what your customer needs before you build any of those features. It's hard to say exactly how to do given that we don't know anything about your application, but people who have figured out how to do it achieve great success. See my notes on [how Rahul started Superhuman](https://smashnotes.com/p/acquired/e/superhuman-with-ceo-rahu...), or how [Ramon made millions with a cheesy blog](https://smashnotes.com/p/my-first-million/e/blogging-his-way...). Those are just a couple of examples that come to mind immediately.
- Lastly, if your cofounder is asking for more features with little results, they are simply insecure and scared the company is about to fail, but instead of admitting what's happening to you and the team, they are hoping to find a way out of this before the collapse. They should talk to other "managers" in the company and find a way together, but they are scared, they are just a little mouse stuck in a dark-dark corner. If that's the case, see if you can figure out how to help them out, if it's possible.
Good luck!