melvinmt

oops, never mind :)

Wag! | Los Angeles | Onsite | Fulltime | https://wagwalking.com

We're a fast-growing on-demand dog walking startup and we're currently operating in LA, NYC, SF, DC, Chicago, Austin, Seattle and San Diego. Our HQ is conveniently located on the Sunset Strip (West Hollywood) and we're backed by several top VCs.

Our tech stack: backend API (PHP/Laravel), iOS apps (Obj-C), Android apps (Java/Javascript), web app (Angular) and internal tools that use React/Redux.

We're looking for pragmatic full stack engineers who are tech agnostic and not afraid to work on multiple parts of our stack and willing to learn new things when required.

We aim not to take up too much of your time so interview process is: 15 min online code challenge, 2 phone screens and an on-site interview (3 hrs max).

If you are interested, please email me directly at melvin@wagwalking.com with links to your LinkedIn and any interesting things you've worked on.

Welcome to the contradictory world of Startup Advice: Survival Bias Edition.

Last week I took Uber to work and paid only $1.22 for a 10 minute drive. Five minutes later I spent more than that on the toppings of my breakfast..

.. not sure how this is sustainable but I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

While Uber competes with Lyft directly in the on demand rides space it by no means will gain a monopoly on all transportation, there are multiple levels of competition after all. So I don't believe we'll end up in a monopoly situation soon where we have to pay whatever Uber demands. If Uber gets too expensive (similar to how they started with pricey black car service), consumers will simply resort to alternative ways of transportation.

Obligatory quote (I should write a blog post on this subject some day):

"The most common cause of failure in leadership is produced by treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems" - Ron Heifetz

> There is even more incentive for people to not own a car and instead use Uber

Sure, but if every company (think Tesla/Google/Apple/Amazon etc) eventually can build/buy autonomous cars and offer the same service, what competitive advantage would Uber still have? Their current network effect of matching drivers with customers is where most of their value is imho. If that disappears, then I really don't know why we still need Uber.

If I speak into my wearable iEarplug in 2020 and say "Hey Siri, get me a car", would I really care about it being an Uber car?

This brings back memories to the Twilight CD-ROMs [1] we had in the Netherlands in the late nineties that came out every month and had all the latest (cracked) games and applications on it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(CD-ROM)

More competition will pretty much always cause every competitor to spend more and make less...

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#/media/Fil...

GDP != Worth

The article explicitly mentions that if the cost is too high, the minority rule will not apply, but good observation nonetheless.

I lived in Atherton, CA for a while (granted, one of the richest and safest [1] ZIP codes in the US) and we never locked our house. In fact, I did not even have keys!

[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/police-blotter-reports-f...

What people don't tell you is that directness also has a cost. The Dutch directness of "GTFO my country" what minorities are confronted with daily is not quite contributing to any minority's happiness (it's a big reason why I moved to the US).

Yes, exactly.

That's why GCE should be as important to Google as AWS is to Amazon while arguably both have a different "core business".

> Google is a product psycho, this is not their core business

So you're advocating we should trust the book vendor?

> Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think.

You've just triggered a favorite quote of mine:

"The single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems." - Heifetz & Linsky [1]

In this context, technical problems are not technical in the sense that we might think of (software/hardware bound), it's in fact any problem that can be solved with a certain process, given enough resources and time. However technically intimidating they might be, those problems are the easy ones. The hardest challenges however are not technical but adaptive in nature where one of the biggest hurdles is to convince people to change their behavior.

[1] A better summary: http://www.sgaumc.org/files/files_library/technical_vs_adapt...

Yes, but the referrer is different ;) Thanks @aresant!

I mostly read business management books, but since most of them can be summarized in a couple pages (or a single big blog post, really) I just skim and skip through the hundreds of uninteresting anecdotes and simply stop reading after I grasp the concept of the book. Takes me a couple of hrs in total per book.

> I'm not going to waste my time with responding to this.

And yet, you did.

If you're human, you're 99.999999% likely to die.

So about $1.44 per hour, that's reasonable-ish.

Hmm, I just upgraded my ancient account (2008) to the family plan with no troubles.

#neverforget Color once raised $40MM pre-launch... anything can happen in SV.

> It's just impossible to "bid" on traffic via Facebook and win out over companies that have far bigger budgets

Yes, impossible on the most broad and least targeted campaigns. But there's almost an infinite amount of targeting that you can do that will allow you to bypass anyone with just a tiny budget. You may just not be aware of the fb ad campaign strategies (and targeting options) that you're able to employ.

Please take the time and watch this video: http://youtu.be/7zcVB-awAM0 He's probably one of the most obnoxious presenters ever, but you'll come to appreciate the world of advanced facebook targeting and figure out a way to utilize it for your content marketing strategy.

This (and Andreessen's article) is quite insightful of knowing when you're on the right track or not, but it's more like a "you know it when you see it" kind of advice that is not very helpful in terms of how to get there, or how to design a process that allows you to methodically identify and jump into these market opportunities. Maybe a second article could dive more into that.

I have once written some thoughts on immortality (http://melvinmt.com/the-immortality-paradox) and I came to the conclusion that while we basically always act like we're immortal in our whole decision making and lifestyle, it is mortality that allows us to advance humanity as a whole.

> The U.S. Congress is also pretty damned incompetent at its duties.

People seem to forget that the American government has been made "incompetent" by design. The Founding Fathers never wanted a strong government.

> I feel like these founders just want to start something... anything...

Wantrepreneurship... I've been there too. Taking some time off is definitely the best cure but $1.8M in the bank is very tempting to keep diving into anything as long as you can keep deluding yourself you're working on the next big thing.

The price of ETH just went from $20.45 to $14.01 in the last 24 hours... I just got out in time and am gonna wait this out a little bit :)

https://www.gdax.com/trade/ETH-USD

Yeah that was the first thought that popped in my mind. If a big chunk of the market is (still) growing illegally, why would they ever come out and join a marketplace?