that was the inspiration for building this into a turnkey tool!
12,317 karma · joined October 2, 2008
2x YC founder, now AI/ML product leader at Pinterest.
@plc on twitter, instagram, calendly and product hunt
> In their picture of the world, you, the founders, should only build a product and talk to customers, everything else is superfluous and waste of time. Hiring is waste of time, paid advertising is waste of time, content is waste of time, talking to investors is waste of time, getting media coverage is waste of time.
IMHO YC doesn’t want you to “build” a product they want you to “grow” a product. I think the YC framework (again IMHO) is to get an idea out and then do everything you can to make it grow 30% each week, and if after a few months you’re obviously failing at that — maybe that product isn’t working.
This seems, on the whole, like kind of reasonable high level operating parameters for startups, since traction is what defines revenue and fundraising chances.
I do think there is a flip side to this approach which is it can kind of lead to short-term-erism where if things aren’t working you flail about, and/or it can encourage founders to specifically tackle things they can ship quickly rather than things that are maybe more compelling.
I would argue that when things are slowly working that’s exactly when you need skilled advisors and founders to give you critical advice. Most dying startup don’t flat line… they slowly grow.
I live in West Seattle and tbh the maps for West Seattle look pretty solid, especially when you factor in the significant reduction in housing costs. I remain more people don't live here!
It drives me nuts they are not bluetooth!
I'd buy this instantly.
BTW, I think surprisingly little overlap between hacker community and mechanical keyboard community.
If I had to guess it would have been some nebulous 'youth prevention' team thinking it was wise to go into schools and explain why cigarettes were bad and vaping wasn't encouraged yada yada.
Inexcusable but Juul was a quintessential "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" company. (I don't expect people to believe me on that.)
* I cannot reiterate enough just how incompetent Juul was in 2017. Everyone was running around with their hair on fire and had zero of the skills or experience to deal with these issues
* I believe that Juul did a lot of really really really stupid things like going into schools and trying to hamfistedly state that vaping was bad but safe — again, Juul had a lot of very inexperienced executives who were obsessed with doing things they thought were really smart but were just plain stupid
* It's worth noting that these actions didn't actually contribute to making youths vape. Vaping was exploding amongst teens because of social media and being a meme — in what world would going to a school and talking about Juul make youths want to use that product? that is what makes all this so hilarious - Juul did a stupid thing, has to live with the consequences, and the underlying thesis of why they did it in the first place was totally ridiculous.
Again, I was a Juul employee - I do not believe Juul consciously or explicitly wanted youths to use Juul, but I am sure that their incompetence meant that their communication and actions blurred their dreadful attempts at dealing with the issues.
The very fact this NYT article exists without a clear rebuttal and explanation from Juul says it all, really.
That alone appears to render your entire comment moot, but I'll add that all of my comments today have been incredibly consistent: smoking cigarettes is really really really bad and vaping nicotine is really bad (because its addictive, there are longterm implications of inhaling nicotine, ...) - to put it another way, if you smoke combustible cigarettes then you should switch to vaping ASAP. But if you do not smoke combustible cigarettes do not start vaping because nicotine is highly addictive!
PS: equating nicotine to caffeine is incredibly stupid and offensive towards the millions of people that battle nicotine addiction every day.
How many because Juul essentially randomly went viral and is an inherently addictive product? Unfortunately way too many.
Honestly, I feel slightly bad that Altria were hoodwinked into investing in Juul and having it implode like it did, all the Altria executives I interacted with were remarkably precise and lucid. BTW I think the FDA deserves 75% of the blame for their poor vaping policies (and total lack of enforcement.)
Also this comment is correct that a poorly regulated and operated vaping industry fuelled a youth nicotine crisis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31836842
Great to hear that you're off combustible cigarettes :) You can easily ween down the nicotine from 5% to 3% to 1.5% over a time period too.
Sorry, I don't want my parent comment to be construed as being pro nicotine. If you don't smoke combustible cigarettes don't vape or touch nicotine. I feel a moral burden to be really clear about these topics as someone that briefly worked in this industry.
There is some regulatory nuance I believe that makes them harder to buy than regular vaping products but I forget what it is — a simple fact though is that the social aspect of smoking breaks, smoking at bars, the habit of smoking is a huge draw and it's hard to replicate that with gum.
The best product to solve the nicotine crisis is a smart device that gradually lowers the nicotine invisibly to the user over a 3-6-12 month period. This isn't a super hard problem, the FDA and the market is just too non technical to execute.
People can debate if vaping or nicotine is good or bad or moot from a health point of view but a simple salient fact is:
A small percentage of people who never smoked cigarettes before start to vape and then switch to combustible cigarettes. That is bad.
Btw all addictive substances are bad for you by definition.
I like to say that vaping is slightly less terrible than combustible cigarettes because it is very clear that you. should. not vape. unless. you. smoke. cigarettes.
Of all the e-cig players, Juul (which is now majority owned by Altria) is the most reputable one — by far - they have by far the best technology, quality controls, compliance and regulation teams, etc.
Unfortunately before Altria acquired Juul it was a terribly ran company. People spend a lot of time discussing the chronic youth issues but the reality is that Juul never wanted to sell to youths or anything of the sort — they were just _so_ incompetent at operations that they couldn't do anything.
They set fire to hundreds of millions of dollars on totally ridiculous projects plainly stupid ideas:
* A modular supply chain project with the idea that they could use manufacturing as a carrot for regulatory laws — this team was 50-100 people and had tens of millions of dollars in budget. Never did anything.
* All manner of vanity innovation projects: new battery technology, next and next and next generation projects, dozens of flavours, absurd marketing campaigns, rebrands, a $250k custom typeface, the list goes on.
* Hired McKinsey and Bain because the executive team (who were all ex-management consultants) wanted the company to move fast ....
* My personal favourite Juul story (ok I have a bunch) was that the company was so incompetent they didn't do headcount planning — You could just hire as many people as you wanted if your random (often incompetent) VP was okay with it. Juul had 50-100 VPs so it was sheer chaos.
It got so bad that Altria had to step in and install their own CEO and axe all of the existing executive team (and lay off thousands of random employees) to try and right the ship. Altria are a very legit operational business — you may not like them but they know how to work with the FDA within strict regulation guidelines. If Juul is removed from the market despite Altria taking over they're truly fucked.
In my time at Juul I have never worked with so many incompetent people. It was quite impressive but also incredibly depressing as someone that joined because the idea of creating a connected device vaping product to help switch Americans off combustible cigarettes was very compelling.
A tank isn't hyper mobile, isn't hyper accurate and isn't hyper long range. I don't get it's role — especially when it costs tens of millions and can be destroyed with either a $5k anti-armor launcher or from a missile fired across the horizon.
I can't really comprehend how the Model X can be ~$50k superior to a Model Y 7 Seater.