3,561 karma · joined April 7, 2010
Note how designers and architects work in teams, in open work spaces.
I have seen communication in a PM group go to shits because of a move from an open layout to a walled cubicle garden. PMs were avoidig their cubes, sitting in the cafeteria as they enjoyed the "coffee shop hum".
Reality, as always, is nuanced.
You're a fucking coder, not the founder. Don't like your gig? Go somewhere else. Grow a pair.
why is this up again?
must have been on HN multiple times now.
start your engines, reddit will do what so many user-driven content sites have done - light themselves on fire. slashdot, digg, they never learn.
yes, the network effect is a huge moat. but then you actively alienate your users and then it goes FAST.
good luck to the aspiring entrepreneurs going after this opportunity.
don't even need a strong business plan, not like you can make any real money - but you'll get funding for years to come :)
It's clearly broken, so why the hell is it not simple to know whats wrong and how to fix it?
And this is for software you've written and you have the full source code for.
Don't envy doctors at all.
below the marketing language this is exactly those 2 points. guess it is easier if you work in enterprise, this business speak is a different language. pretty verbose, low information density.
Nothing is scarier than birth-defects. Radiation causes very visible birth defects.
Hence people are very, very scared of radiation. And rightly so.
A windpark will not cause disfigured babies. Hence wind is better.
And: Nuclear is the most expensive energy source, by FAR. safety, waste, clean-up - super, super expensive. dismantle a wind park and it is gone, poof. dismantle a reactor and now you have a new problem.
Also very hard to weaponize wind or solar. Blow up a wind park and well, the wind park is gone. Steal a rotor and now you have a rotor.
etc etc etc.
What is sooo hard to understand about this?
1., Self-updating rolodex for sales people. 2., Recruitment tool.
It works for both, no real competitor in sight due to the massive network effect.
Some niche networks are doing ok, like Xing in DACH region. Not aware of anything special in China, guess everyone is on WeChat anyhow.
overall this is content marketing for a16z, right along their great podcasts, etc. attracting start-ups and good candidates to work for them.
being a visible, renowned think tank is not a bad place to be, if you have the money and patience to execute along that line. it is amazingly hard work to churn out quality content throughout the year.
Budweiser is the king of beers, it says so on the label. The World Series is the world championship in baseball. etc etc etc.
However - this is great for the overall economy. The US is breeding the perfect customer, that can be sold anything at any time.
You can see it in startups too, you can sell product based on a powerpoint, a "vision". 9 out of 10 with nothing behind it. It would never, ever, fly in Germany for example. People there assume a scam before anything else.
So, shit for individuals, great for the overall economy. Pick your poison.
Now public at close to 9bn market cap.
is it more ethical to profit from curing a disease or from causing it?
Pfizer vs. Red Bull.
and if you can't become a billionaire from curing things, how will this sector attract the same kind of talent/genius like other industries?
Biotech vs. Quants vs. SnapChat
HN sometimes really can fuck right off.
less than a Tesla? more than a house?
interesting questions arise around immuno-oncology.
should Apple be the most profitable company - or someone that literally cures cancer?
Will be interesting to see if long term certain psychic diseases (bi-polar, depression, etc.) get less prevalent on the Arabic peninsula.
Just like most HN discussions sound utterly alien to outsiders.
Sociology, Philosophy, Economics, CS ... all different trade languages.
They've been futzing around a bit too, they started as WeAreHunted, then got acquired by Twitter to become Twitter Music, then shut down, then restarted as Wonder.fm.
Making money in music is HARD.
Once you play with the big kahunas, your prospects will be tightly controlled and briefed by their procurement teams. Which means most of the question techniques outlined in the post will fall flat as the proc guys have read the same playbook.
This is where the side chats during coffee breaks, etc become the core. Be ready to show your software to anyone, anytime. The literal elevator pitch. Anything to outmaneuver the proc team.
Good luck :)
Lots of interesting questions, no answers to date:
1., Did the introduction of electricity and mass refrigeration amplify/cause the deterioration of public health?
2., Did the massive losses of young, fit, male population in WW1 and WW2 lead to the decline of public health in the partaking nations? It stopped fine genetic material from procreating (you needed to fulfill health standards to serve after all). Losses of that scale were not encountered before.
etc etc.
Correlation, causation, the usual.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bubendorfer there is no English page for him
He free solo'ed the south wall of the Aconcagua within a day in 1991.
Workday (WDAY) and Veeva (VEEV) as great examples of just recently rallied SaaS stocks.
The true value of SaaS is just unfolding, not being stuck on old versions is just now sinking in. The above companies have customers go beyond the 5 year, sometimes 10 year mark - but they're not on some outdated version, figuring out how to patch that shit up. This is a revolution in enterprise that has not fully sunken in, there are still a lot of companies out there only dipping their toes into going SaaS.
Vertical clouds such as Veeva, as in going deep into one specific target industry, are a pretty good model to follow. Customer acquisition costs are super low, there is data out there to confirm this. All a reference sell, as CIOs talk to each other in a specific industry. Build a positive reputation, the sale follows. Product leads the way, not marketing.
The moat here being super deep industry expertise and data accumulation that gets harder and harder to compete with.
There will be something after SaaS, but it will take a while and it is utterly unclear what it will be.
Mainframes - Client/Server - SaaS - ??
If it's code that has been running successfully in production for years, be humble.
Bugifxes, shortcuts, restraints - all are real life and prevent perfect code and documentation under pressure.
The team at Salesforce.com is doing a massive re-platforming right now with their switch to Lightning. Should provide a few good stories, switching over millions of paying users, not fucking up billions in revenue.
Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.
Hug your QA engineers, they save you from eternal embarrassment.
Right now Harvard has the best course in the US. Stanford and Berkeley are a joke.
The best path into PM is still doing something hands-on in that area. If it is enterprise, then start in consulting or pre-sales. Consumer is pure chance.