raiyu

I mean the writing was on the wall. It was the plot of several Bond films. The media tycoon by owning the news can disrupt governments.

I don't think that social media alone is to blame, nor do I think it is the main culprit, it is an accelerant, but not the cause.

In order for fringe view points to be broadly accepted they need to be "approved"/"verified" by a trusted party.

Now that our news channels, like Fox News, and CNN, spend more time talking about their opinions of the news rather than what occurred, every fringe viewpoint has been stamped as "valid" by appearing on these "news" organizations.

Social media I think exacerbated this problem by reducing revenues for news media companies so they all had to focus on content that was more emotional, rather than informative. And if they can stir up an emotion people tune in.

Then those viewpoints are shared across social media to create a larger audience, again linking back to these "verified" sources, and you get a pretty vicious flywheel effect.

Wait till some siblings get pissed off at each other and start deleting important files that the other one cares about =]

Yeah I think there is still definitely a segment that want the disk syncing, but for me it was actually becoming a hinderance and having everything online was actually much easier. Plus I started doing more file storage that I was accessing both on desktop and iphone. Certainly the original use case for Dropbox of local sync was amazing and exactly what I needed years ago, but my work/life needs have changed over time and I wouldn't be surprised if a larger amount of people are falling in to the cloud first category today as compared to when Dropbox originally launched.

Back then cloud syncing just made no sense at all because the speeds were pretty bad and inconsistent.

Not saying everyone falls into this category, but just pointing out that the market has evolved somewhat from their original position.

My use case maybe different from yours but GDrive has worked well for me.

Signing into the same account on multiple devices creates security and ownership issues, much better to be able to delegate permissions and also keep ownership clearly understood.

Yes and I'm saying we should be thinking of unions on a broader basis. Not as a single company union, but as the union of American workers, and directly pushing for legislation. =]

That's certainly one perspective, the other is that in the consumer segment churn is high but also the are a tremendous amount of people.

Dropbox had a head start but over time other companies like Google where able to build out competing services and because the total population of potential consumers continued to increase, a lead today, doesn't guarantee a lead tomorrow.

The other side of is that what made Dropbox amazing at the beginning, the ability to sync files with direct access on your computer, is actually now a detriment. Many users don't want the files locally, download speeds have increased dramatically (I have 1Gbps fiber at my apartment), so having the files locally is actually annoying and takes up diskspace, so you have a bit of a late mover advantage, especially if the population of available consumers continues to increase.

In this case it isn't simply X couldn't compete with big Tech, the landscape did shift a bit.

It's also important to note that Dropbox is still a very successful company, and if they aren't chasing revenue growth and profit they still provide a great service to consumers. But their growth chasing leads to a degraded user experience, which also pushes people away from their product and has them explore alternatives to really see if it's an apples to apples comparison. And that's where the "cloud" first storage solutions today present a better platform.

What really slows this down is the cost of switching for older customers that have a tremendous amount of data already in Dropbox and have it integrated into their workflows so it really isn't a fun project to migrate off.

This is also where the price increases create revenue growth because customers aren't willing to go through the pain of migration, but you aren't delivering more value to them, instead you are playing off of the cost switching to drive revenue growth and that begins a downward trajectory.

You don't need to setup the whole thing yourself, at DigitalOcean we launched the app platform so you can just connect your Github and one-click deploy your code base. You also have the rest of our services available so you can expand and add services, droplets, etc as and when needed.

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/

The putting two in a box isn't a mistake if it is handled correctly.

Understanding the technical architecture and managing and building teams as well as reviewing budgets and aligning to plans aren't two skill sets that are intertwined. It's very common to have one person great at one and another great at the second.

If it's made clear who is responsible for the architecture then it is clear who makes decisions there.

Likewise, that person can focus on the technical architecture and someone else is doing the people management, timelines, budgeting, and so forth.

What's the alternative? Promote the architecture person into a managerial role and have them be unable to scale the teams?

Or promote the other person, scale the teams, but run into technical issues and debt because there isn't a person owning the architecture and keeping the mental blueprint in their head how all of the pieces fit together?

It really comes down to getting the right people on board, clearly explaining the responsibilities, ensuring compensation is equal, and then having the two parties see each as allies on the same team.

Dropbox has been hammered by Wall Street ever since it went public. On the surface it should be trading well enough given it's revenue growth from when it went public to now, however, the narrative of competing with both Microsoft and Google was a tough one to play down.

Revenue growth will slow down to below 20% in 2021 which basically starts to take DBX out of the high growth tech stock focus and it is trading at less than 5x 2021 revenue when the median is somewhere closer to the 12-14x range and that's for companies below 30% growth.

The same was seen with Slack. Though they had great revenue growth, the narrative was that they couldn't compete with Microsoft and so their stock never really traded at a comparable revenue multiple compared to others.

It could be said that they have a heavy spend on Sales and Marketing but the same could be said of plenty of other Enterprise tech focused companies like MongoDB that still commands a very high forward looking multiple.

Unfortunately from the end-user side the experience has suffered somewhat and I've personally switched away from Dropbox so I can't really say they are doing great on the product side and the amount of "Growth Hacking for Revenue" that is now part of the product experience is a bit off-putting.

Also shows the potential for issues if you end up solely dependent on one product and don't diversity, especially if it's seen as a commodity.

The work force reduction is purely to turn the company profitable on a net basis and the trailing twelve months they've already gotten into the black. That's down from a $400MM loss just a couple of years ago.

But the belief is that there isn't a tremendous amount of profitability internally, because the expenditures are just too high, and cutting further into that theoretically will reduce revenue growth further.

Proves my point.

Any system that aggregates power can be used towards detrimental efforts. Unions aggregate power and as such are heavily dependent on their leadership.

When there was no employment law in the US and you had children working, obviously change was necessary and so unions were able to provide worker protections that an individual couldn't establish for themselves since they had no power against the corporation.

If you look at police unions in the US you can see how detrimental unions can be as well. They are focused on protecting their workers even when those same workers are the issue which leads to a very challenging environment around firing "poor" performers.

Often times what is better is intelligent government regulation. Though that in and of itself is an oxymoron.

Things like mandated health insurance, overtime pay, work hours, minimum wage, these are all protections that we need encoded in law, less so in unions.

The other challenge with unions, is that while one can succeed it leaves everyone else that is outside of the union at other companies completely unprotected.

At the same time, if you think of the largest union, it is all of the workers of a country. What if they joined together, to really lobby the government for massive change. Something that goes into law.

Like minimum wage increases, and the like.

The reality though is that any economic system is complex where pushing on one area creates an often unexpected result elsewhere.

You would also need heavier investment in government agencies that are meant to police the enforcement of such policies and to ensure that they are truly operating separately from the industries they are supposed to be policing. The opposite of that is what happened with the FAA and Boeing recently.

But this is the issue with zero interest rates.

There is no incentive to save, but alternatively, it also pushes interest rates on mortgages to near zero which increases the demand side by opening up home ownership to people that before couldn't afford it which pushes up prices.

The same occurs with stocks, with no returns in other asset classes everyone floods in to stocks and pushes the prices higher.

This is definitely the new normal going forward, because you can't increase interest rates without dramatically reducing purchasing power, which in turn leads to slow down across many areas of the market.

Yes as is the case with any direct listing. But the opening share price will be based on the order book and the orders that investors place before the first trade executes.

I’m not a lawyer by any stretch but i thinks the underlying asset needs you decline in value as well.

This is definitely not a legal opinion.

Cryptocurrencies are already taxed. The amount the SEC will collect here if they win will be peanuts compared to tax revenue and they aren’t going after regular folks but instead the alleged security issuer. They also have to do this because according you the definition there are plenty of bad actors using the same schemes to sell investments to folks so they have to enforce to reduced fraud overall.

In layperson terms with Bitcoin you can’t sue the network. With ripple you can.

Bitcoin wasn’t sold by a company entity and xrp was.

About time plus plus with audited financials it’s not a trust issue. Don’t think this will massively increase public listings but it will certainly level the playing field and get rid of the first day pop. Especially now that companies are staying private longer this a huge benefit to the everyday investor.

I like that one of the recommended solutions is to use named addresses instead of wallet hashes.

DNS and domains instead of IP addresses

Absolutely and if there was no warning and only through the crashes was it discovered what the malfunction is that would be appropriate.

But if engineers are saying that something is wrong before the first customer deliveries, and if the company is choosing to take this route purely out of financial benefit to themselves, its criminal.

Not sure what the point of this is. It reads more like a Press Release to generate more buzz for YC, as if that was needed.

You are going to select one company from YC who is already selected from the cream of the crop, so that you could mentor them?

I mean this is something that you can just email YC about doesn't need to be blasted to everyone as a press release.

I mentor a lot at Techstars. We went through Techstars, had a great experience, and so I try to help other companies. I also mentor outside of Techstars, and generally just try to be as helpful as I can to anyone that reaches out, time permitting.

I'm not writing press releases about it.

You can rub static sites for free on DigitalOcean’s new app platform

I agree with you on this. Read the article and though Gentrifying isn't the right word to explain what the author is referencing.

But on the other hand I was click-baited into clicking specifically because of the title so it definitely drove my curiosity.

Probably getting this under a more appropriate title would result in fewer clicks.

Travel will rebound and their last quarter bookings while down are recovering well.

They also have more “rooms” and any hotel chain without any of the capex or infrastructure costs so it’sa fantastic model that is light on cash and creates tremendous scale.

The pandemic forced them to cancel advertising, save a ton of cash, and realize that their brand is strong enough that advertising isn’t really needed in the traditional sense which improves their balance sheet for 2021 and 2022 and future years.

When i add phone numbers to my phones contact list i don’t expect Apple to own it. And if i want another app to use my contacts on my phone I’m ok with that. I think opening up the social graph via API would be essential to real competition and a wealth of other apps and companies can be created. Granular access can be given so that isn’t exploited. They have the funds needed to build it out from their billions of profits.

The original design was done with function first and form received almost no attention which was typical for Google for a long time.

As design overall started to become more relevant in products Google started to push out their redesigns but it was done with form instead of function as the focus. They've never really re-designed anything to be better - their updates have usually made the product worse.

But without a strong design leader it's death by a thousand cuts because there are so many layers of management to getting anything done.

Don’t get me wrong I get that many companies do this and it’s the industry norm when it comes to enterprise sales but on average I think the incentive structure leads to a number of issues and sure there can be stand out sales folks that aren’t selling but really aligning with the customer, but can’t go based on exceptions, have to look at the average sales person to see what kind of an individual that incentive structure creates.

I also think you can augment the customer success team to take care of that especially if you have a wide variety of customer profiles.

There is massive potential inside of companies customer support organizations that go unrealized.

They know the product, the customers, the bugs, they are the front line for down time, or bad deploys by engineering. I think the sales model is an old model that will eventually get up ended.

Customer Support > customer success > inbound leads

And if you do customer success right the customer will naturally grow with you or you find the limitations of the platform and that’s critical product feedback.

Btw, your description of a great sales person also works equally well for a great customer success individual.

I get the general premise but in reality when it comes to software or hardware sales I’ve never experienced that personally.

Cofounder of Digitalocean, so I’ve gotten pitched by hundreds of sales folks on the tech side of things.

On the consumer side I did happen upon one or two great car sales folks that followed that model of a great sales person.

I know from a mathematical perspective this works in order to ensure that the company can be profitable at some point but a part of me wonders if it’s really necessary.

I’ve never had a positive interaction with a sales person.

But I’ve had countless positive interactions with customer support reps.

One is over paid, the other under paid. If companies just created a sales team from their highest performing customer support reps and didn’t give them quotas or bonuses I think the model would still work as well from a revenue perspective, drastically reduce costs, and also lead to less irritated customers as no one i know looks forward to any sales call, ever.

Ok, broad generalization but you get the idea.

The whole m1 vs intel and AMD saga reminds me of innovators dilemma and the lesser referenced investors solution by Clayton Christensen.

In the solution book it basically details that everything goes through an ebb and flow of aggregation and disaggregation. This was often pointed out with Craigslist as the original aggregator and how many startups have been founded now to disaggregate it.

Interesting to read this article from that perspective. Intel and AMD disaggregated and found success for decades but now aggregating with SoC looks to yield massively better results.

Interesting to see certain business patterns continue to reappear.

Also shows that in tech no one has dominance if they don’t adapt.