rexreed

I wouldn't necessarily call growth-hacking / blitzscaling to capture customers at a loss network effects. More accurately it's about cornering the market or dominating market share. Network effects are more prominent for things like social media networks where the network value grows exponentially with scale. But not as much for a B2C or B2B solution where there's an identifiable or fixed number of customers and the rocket fueled competitor captures them all with unsustainable pricing.

Profitable startup works for founders, but it doesn't work for the venture capital industry.

But it's hard to be a profitable, bootstrapped startup when rocket fueled / venture-backed startups are too busy growth hacking and venture-funded blitzscaling to capture customers at low cost to the customer, only later to screw the customer when it comes time to either flip the company to a buyer in order to return those VC dollars, or to turn the screws on the customers and enshittify the product when blitzscaling is no longer feasible.

Personally, I prefer a bootstrapped, profitable startup in markets where blitzscaling venture-backed rockets aren't raiding the customers.

This is great, thanks both for writing these down and sharing!

I'd love to learn about PMF and which posts from HN were most helpful. Even a few pointers in the thread here would be awesome.

Are you in it for the glory, for the money, for the experience, for the team and colleagues, for the resume, for the challenge, or for something else? Answer that question and you have your answer.

If the predictions are meant to be bold, then yes. If they're meant to be fairly obvious, then no.

For example, saying that flying cars will be in widespread use NET 2025 is not much of a prediction. I think we can all say that if flying cars will be in widespread use, it will happen No Earlier Than 2025. It could happen in 2060, and that NET 2025 prediction would still be true. He could mark it green in 2026 and say he was right, that, yes, there are no flying cars, and so mark his scorecard another point in the correct column. But is that really a prediction?

A bolder prediction would be, say "Within 1-2 yrs of XX".

So what is Rodney Brooks really trying to predict and say? I'd rather read about what the necessary gating conditions are for something significant and prediction-worthy to occur, or what the intractable problems are that would make something not be possible within a predicted time, rather than reading about him complain about how much overhype and media sensation there is in the AI and robotics (and space) fields. Yes, there is, but that's not much of a prediction or statement either, as it's fairly obvious.

There's also a bit of an undercurrent of complaint in this long article about how the not-as-sexy or hyped work he has done for all those years has gone relatively unrewarded and "undeserving types" are getting all the attention (and money). And as such, many of the predictions and commentary on them read more as rant than as prediction.

I like Rodney Brooks, but I find the way he does these predictions to be very obtuse and subject to a lot of self-congratulatory interpretation. Highlighting something green that is "NET2021" and then saying he was right when something happened or didn't happen, when something related happened in 2024 mean that he predicted it right or wrong, or is everything subject to arbitrary interpretation? Where are the bold predictions? Sounds like a lot of fairly obvious predictions with a lot of wiggle room to determine if right or wrong.

It's also a good "first pass dentist" but I wouldn't use it for anything critical.

Great answers! For B2B/government what are the sort of sales channel partners you are referring to?

Can you provide more details on how you leverage your network to grow your business? It's hard to just push friends and customers to get you more business. What in your experience works here?

Which VPS are you using and recommend?

Some of the comments and feedback I'm seeing in the reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/PorkBun/. But then again I don't have any firsthand experience with these issues, so who knows. Are you having good experiences with Porkbun?

I coincidentally just this past week ran into a major issue with Namecheap on a fraudulent domain marketplace sale that they did not resolve properly or in a timely manner. They deserve their meh reputation. They were decent about a decade ago. Come renewal my domains up for sale are moving to Dynadot. Was considering porkbun but I sense they are heading the namecheap way.

A secret amazing museum: System Source just north of Baltimore: https://museum.syssrc.com/. Much more amazing than the website makes it seem!

I agree. I actually think self-employment / mass self-employment, with the augmentation of tools is the future. Traditional corporate employment is starting to turn sour.

He is just as much qualified to be "CEO" as his "employees" were qualified to work for nothing. The CEO title is meaningless in these kind of situations. He's just an entitled founder who tries to get as much as possible for nothing. In the end, no value is created.

Why not go even more old school? Shared hosting and PHP?

Ah - thanks for the heads up! Been on HN for 14+ yrs and first time I noticed that ;)

It's odd that the post shows as being only a few hours old, but the comments from ramiborni99 as 3 days old when viewed from the above link (here it shows not as old)? Similarly, your comment shows as a few minutes old, but showing as 3 days old when I view the threads from the above link... Very odd

@dang - what's going on with the timing on these comments and posts when viewed from the user thread link?

In this example, you invested $100 to get a $1,000 return. $99 of those investments failed, but the one that succeeded made up for the losses. You still have to factor in the losses, otherwise if you could have just picked the winner from the get-go, you would have done that and invested just $1, not $100.

An amazing guy, and not much of an attention seeker. That he stayed at IBM all his productive work life (1968-2012) says something, especially as "His last position with IBM was field technical sales specialist."

Sounds like you didn't live through the Microsoft product launches of the late 1990s. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Same stuff, different day. You might enjoy this reminiscent remix, which also features a SpaceX-ish rocket as well (not bad foresight for a video created in 2009): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRm0NDo1CiY&t=106

Interesting! How far away is this tool from being a desktop simple RPA solution? Would it be able to interact with desktop apps and simulate mouse or keyboard actions in the future?

Before there was race there were tribes. Which goes back to the very roots of humanity.

The folks from Agree.com just started up to do the same thing... what do you think of them? Sounds like one of those times when folks think the same thing at the same time?

You only get a reduced sentence if you cooperate in the prosecution against someone else the government / prosecutor is just as or more interested in. That wouldn't be the case with the diddle.

This is the way. I feel there's an evolution of small business self-employment that can achieve scale without falling into the trap of the current finance-focused corporate approach. Spending my time and energy to focus on building out what this model is.

"If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager." Sad to say, but the professional fakers dominate the C-suite. And often the top manager (the CEO) is a professional faker in chief, hiring like others instead of those who really know what they are doing, so that they don't call out the BS of the top levels.

In the current corporate model that dominates modern capitalism, it's the shit that floats to the top. I am hopeful of a future of mass self-employment and away from finance-led, quarterly-focused, bottom-line driven corporations that stray from their missions and seek to serve a minority of overweighted shareholders, at the expense of employees, customers, and the "common" shareholder.

The Spreadsheet-based workflow works very well for me as well. I have a feeling a very large % of people manage their personal finances on a spreadsheet. And it's private, not cloud based, backupable, and password protected.

That's also my question. In general, can someone explain why offsite, offline, multi-timescale backups don't help in these cases?

Yes I get that insurance paid the extortion, but besides just capitulating, why doesn't restoring from backup work, assuming you can spot the vulnerability that caused the ransomware attack?