Highly recommended! Watched it on Netflix a few years ago and teared up several times.
87 karma · joined December 18, 2011
Am I missing something? It's a nice set of thoughts, but I can't imagine paying to have read somebody's personal blog, and would have been vaguely weirded-out at him having ads on it.
I'm just about to start his most recent book, "The End of Power," which is about how hard it is to establish and maintain political control as technology decentralizes. It's not going to be the kind of book Maduro (the Venezuelan president) is going to read, but seems pretty sure to be the playbook of how that regime will end.
https://www.amazon.com/The-End-Power-Boardrooms-Battlefields...
Losing to a competitor would mean you're not failing because you didn't find a market need. So you would screw up managing it, or by not spending to market/hire/add capacity fast enough. The only other reasons I can think up seem idiosyncratic (maybe well-funded competitor got regulatory approval or a big partnership from a VC intro?).
In the original post from the AgileBits team quoted at the top, that team tried Basecamp, which to me seems to do a good job of separating thoughtful/long-form discussion from chat, along with the weekend-pause feature.
I haven't yet found a Chrome extension which does Hemingway-esque linting on all text input fields, like Gmail or (god forbid) comment sections. Somebody (maybe me) should make this.
Having been involved in LP reporting at a seed fund, I can say that it happens regularly but infrequently (quarterly, or at most monthly) and at a 30,000 foot level. I've really never seen LPs interact with portfolio companies at a seed stage, beyond chatting at a cocktail party after the annual meeting.
Besides, given the nature of the platform, if they're looking into trends and products, isn't that information publicly available (this is just adding money behind the top syndicate deals on AngelList)?
If somebody can take the same data, package it up more nicely, and make the economics work to eliminate fees, I actually don't think we're worse off?
However, I think the target audience is probably more likely individuals rather than financial advisors, unless you're going to be running it as a SaaS. I can't see the overlap of small advisory firms and those familiar with Vagrant.
Will give it a poke with a few hundred dollars in Vanguard ETFs.
However, this looks to have been the result of concerted corporate effort and training (every clerk knows how it works, etc.). Can't see it catching on in a small business.
I'm actually curious why broader community effort hasn't sprouted up around web scraping for banks, given how horrible API support has traditionally been. Plaid (plaid.com) purports to make this easy, but it's not very mature yet and will be a paid service.
We were just recently using it in business school to look at cycle times in assembly line output.
I bet a lot of us hit this moment, over and over again: "We didn’t obsess over it and we didn’t love it. We loved the idea of it. That hurt."
When you're on the brink, remember why you're doing this at all; to build something that you think is really cool.
I'd be interested to see what partnership companies like IGG, who builds the popular iBank for Mac, have pulled off to do this (http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibankforipad/direct_access.php).
It's actually as mentioned in Wesabe's postmortem (http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint/); for most people Mint doesn't actually get you to change your behavior. It just provides twentysomethings with some feeling that they're managing their finances, in return for getting pitched credit cards.
Harder and more worthwhile than UI or functionality fixes are changing twentysomethings' behavior, or doing something interesting for older people with more complicated financial situations. [Mint's useless for my parents, with multiple bank accounts, investments, retirement, education and health savings accounts, etc.]
One problem (and barrier to good competitors) are that aggregating finance data sucks. Mint started with Yodlee, which is nothing but a scraper for bank sites, and now runs on something Intuit built internally. It's hard to imagine many startups meaningfully tackling the problem.
As someone who's just recently started to consider full-time hires beyond our founding team, it's ridiculous how important this is relative to how little it's talked about. The other traits - "avoiding crises", "doing their research" - often boil down to effectively working together with your teammates and finding information / reaching decisions quickly.
And I do think it's got something to do with educating programmers. Working with interns and contractors we've had at Harvard, MIT, etc., the best have been Olin College (http://olin.edu).
I'm not going to gush about it in this comment too much, but suffice it to say the best communicators about technical problems are usually the ones who spend the most time working in teams and presenting their work, and those are Oliners to a tee.
On a lighter note, one of the "shared connections" in the blog screencaps is actually Good Girl Gina, of Reddit meme fame. http://note.io/HfhtzE
Frankly, I don't think I'd love to have notes leave my physical possession, if are important enough to pay for scanning in the first place.
The thing that none of the ambient-social apps (this, Highlight, etc.) get is that literally no amount of social data is going to make hangouts happen spontaneously.
Once you get the context right (networking events, dating) to motivate people, that's when the location-awareness and social data make a huge difference.
But when I'm at CVS buying toilet paper at 11pm, there's no amount of social data that could make me wanna hang out with a person, no matter how close we are.
For two years, my roommate and I hosted drinks at our house every Wednesday night; the effort of continually remembering to add people to an email list + calling + texting was a drag. We were always trying to find ways to reduce friction for the event, and a similar setup would have been fun.
If you have this many pieces that it's hard to keep straight without a tool like Gutenberg, isn't that modularization the whole idea of a wiki?
I think about it is as being highly networked. [...] you look at the strength of connections between people, the communication channels, and how information travels amongst them, and then you can draw a diagram.
What seems like a higher-than-average percentage of Githubbers are particularly effective communicators publicly, even outside the management team. (Zach Holman in particular comes to mind.)