romanhn

Are investors majority shareholders? If the founder owns the majority of the company, I don't see how he could be removed. Are you all prepared to possibly lose your jobs over this?

That depends on where you draw your moral lines, doesn't it? :) I do think this example just underscores the grayness and ambiguity of our human existence. I bet even some of the lying and moral corner-cutting experienced by OP would have pedestrian and wholly rational explanations. I've certainly seen reasonable people disagree vehemently with reasonable (in my opinion, but not theirs) decisions.

A few thoughts.

1. The lack of response is already an early form of feedback. Perhaps this isn't a pressing problem folks are looking for help with?

2. The thread you linked to is not very compelling in my opinion. There's no solution proposed, just a general problem statement, and even an admission that you could solve this with existing tooling. Not really a whole lot to engage with.

3. I've done my time in management, and have definitely seen the problem you're describing in the thread. It is not a tooling problem, but a process and people one. It is solved through conversations, expectation setting, and ongoing reinforcement.

4. > Where do I even find them?

That depends on the problem you're trying to solve, doesn't it? Respectfully, this is the hustle part of building a business. Understand your potential customers, find out where they hang out (HN, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, Discord, Slack communities, random forums, email lists, industry events, etc), understand the norms of engaging with them (people tend to dislike thinly veiled commercial activity), contribute to the community, build relationships. Make some assumptions and come up with a strawman, a design, or a full-fledged MVP. When time comes to asking for feedback, I highly recommend The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. It's a quick read that should help keep you on track.

Good luck!

"Early adopters" is not some sort of a cohesive group that you can find in one place. I can't imagine such a platform being particularly useful either. Grab three random YC companies, say in education, AI MLOps, and agriculture, and you'll see that there's not really any common ground that would compel potential early users to gather (outside of Hacker News maybe ;))

Reality is that you have to find early adopters where they already are. You have to go to them, not vice versa. Talk to them and solve their problems, rinse and repeat. Many of them will not even realize that they have a problem or that it is solvable, so no chance they would have signed up for this hypothetical platform in the first place.

Probably depends on your ethics/politics. Ben Cohen is a prominent supporter of stopping U.S. military support for Ukraine.

I'm building an online tool to help folks applying for jobs manage their applications, interview stages, communications, etc. It's pretty common nowadays to apply for many positions, so the goal is to reduce some of the mental overhead and help you focus on what matters - getting that job!

https://rolepad.com

As an engineering type lacking in design skills, I feel you. For my own side project, I paid for the TailwindUI library, which contains all sorts of premade components for web apps, stores, and marketing pages. It was a godsend, really helped to put together a clean UI while giving me flexibility to stray off the path via Tailwind CSS.

Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson is a classic.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann is fantastic. Great balance of breadth and depth, theoretical and practical.

The scene in question: https://youtu.be/msX4oAXpvUE

Not only that, but it was the first YC company to go public. That said, their performance post-IPO leaves a lot to be desired.

Having a clear value proposition and developing a unique insight is almost certainly not enough for securing funding. Doubly so in this environment (exceptions like Mistral AI exist, but I wouldn't bet on that). Build an MVP, get some traction (aka paying customers), prove out your value prop. I don't want to be too negative (trying to do something similar in fact!), but there's definitely some real upfront work and hustle required before you can start even thinking about measuring successes.

Speaking as someone with a decade as an engineer and another decade in management roles, I wholeheartedly agree with every single point here. I suggest reading The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier to better understand what the path to management (and beyond) looks like.

I feel like I saw something a bit more refined (I recall node statuses aggregated on one cool UI), so this may have been an earlier iteration, but the beginning of the following video has some of what we're talking about: https://youtu.be/Nrb3LN7X1Pg

Back in 2014 or so, I saw the FoundationDB team demo the product at a developer conference. They had the database running across a bunch of machines, with a visual showing their health and data distribution. One team member would then be turning machines on and off (or maybe unplugging them from the network) and you could see FDB effortlessly rebalancing the data across the available nodes. It was a very striking, impressive presentation (especially as we were dealing with the challenges of distributed Cassandra at the time).

It definitely feels slower than previous versions. The fact that the Start menu almost always takes multiple seconds to open is absolutely inexcusable. To be fair, it's likely attributable to running a bunch of heavy apps (Visual Studio, Docker Desktop, multiple Chrome windows) on 8GB of RAM, but the task manager doesn't typically show memory as full, or any other obvious diagnostic. The primary hard drive is an SSD.

I've been on Microsoft operating systems since Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS. Next year I am buying a Macbook M3 when that comes out. Time to move on.

Currently using Firebase Auth, which was fairly easy to implement and is free/cheap at high user counts, so is an option for a B2C application, unlike most commercial solutions I ran across.

Cons: difficult (sometimes impossible) to customize, password complexity can't be set (6-letter passwords allowed, wtf), and worst of all - it's Google, so expect appropriate level of care from the company (read: none). Definitely planning to switch out when/if there is traction, but for an early MVP I found it to be quite decent.

They were. Let's see how long my vouch holds.

I'd suggest looking again - they might have lost the rest by now if you haven't been using it. They now delete all email if you haven't logged in for a year. I found out first-hand :(

Yesterday I prompted three different chatbots (ChatGPT, Bard, Poe) with a prompt to generate lyrics on a specific topic (VC investment in Europe) in the style of the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast." They were all pretty terrible. Then I installed the Bing app that comes with GPT-4 and it did a fantastic job, so there's that. I don't pay for OpenAI's GPT-4, so can't compare that one.

Oh wow, I did not know about the upcoming policy to start deleting accounts with two years of inactivity. Thanks for mentioning this! So glad I got through ahead of it. How many people will not...

I can only assume arbitrary as it sure wasn't aware of a tie to my number during previous recovery attempts. I assumed there was a required phone field somewhere that I needed to provide data for.

I never used this address anywhere so comparatively not much. Oddly, almost none of it is in the spam folder. The other interesting bit is that someone seems to have been using this address for online purchases and lease agreements (fraudulently, most likely).

Good point. I had done this previously with my primary email, but it didn't occur to do the same here for some reason. I kicked off the Google Takeout process per another comment's suggestion.

Immediately!

It's been a while since I've read it, but I remember The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber being a very interesting take on how to build a scalable business by analyzing how successful franchises operate. It was an unexpectedly practical and engaging book, even for someone not interested in franchising per se.

I resisted tabs on IE7 for years, preferring to keep dozens of individual windows open. Now I have dozens of tabs. One of these days I'll start making more use of tab folders :)

Both innate talent and hard work are orthogonal to achieving desired outcomes (and you can get there with either). If your talent or efforts are pointing in the wrong direction, you won't get to the outcome, regardless of how well-meaning the intentions might be. If we talk about companies, it's not uncommon to be rewarded for outcomes, vs talent or hard work (a hard pill to swallow for many hard workers, in my experience). This of course requires a system of measuring outcomes, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.

Rolepad - better tracking of job applications and interview processes. Seems particularly relevant these days. https://rolepad.com

Apparently I said it 18 times, which doesn't seem right to me. A Google search didn't return a single example, though there were some instances in replies. Wonder if those are included.