seanlinehan

You can request it: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/faqs/

Yes! We have a bunch of awesome coaches for people in your situation. Hit the form on our homepage and we'll get you set up. Or email me at sean@exec.com

https://www.exec.com

For idea #2, check out Attention: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1574914307

To anybody affected by this layoff, my company Placement.com created a Better.com Alumni Job Board [0] to help smooth the transition. We've seen over and over how much easier it is to get a job at a company where:

1. You have a connection (or can build one easily)

2. The company recognizes the companies you previously worked for

Targeting companies that ex-colleagues work at is a powerful strategy! So we made this board for everybody affected. Also, if you are interested in talking to a career coach, I'm happy to give a free intro session to everybody affected here. Just email me sean@.

The lack of empathy shown in this situation is intense and I hope y'all know that there are amazing companies that will value you more waiting with open arms!

[0] https://www.placement.com/boards/bettercom-alumni-companies

To add a small bit of context for the last point about funding. A $7B reduction in funding sounds like a lot, but during that same period student loan debt increased by $760B.[0] On the balance, the reduction in state funding seems like an insignificant piece of the puzzle.

[0] https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/state-of-student...

Insurance companies make money by investing the premiums. It's possible for an insurance company to make a profit from investment even if they had unprofitable underwriting. From Warren Buffet:

> Insurers receive premiums upfront and pay claims later. ... This collect-now, pay-later model leaves us holding large sums -- money we call "float" -- that will eventually go to others. Meanwhile, we get to invest this float for Berkshire's benefit. ...

> If premiums exceed the total of expenses and eventual losses, we register an underwriting profit that adds to the investment income produced from the float. This combination allows us to enjoy the use of free money -- and, better yet, get paid for holding it. Alas, the hope of this happy result attracts intense competition, so vigorous in most years as to cause the P/C industry as a whole to operate at a significant underwriting loss. This loss, in effect, is what the industry pays to hold its float. Usually this cost is fairly low, but in some catastrophe-ridden years the cost from underwriting losses more than eats up the income derived from use of float. ...

Most likely this will be done by issuing new equity. The press release states that they will exchange Twilio Class A common stock per share of SendGrid common stock. They defined the exchange ratio (that's why the price is ~$2B and not a specific number) and will issue as many shares as they need to based on that ratio:

> 0.485 shares of Twilio Class A common stock per share of SendGrid common stock

Technically, issuing new shares dilutes every existing shareholders' ownership. But, if the market deems this to be an intelligent combination that was valued correctly, the market cap of the combined company should be ~$9.4B or (ideally) more. So the goal is for existing shareholders to hold, at worst, the same amount of value in dollar terms as before or, at best, hold more value as a result of the acquisition.

That's what I was thinking!

I hope somebody runs the data in the future to see if there was a statistical difference in outcomes between the companies intended to be accepted vs. not :-)

Do you have any examples of this? Sounds cool

Right now we don't have any remote opportunities but perhaps in the future.

We're hiring!

Product + Design: https://www.flexport.com/careers/department/design

Engineering: https://www.flexport.com/careers/department/engineering

If there were any red flags that you could have known about, yes. Not knowing does not grant you immunity under FCPA.

Does anybody know what happened with 21's vision of an embeddable mining chip?

https://medium.com/@21/a-bitcoin-miner-in-every-device-and-i...

It's different in that publicly traded company market caps are usually based on the value of common stock. The valuation touted in headlines for private companies is usually the implied value of a new, privileged block of stock. The common stock is not valued at the same amount.

But, only IPO all those special classes of stock convert to common stock. So in the success case, yes, valuation and market cap are eventually consistent.

It practice it tends to be the exact opposite. Your most invested users tend to be the most vocal and least likely to represent the majority of your user base. The additional risk of abandonment of the entrenched super-users is usually 1. accepted in favor of appealing to a new, larger group of people 2. usually far less than those users will tell you.

The Flexport blog has a great post on this: https://medium.com/flexport-design/how-to-handle-user-outrag...

Taking calls while driving is pretty effective. If you have a side project you could do sales calls while driving.

Here is a NYT article that explains what USAFacts.org is:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...

> On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.

Yeah, classic brokerage biz model. We contract in bulk with asset owners and sell piecemeal.

Depends on the situation. Our rates have expiration dates attached to them, so if the price went up before our negotiated rate expired, we will eat it. If the rates expired, we leave it to the judgment of their account manager on what to do.

Lower their prices, without prompting. At Flexport we sell logistics services. The price of ocean freight is highly variable (less dynamic than, say, the stock market or airline seats, but still fluctuates a ton). We make money by brokering these services. In some cases, the price of freight drops in the time between customers when contract us (and agree to a price) and the service gets executed (when we contract with the asset owner). We pass those savings on to the customer and let them know. This usually results in big joy, all around.

You can also build a successful startup not being a slave working 14hr days. Both small businesses and big businesses can be either well run or poorly run. It's mostly a function of building the right culture, having the right systems in place, and having enough resources to not burn your team out.

The Serenity Prayer popular in 12-step programs is the tldr; of Stoicism I keep in mind:

Grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

The purpose is to make supply closer match demand. If fares increase, more drivers will be willing to drive. If fares increase, less consumers will request rides.

You're correct in assuming that increased prices will reduce the number of drivers demanded. But you're wrong in assuming that the pool of available drivers remains static when prices increase.

These systems fulfills all the requirements in yesterday's world. And more importantly, they fulfill the requirements of the company's operating organization; not their customer's.

Modern customers want real-time data and analysis. They want all of their information available on the web, mobile, sms, email, API. They want a modern technology experience.

A DOS program consuming data via EDI and Excel-based input is a good candidate for the worst technology to do these types of things.

All the big players definitely have spend years and millions (hundreds of millions) optimizing these things. But they are optimizing DOS-based systems built in the 80s. The tech stack that the old guard is working with is unbelievable.

You don't have to automate the parsing of queries to produce leverage here. Every time they answer a query successfully, I would imagine they add that to an internal repository of information. So the technology play would be less on the "figure out what they want" front and more on the "deliver exactly what they want" front.

Need an on demand helicopter in NYC? Great, Magic knows just who to call for that because they already did it for Justin Kan. Need to rent the Exploratorium? Great, they can do that too.

For more common requests that fit neatly into other on-demand services offering, they could ostensibly partner directly with those folks and integrate with them. That way, Magic could have their own master dashboard to purchase services with minimal effort.

Yeah, I imagine they will drive right towards each other. Dropbox is trying to get better at the whole collaboration / enterprise use case. And I have no clue about Slack's plans around document handling, but feels like a natural progression for their product. I don't think they do a great job there right now, but even something as simple as being able to add tags to uploaded documents (as opposed to free-text subject lines) could go a long way.

Slack and Dropbox have pretty different business models from my vantage point. Slack entered the market as an enterprise product vs. consumer. Slack was built for collaboration from day 1, so there is some amount of lock in (change management in an organization is tough).

I look at Slack as being more like a hybrid of the best parts of Box + Dropbox... They have the good parts of Box's business model and the UX quality of Dropbox. And fortunately for them, they aren't in a market where the price is driven largely by the cost of the commodity hardware underneath them.

You can check out their F1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015...

2013: $148.4M

2014: $215.1M (44% growth)

2015: $319.5M (48% growth)