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tommynicholason WePay's (YC S09) next chapter

2x liquidation is not standard anymore - 1x is far more likely. This was an "up" acquisition too so it's possible they exceeded 2x for most if not all investors.

tommynicholason WePay's (YC S09) next chapter

It's not a down acquisition

tommynicholason WePay's (YC S09) next chapter

Zelle and Wepay have nothing in common - you may be remembering Wepay's old business.

tommynicholason WePay's (YC S09) next chapter

Sources say it's north of a $220m acquisition - I mean I know that's not a home run but I'm also pretty certain it's not a nothing outcome at all.

tommynicholason George Soros Transfers $18B to Open Society Foundations

These kinds of transfers point out two things to me:

- (obvious) the ridiculousness of wealth accumulation. This is over-discussed so I won't further that discussion.

- The critical need for better philanthropy. Philanthropy is by and large ineffective. I belive this is because it either isn't taken seriously (pet projects) or generally has no feedback loop or accountability. The best philanthropic organizations by impact are probably research universities, organizations not designed to be philanthropic. That sucks!

I think for all the shit YC gets, this area may ultimately be where they make they make real social progress. YC Research is interesting, but organizations like Watsi and New Story are REALLY game-changing to me. They showed me a model that really works, and I not only give to them regularly but also other organizations I could find with a similarly direct impact (Brooklyn Bail Fund is my favorite).

I think scaling real, accountable impact is a task my generation (I'm 29) is really, really up for. I think we can do it. There will be a lot of shitty, terrible attempts it but I don't think the attempts will stop and I expect it to yield results. I hope that's part of our legacy as a generation.

tommynicholason Ask HN: Resources to learn blockchain and smart contracts?

http://truffleframework.com/tutorials/

Not sure the Ethereum network can even deploy in 120 minutes these days, but you'll certainly have it built in that time :)

tommynicholason Ask HN: Resources to learn blockchain and smart contracts?

Compiled these resources while building my first smart contract. I can't promise they're the best, but I can promise I built something that works following these resources + learned a ton:

https://blankslate.io/?note=48627

(if you want just tutorials: http://truffleframework.com/tutorials/)

tommynicholason Ask HN: Sell my startup for $14M because I can't raise $2M?

If you think you could actually sell for $12m-$14m do it and don't look back, even if you get to the $400m sale you may not even make that much personally.

But be wary - companies are bought not sold. If you're below $1m in ARR, those approaches you think you're getting at tenuous and possibly totally fake. It may not feel that way to you or even to them, but acquisition are HARD without a revenue number to calculate price on or a really motivated CEO.

tommynicholason YC wants to let people invest in its startups through the blockchain

Every headline from Techcrunch disrupt that I have seen has been directly contradicted in some way in the video. For example, Vitalik Buterin spends about 10% of his talk explaining why not everything will be or should be decentralized. The title of his video? "Decentralize Everything with Vitalik Buterin"

tommynicholason Equifax Releases Details on Cybersecurity Incident, Announces Personnel Changes

Equifax makes their partners have a fully implemented and tested patch management program and audits annually (or via a third party) that you stick to it, making this situation even more hilarious.

tommynicholason Juicero Is Shutting Down

I could be extremely wrong about this, but I doubt they've spent the majority of that money. I think they're likely to be giving it back to avoid shareholder unpleasantness and seeking a buyer to try to neutralize the overall outcome. They raised $98m of the money in the last 18 months, I would bet 2/3rds of that is still there if not more.

tommynicholason Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?

I think there are just certain scenarios it may not support, like at one point writing queries in the editor for JSONB fields in Postgres was either hard or impossible, things like that. But generally it's pretty great and ready to be used IMO.

tommynicholason Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?

It's great and IMO pretty damn mature. They use it widely in prod at Airbnb so the only ways in which it's not "mature" are in customizability.

tommynicholason Decentralized, end-to-end encrypted Cloud Storage

Exactly right. Especially the last two points are important: no mirrors by default and depends which nodes copy and cache your files. The big challenge ahead for them is how to get various implementations (Filecoin ideally) to make it simple to get dependable nodes to copy/cache/return/etc your files when needed. I'm very excited about it and think they will get there, just important to understand the present vs. future of what works and may work.

tommynicholason Decentralized, end-to-end encrypted Cloud Storage

Sorry just to be clear - you can literally not use IPFS for storage, it doesn't "have" memory or compute or anything. It's a protocol.

tommynicholason Ask HN: What problem in your business is worth paying 10k/y for?

Think about running your own Superset instance. Could be the solution and IMO it's much better than Tableau.

tommynicholason Decentralized, end-to-end encrypted Cloud Storage

Great questions, and not to be unnecessarily pedantic, but IPFS is not a method of storage. IPFS is a replacement for HTTP and has a lot of attractive qualities and works in production today.

Filecoin is a method of incentivizing decentralized storage on IPFS and many of the questions you've asked are either totally or partially unsolved.

Those questions will ostensibly be solved by groups (possibly Protocol Labs, the creators of IPFS and Filecoin, possibly others) over time. That's kind of the bet you have to make if you buy Filecoin, but it's not a bet you have to make to use IPFS today or build a solution on IPFS that works at least for your ends but not all ends.

Hope that makes sense - it's worth digging in more on the forums themselves as to which of those problems are more or less solved and what the possible solutions are.

tommynicholason Decentralized, end-to-end encrypted Cloud Storage

FWIW I did a similar test with IPFS recently and had no problems and it worked phenomenally. I know people have issues with Filecoin (IPFS's native token) and I myself am confused about some of the outstanding unsolved issues with it, but IPFS itself works really well.

tommynicholason Google's stance on neo-Nazis 'dangerous', says EFF

The entire point of my comment was to say that while I would generally be considered a "pro-government liberal", I do NOT trust "big government" and prefer to see power be more diffuse.

What did you think my point was, I'm interested to see how I could be more clear in the future.

tommynicholason Google's stance on neo-Nazis 'dangerous', says EFF

I mentioned that I'm uncomfortable with how few companies have so much control. It's far better now than it was in the pre-Trust-busting days, for sure. However, it's trending the wrong direction.

tommynicholason Google's stance on neo-Nazis 'dangerous', says EFF

I agree, in that it sucks that it's a literal handful, but on the flip side it's nice to know the government is set up in such a way that it isn't by default the most powerful entity in every imaginable way. The people themselves, private companies, etc have a chance to be more powerful than the government in a variety of ways.

I'm a pro-government liberal who is extremely wary of the power of global corporations, but I still take some solace in what this says about our system.

tommynicholason How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

Paypal's white label product was unusable (literally for some companies). Their banking relationships did not need to be better than Paypal's to have a better white labeled, developer centric payments gateway than Paypal.

tommynicholason How the Collison brothers turned ‘seven lines of code’ into Stripe

International or some other payment type Amazon doesn't support well or at all in their own payment system seems like the lowest hanging fruit.

Amazon payments seemed like a huge opportunity to me at one point but I think they're sort of moving away from it. This could be a test that could trigger moving all payments to Stripe and eliminating the overhead of their own payments team. Wouldn't shock me.

tommynicholason Reddit raises $200M at a $1.8B valuation

I'd be surprised if they implement a change as jarring as it sounds like they're considering. We'll see though.

tommynicholason Hypnotized by Hyperloop

I'm a fan of the hyperloop concept and I hope it gets implemented. However, the Concorde example is useful to think about to me. Perhaps the reason we don't have better city-to-city transportation when there are options available and even implemented in other countries is actually that we lack the true will to build them.

This article does make the common mistake of suggesting the Hyerloop competes with intra-city subway systems though. I find the "just fix the subways" response to the Hyperloop disingenuous.

tommynicholason Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person

Of course. It's a ludicrous amount of money, you could just keep it in cash and not worry about it. That wasn't in any way the topic of conversation - it was why is it difficult to beat the market (or even match the market) managing that much money for one person as a money manager.

tommynicholason Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person

matching the S&P 500 with billions of personal assets is reallllly hard. Almost nobody in that position would just put $30B in NEA with Vanguard and wait - not diversified enough.

tommynicholason College students lost access to legal pot and started getting better grades

Once weed is legalized, as it should (obviously), these kinds of studies will be less political. Until then, you can't blame people.

tommynicholason How Much Are People Making from the Sharing Economy?

My biggest problem with Uber/Lyft is how the costs are incredibly obscure to the driver. I think that sucks. With Postmates, for example, a friend of mine was making $15 - $20 an hour riding his bike. That's ok money! Especially given the characteristics of the job I mentioned above. If he'd been driving a car, it's not really ok money.

I'm eyes wide open about the downsides of many of these jobs, especially the ones that involve using your own car. I just want to mention the upside because it's important. It has helped a really save a few of my friends butts at really tough times in their lives. I don't want to lose site of that. Optionality is important.

tommynicholason How Much Are People Making from the Sharing Economy?

The somewhat optimistic view of these "gigs" is that they have two important qualities:

- They can be picked up/put down at any time - They require no specific time commitment and can be managed in parallel with other money making endeavors/jobs

Most "jobs" are actually difficult to get (go try to get a job as a waiter - you probably need to know someone), require a very specific time commitment, and if you decide you have other opportunities you want to pursue for any period of time you have "quit" the job and renounce the right to work it likely forever.

Those are really shitty qualities! There's tremendous value in a job you know you can start/stop anytime and don't require any specific commitment in order to continue to have the job available to you. We should look at the gig economy not in any way as a career (although some may find it appropriate to use it as such) but rather as a new income generating tool. When considering whether the gig economy is good or bad, we should consider that context. My overall take is that we need more "gigs" but that the rate of the shift towards "gigs" in general is too fast and is worrying. I assume it will slow dramatically but if it doesn't...