trjordan

The Good Place (the show) took a try at this! It’s an exceptional show in many ways, and the final season spends a lot of time trying to solve this exact problem and grappling with its consequences.

(I won’t spoil it for you, but Wikipedia has a summary if you don’t want to watch.)

Because they may see that reducing the J&J supply to zero doesn’t meaningfully change the time to fully vaccinated.

Because they may see that clotting worries would harm public trust in vaccines, delaying or preventing us from getting to herd immunity.

Because they may see the number of people tested for blood clots, indicating the number is much higher than 1 in a million.

Because they may see that trading a week of paused administration at this point is a reasonable price to pay to ensure we get to herd immunity.

> Tesla's terms and conditions say if a refund is needed, it can pay in either the exact amount of Bitcoin paid or in US dollars based on the dollar price of the car - whichever it wants.

Fascinating.

Always, a little bit?

I've founded one startup and sold it, and I've been part of 2 others that got sold. I'm currently enjoying being a PM at Slack, but at some point that'll get old and I'll want to do another startup. B2B SaaS is my jam.

I'm technical enough to build as necessary, but I'd prefer to focus on the go-to-market side. I'm always up for talking to folks who are thinking about it. I've got a history of working on developer tools, but anything analytical is interesting.

Twitter is in my profile, DM me and let's have a Zoom?

Broadcast audio further than video. Make it easy to find a break in conversation.

I’d frame it slightly differently; it’s not exactly “the right guy.” B2B marketing is frequently about getting a critical mass of people at a company to come to consensus. The best strategy here is frequently getting 1 person very excited and 10 people aware enough to not pitch a fit when they hear a deal is happening.

The best B2-large-B marketing strategy I ever heard was fundamentally account-based. This guy sold a $1m+ product, and he had a list of the 1,000 companies that could possible afford it. His metrics revolved around a hierarchy of countries > sales territories > accounts. He’d literally evaluate programs based on “have we scheduled enough demos with IBM this quarter?” If the answer was no, they’d run a smaller campaign focused on just the accounts they were behind on. Sales loved him.

The hard part about attribution is so much of the internal discussion is opaque. So especially in large accounts, you have to develop some feel for what is “enough” activity in an account that sales won’t have a hard time of it.

(And fwiw, you don’t have to do this through pure marketing. Bottoms-up products aka freemium is a great signal that sales should reach out — Datadog, New Relic, Github, and more do this.)

They mostly use stock grants and options, both of which are taxed as income on they day they vest. Are there other vehicles you’re referencing?

I think there’s two parts.

One is table stakes. What is the ROI of a website? Of showing up in Google organically? Of a well designed logo? On some level, customers expect to be able to find you. You need to show up, and show up well, at the point that customers are simply exploring. That’s fairly untraceable.

The other is distribution, holistically. Tesla might not have “marketing,” but they have showrooms, launch events, and referral programs. Every successful business started with precisely one highly effective way to acquire customers. Marketing, on some level, is about making sure that acquisition channel is working, start to end.

As companies grow, everything becomes muddy. Sure, Tesla or Walmart or whoever is probably unable to undertake how their marketing is effective, but they also can’t attribute success to every engineering project or accounting effort. That’s normal and true everywhere.

This is something I worked on for a couple years, and I fundamentally agree. I started a company around marketing analytics, eventually selling it and integrating it with another marketing analytics company.

Our product was B2B revenue attribution: for each dollar spent on marketing, how much revenue came of it? This is hard in B2B, because marketing happens to people, but purchase happen months or years later by companies.

We found that we could do this for several data streams (conferences, online ads, gated or cookied content marketing). What we then found is that _CMOs don't care_. We were asked multiple times to widen the definition. To push up the numbers, justifying more ad spend or a bigger user conference or more headcount.

And you know what? I think that's OK. Marketing works, and it's a critical component of any company. A lot of good marketing isn't trackable, because it plants a seed inside a person's head far before that person buys anything. It tells a compelling story. The world is full of data-addicted PMs and sales VPs and ad purchasers and CEOs, but good marketing is more than that.

If the marketers have to appear (or actually be) addicted to data to communicate well with the rest of their company, then so be it. Just like Jacques says: I don't know what the way out of this mess is, or what the path to success looks like. Good marketing can still happen with bad data.

Why is it the job of the person who was interrupted to correct the behavior?

Why not the interrupter? Why not somebody else?

I read it as 75% of the company being split among the 3 founders.

It's not clear to me there's a real company here with only the OP. I don't think it's unreasonable to assemble a founding team in the way it's been described.

Just as a gut check: 25% of the company for 200k is a lot of equity for a low price. That's a yellow flag to me. It says to me that the investor doesn't think the company will grow huge and/or there should be room for future investors.

I'm not sure what you product or idea is, but companies where technology is the core tend to have all founders (or N-1) capable of building product. You have 1 of 3, so what are those other two folks doing? Again, a yellow flag. In terms of the business, I'd worry this is going to be low margin, if it takes 2x as many sellers to sell as it takes builders to build, from day 1.

Technology is leverage, and you're the only one building the lever that lifts this company off the ground. My advice is to make sure your founders understand this and to make sure all three of you are focused on building a true MVP. You need to build something that is easy to set up, easy to use, and delivers true value. Your cofounders will smooth over some of the rough edges, but push hard on making sure you're aiming for product-market fit in a good market.

If not, you'll end up as the IT group for a consulting business. It's not a bad gig, but it's not the startup journey you've probably come to this website to talk about.

Discovering the problem and discovering the solution are two different things.

The art is getting people to say “this part of my day sucks” without inviting them to specify the solution. Your job, as founder, is to understand the problem deeply enough, then create a solution, then get feedback and iterate.

Do you buy products with 3-star reviews?

Code thinks in objects and functions and values and pointers.

Databases think in tables and columns and rows and queries and indexes.

If you don't pick an ORM to help manage this translation layer, then you'll end up re-implementing your own. Maybe this is OK, because yours will be simpler for quite some time.

What else are you going to do? Stored procedures? Concatenated strings?

I sold a two person company to a fifty person company, which triggered this situation. After the acquisition, I was a "normal worker" by most definitions.

I certainly see less of this than you, but you have a brand. I suspect that matters a lot.

If you require the PIN to lift a credit freeze, some people will lose their PIN and never be able to lift the credit freeze.

So there must be a workaround that relies on verifying identity, based on non-random information (e.g. no PINs, no passwords).

They've made it too easy, but until we can request that a credit agency blacklist an SSN and forget all associated information, this will keep happening.

10x return on the $60m investment means getting $600m back. Depending on ownership stake, that's probably between $2.5b and $6b after IPO. A big multiple these days is like 20x, so that's $120m - $300m in revenue.

FWIW, $25m was a pretty conservative estimate. One way to look at it is to take the number of employees and multiply by $200k. That would imply upwards of $50m in revenue. https://www.saastr.com/how-to-figure-out-your-competitors-re...

It may take some time to get there, but they'll almost certainly break $100m. The VCs at this round probably won't sell immediately after the IPO, either -- trying to make 10x in 2 years isn't the plan.

Also, 7+ years to that level isn't the worst, by any means. The more relevant metric is growth in the last couple years. If they're still doing 100%+ year-over-year, that's pretty great. https://redislabs.com/press/redis-labs-announces-10th-consec...

Yes, always, both.

There's almost certainly a non-trivial sales team spend here. Redis Enterprise isn't a decision that organizations take lightly, and databases aren't cheap. Mongo is public on a similar model, so there's almost certainly enough room to grow with their current offerings (licenses and hosting).

Based on 238 employees, they're probably at $25m+ in revenue. Many companies start to think about a "second act" at this point, but few of them actually pull it off. So we'll probably continue to see improvement around the core product and a slew of new integrations, but I'd be surprised if they came up with a totally standalone new product that's worth $X0,000,000 / year in short order. There's too much to do with Redis itself and the hosting platform to devote so much effort to a brand new effort.

Two founders are better than one when one of the key problems you will face is hiring. One founder hasn't proven they can recruit. Two founders have proved they can convince at least one other idiot to join them.

This is important for VC businesses, where hiring quickly is the only way to grow. But it's not important for smaller businesses, where cash management matters more.

I get the disdain for VCs -- it's a specific model with a specific set of failure modes. So that's fair.

What I don't understand is this dislike for investing ahead of growth or success. Why is the expectation that everything can be done bootstrapped or constantly profitable?

Companies take investment. If you're building a product that will be valuable for a long time, there will always be a period at the beginning where the entity requires somebody to put their investment into it. If the idea is small enough that one or two rich dudes with Google money can do forgo their salaries, that's great. But even a team of five for 18 months is a significant investment, and somebody needs to pony up. Should startups only consist of rich people who can afford to roll the dice?

Instead of fully rejecting the model, I believe that companies should take VC money with a finite plan towards profitability. If you take $2mil in seed money and hire a team of 8, get to $2m / year in revenue. If you want to take another bite at the apple, there will be VCs who fund you at that point. If not, you're not dead.

Real progress takes real investment. Ignoring that fact ignores a wild world of interesting, viable companies.

> Build you own Mint

> Fancy interface is out of scope for this demo.

OK.

They're basically the Google Photos team, now. Have you seen the ads about face recognition and auto-sharing? They've been working on the problem of photo sharing ever since they figured out that people didn't want to share contact info with Bump, they wanted to share photos.

This is true, but one of the important inputs to socioeconomic asymmetry is race and gender.

It's hard for your parents to escape poverty if the police profile and arrest them. Or if your mom could have been promoted faster than your dad, but wasn't because of a bad company culture.

Config blast radius, hardware sizing, networking partitions, disaster recovery, dev/prod separation -- lots of good reasons to have multiple clusters!

As a gut check, most of these reasons apply to AWS AZs as well. If your Kubernetes strategy calls for more than one per region per AWS account, it means that you, organizationally, don't trust containers as much as you trust VMs on AWS. And right now, you're probably right to do so.

This is, like all good HN articles, technically correct and practically incorrect.

It is correct that containers leak, and people know this. Multi-cluster strategies are real, and they shouldn't be. It should be OK to have one big cluster[1]. Until Kubernetes fixes this, there will be some friction to adopt it, based on real use cases like untrusted code and noisy neighbors.

It is incorrect because users (e.g. non-infrastructure engineers) don't know or care about the precise definition of containers and VMs are. The point of "containers" is that I can define something that acts like an operating system from the ground up, and it builds quickly and runs quickly in production.

Kubernetes doesn't win by forcing users to think about VMs. Kubernetes wins by adopting a VM standard that can be built by Dockerfiles. Infra engineers will love it.

But besides them? Nobody will care, because Docker for Mac will look the same.

[1] Maybe 1 cluster per region? There's a whole fascinating topic that starts with the question "when building a PaaS, do you expose region placement to devs?" The answer implies a ton of stuff about what exactly it's reasonable to expect from a PaaS and how much infrastructure your average dev has to know.

Did you read the linked papers? They go into a lot of detail about how they did it.

YouTube Vimeo is more like 1% / 99%. By almost anybody's definition, that's winner take all.

Vimeo aims for $100mil this year: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iac-interactive-vimeo/iac...

YouTube Could be a $15 billion business this year: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/18/youtube-could-be-a...

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." - Linus Torvalds

A rude leader drives people away from the organization. It is directly counterproductive.