ToJans

My best guess is that the energy providers speculated on the energy trading market and lost, creating a huge gap. There's almost no risk for them, because when they win, they make a lot of profit, and when they lose they can just tell consumers there is a shortage in energy.

Ofc. this market is highly regulated, but if I understood correctly there's a lot of room in between the whitespace for interpretations.

(Note : Highly simplified explanation, in reality this will be implemented via leverage and derivatives, but I've consulted for an energy trading division a couple of decades ago.)

Interesting story. I did something similar for a bespoke monitoring/helpdesk/knowledge base for a big client in energy trading. However it took me an afternoon and I did get permission: I just installed Oracle text on the existing database and replaced the old search by tags with the Oracle text instance.

Typically in these large orgs, writing an app is only one of the first steps; they also need to be maintained, updated, monitored which might require extra budget, which typically nobody wants to pay for because "everything works".

If you ever end up in a similar situation, you could consider the environment as a part of the challenge before you figure out a solution.

Nevertheless, the 1 hour meeting is a hilarious story, although I personally would avoid burning bridges on the way out: it might hit you in the face in another context when you least expect it....

Might I suggest you to take a look at "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius?

It might be a long shot, not maybe you can find some peace in it...

Update: ...and if stoicism isn't your thing, maybe epicurism is...

Interesting line of thought; another POV that emerged during a late-night discussion a while ago, was to look at the percentage of people that work in public service in each country.

We assumed that, the closer the percentage was to the median, the more risk-averse people would be (assuming the median represents some optimal size for the government).

We never validated the idea though; I'm quite curious to see how that would hold up after verification.

While this is somewhat true, most of the European founders I know work around this by hiring freelance senior contractors and employing heavily subsidized juniors.

Ok; point taken. Would you tend to agree that the majority is or expects you to be ashamed about it, or is that not what you experience?

We're probably about the same age, so let me ask you this: have you ever heard or seen a European person (who failed a business he or she depended on) carrying his or her failure like a badge of honor?

In my experience with job interviews (from both sides of the table) people tend to be ashamed, or they assume you should be ashamed about it.

As for me personally, I like sharing both my failures and my successes, and receive a lot of positive feedback about this. But when I ask them to do the same, I usually get a "I wouldn't want to ruin my reputation.".

YMMV.

In my experience (Belgian guy that dabbled a bit with EU VCs for my SaaS) Europe is very risk-adverse, and you either have to give up ridiculous amounts of equity for a little amount (i.e. 50k€ for a 25% to +50% stake) when not established yet, or have a recurring revenue of at least 50k€/month to get reasonable propositions.

Also, European culture is slightly different: most people consider a startup failure as something bad that you drag along for the rest of your career.

I've talked to some European VCs, and while they have big ambitions and are starting to gain momentum, it might take a while before the shift in the European mentality happens, and we end up with a thriving ecosystem. Some hubs (Switzerland and Berlin for example) seem to be doing quite good.

I also assume a big difference with the US is the fragmented market: different languages, cultural differences, legislative constraints, market demands, ... For example, in my experience high touch B2B sales are highly impacted by the language gap, in fact some countries (France, Spain, Italy, ...) are notoriously against working with people who don't speak their mother tongue. (On the bright side most of us Belgians do speak at least 3 languages, so it is still somewhat doable.)

As an alternative to VCs in Europe, you could look at some of the national and European subsidized tracks, although they tend to be mostly coupled to the trend-of-the-decade (sustainability is hot right now), and also require quite some effort to enter with no guarantees of success. (Disclaimer: it's on my to-do list, so no real experience with this.)

I would presume the combination of all of these factors results in people looking on other continents for better opportunities.

(I personally think Africa might offer huge opportunities in the coming decades, but that's for another time.)

FYI I've brainstormed on an innovation use case once that would allow citizens to use an app to suggest things like planting trees everywhere using AR etc. When discussing with academics, I was flabbergasted to find out that in street canyons, trees can have a negative effect because they reduce air flow. So, apparently it's not as simple as "just plant some trees"...

Exactly my thought: couldn't find their exact turnover, but I assume it's less then 10M? How does this valuation work exactly? Could anyone elaborate?

I still play QuakeLive on a regular basis; the problem is mostly fixed by playing on servers with a stable community.

AFAIK no players are actively cheating in that community, although some prefer to play using timenudge, which could be considered an "allowed cheat". Fortunately it's quite easy to spot those laggards, and it's up to yourself to decide whether you want to opt for fair play or not... (Also, it feels quote good to beat them even though they have an advantage over you.)

Also, it's rare to have skilled players that cheat, so most cheaters are easily detected.

And to add to unfair advantages: I have very good ping, and also noticed I moved up on ranking after switching from a slow monitor and Bluetooth mouse to a gaming monitor and - mouse. While this is not considered a cheat, it might give you an unfair advantage over the players who use less then average hardware.

I assume it's part of human nature to figure out ways to get an edge over others, and the difference between legal and illegal is mostly about subjective standards. A good example would be doping: as long as it's not on the doping list, it's considered fair play; I recall a trend of asthma along professional road cyclists a couple of years ago. Once the needed medication was on the doping list, the trend reversed immediately.

In my experience these additional "optimizations" are unavoidable.

... and/or Stockholm syndrome?

Addendum/update:

Also, this context seems to share a lot of similarities with the rise and fall of the now abandoned ghost towns that emerged during gold mining, or am I the only one making this association?

My experience with offering usage based pricing was not positive, mostly because we didn't impose a time limit on the consumption of the prepaid credits, which resulted in a a huge cash flow problem. We've now switched to a more standard tiered subscription model with some optional packages, where each tier also imposes limits on the usage, and this works way better. (Of course, n=1, so YMMV)

I wanted to reply, but I did not want to disclose everything on HN, so I've sent you an email.

Exactly, in my experience - Europe - a VC is only interested in scale-ups...

I am currently negotiating a buy-in for my SaaS, so for validation purposes I contacted a few VCs in our domain, and received a few replies stating they required at least 500k to 1 million ARR.

It would be my assumption that - in Europe - you don't really need VC money if you're making this amount of ARR, unless your margin is so low, or you are growing so fast that there is a huge risk involved.

To me getting VC money at 500k/1 million ARR sounds like a very expensive loan where the VC has limited risk (the investment) and unlimited upside. If I would be at that amount of ARR and in the need for some credit, I'd rather go to the bank and pay for a credit line for a couple of million that we can use when/if we need it, especially at the current cheap interest rates...

Update - addendum: Just to clarify: I am a big fan of external capital if it also includes proper engagement, preferably an org that has a huge network and/or proper domain knowledge.

I've been on both sides, both as a "servant leader" and as a "servant".

Context matters. The only time I micro-managed a team myself, was when someone at the top was instigating a blame culture. I did explain all the goals in detail to the people, and explained why it mattered that we delivered exactly according to the specs, even though it wasn't really functional. Sales always blamed IT for failing to deliver according to specs, while the sales intake was actually fubarred, resulting in way too low quotes and everyone blaming IT, resulting in a negative downfall.

I have been micro-managed about 3 years ago for about 3 months, but this was when I was consulting in a highly political organisation with very complex regulation (EU airspace), so it was part of my initial training. Once trust was there I spent most of my time engaging with all the counterparts according to the explicit and implicit protocol and rules ("continuous improvement manager" for the curious, but what's in a name...)

What I have done quite a few times, is not micro-managing, but micro-coaching: sitting next to a person every waking hour available for help, assistance and spotting potential frustrations. This is usually part of a bigger, risky change trajectory where I decide to start with the one person "impossible to convert"; in a lot of cases these people actually became some of the ambassadors of the whole project, and this is a big win for such projects...

Edit: some more details regarding the "being micro-managed" part.

Just a small addendum: these negotiations are mostly about buying a percentage of our shares as a commitment for a serious engagement, mostly intertwined with something acqui-hired-ish.

To sell all of it, they'd have to "make an offer we can't refuse" ;)

We are currently talking with a few potential buyers for our SaaS, and had talks in the past as well... Here's my lessons learned:

One didn't proceed at the very last step, without any explanation or feedback, so I have become very careful when engaging into these kinds of conversations.

All of our serious negotiations are small and medium sized organizations, both customers and competitors where we can extend their offering or have an important tool that generates a lot of their leads, so we usually don't reply to exotic candidates.

We had a few chats with large organisations, but this was mostly a bullying kind of relation, so we did not proceed... I think this is a bit like a poker game: to maximize your odds of winning you need to play in your own league...

The advantage is that, in this "little league”, discussions tend to take anywhere from 3 to 5 meetings and some emails, nothing more; that's the advantage of talking with the company owners directly and not with a big-corp M & A cell...

IME you can be blunt and open, and I strongly suggest to avoid a technical due diligence until the latest phase.

No need to exaggerate numbers, just be open and explain your valuation model; this might be anything, but it needs to buy them good ROI, time, a competitive advantage or a decrease in risk. IME it works the best if they have the capacity to scale up your product, so it's a win-win.

I haven't considered a 10% deposit, but I think this might be a bit too aggressive for European standards in the early talks. However, I think it is a good idea to go through with it once you have an LOI.

It is a challenging process that's not over until the fat lady sings, so try to manage your expectations and be prepared to walk away if it is not a win-win. If you fail to see what their motivating factors are in the deal, just walk away...

I've been involved in the European DDD community from the start, sparked the initial IDDD tour with Vaughn Vernon, and am still highly involved, so you could say I know a thing or two about DDD, and I consider the patterns most people think about when being introduced to DDD a bit similar to the inheritance part of Object orientation: it's pars pro toto and you are probably missing out on the valuable part of DDD:

First: DDD will not magically fix all your problems; however, it does ask the right questions: what is your common language, how does your code align with your organisation, what are the boundaries and the relationship between boundaries, what is your core domain and where might it make more sense to buy something existing etc... So while it is not the silver bullet, it might help you to pinpoint some typical issues with your current code base.

Second, people new to DDD tend to focus on tactical patterns and things like CQRS etc, which might be interesting but it's usually way less important than the strategic part of DDD.

Third, it also attempts to define nomenclature for developers, f.e. about responsibilities and granularities: aggregate roots, bounded contexts, commands, events etc...

Like every other methodology there is some cargo culting going on, and that is also the reason I decided to spend a few years outside the echo chamber. However, now that I'm back it's great to see how the methodology is maturing and the community trends to attract the right kind of people.

TL;DR: DDD can be useful, but don't blindly start applying tactical DDD patterns everywhere without understanding the bigger picture; this will only work against you.

Edit: some line breaks

IME you do not need to read everything thoroughly to get value out of it.

I usually go through several spurs in a year where I go through a series of books in a couple of days... I might not recall everything that's being said, but I get the main message, and assume a lot of information is stored subconsciously.

Simply knowing that there's more details available if/when I need it is usually enough for me...

The technique to learn to speed-read is easy, but it takes a lot of practice. I posted a reply explaining it; no idea why it got downvoted TBH.

Anyway, I'd strongly suggest you to start practicing; it tends to be a very valuable skill to have.

I learned this using a simple technique: Start using your finger to track where your eyes are. Move your finger a little bit faster than you read. Resist the urge to go back if you think you missed some things, just assume things will clear up later on, or if they do not, they were not very important to begin with anyway...

After a while, you can stop tracking line by line, but just scan a page by moving your finger diagonally across a text. After doing this for a while, you can skip using your finger all together, and glance over texts to get the main idea.

I have been doing this for over 2 decades, and can glimpse at contracts for peculiarities by glazing over a page, or go through books taking only a few seconds per page if I'm in 'scanning' mode.

It's a nice party trick as well ;).

(Note that reading contracts for the first time like this are good for a first review and general flow, but you miss a lot of details, so you need to do a proper review later on.)

I tend to take a little longer when I'm actually reading a text thoroughly, although I prefer to read texts really fast and re-read them after a while when they are interesting or need more attention.

IME not all texts are readable like that; some text is very information-dense and it gets really hard to keep track of the context if you try to speed-read it.

On a side note, glancing over code/search results might have contributed bigtime to this skill as well.

The biggest "disadvantage" is that - when on holiday - I need a gazillion books, because it takes me at most 2 or 3 days to get through a single book...

I recall experimenting with similar approaches about 2 decades ago; depending on your gestures you can actually simplify a lot:

- normalize the draw height/width

- use polar coordinates before normalizing

- normalize the length of the drawn path

- DAG to recognize shapes faster, using partial paths

- only taking into account corners with angles over a certain treshold

- ...

The possibilities are endless, and this is a good exercise to explain that slight alterations on your problem space can have a huge impact on your solution space.

[update - formatting]

Over the last 2 decades I have switched from development to business owner/management/marketing/sales and back 3 times.

Right now, I am doing a rewrite of my online 3d engine for consumer products, after being active for 3 years as an enterprise consultant for mid and large sized organizations, mostly initiating first roadmaps and identifying how to onboard new clients, reorganizing my client's product and solution portfolios, figuring out/maturing pre-sales tracks etc...

The reason I switch from development to other tracks and back, is that after a few years I feel like I am stuck in an echo chamber, where I tend to overestimate the value of the thing I am doing, and underestimate the importance of what others do.

The biggest disadvantage is that I could have probably retired from a financial POV about a decade ago if I had stayed on the same track, while this might now take another decade, but on the other hand, for me the chase matters more than the catch.

The biggest advantage is that - due to my broad experience - my kind of profile is extremely unique, and I can find a well-paid freelance gig in about a week without to much effort if I need some cash to bridge one of my many mini-sabbaticals.

This might not be for everyone, but if you like to spend time out of your comfort zone, I would strongly advise anyone who tries to understand the bigger picture to switch every n years; it is super valuable to understand the drivers from both sides and makes the job so much more interesting.

Edit: typo

I don't get it... Isn't this stating the obvious? Let's assume you have a dice, if you roll a six, you get 5 times your bet. If you win on a first or second try, it makes sense to stop, from an expected value(EV) point-of-view. But in most of these systems you cannot stop betting forever... So you would start again when things get interesting, which might be the next roll if it is truly random, right? So the only thing they say is to temporarily pause when you are above EV. But when is the best time to start again?

**** I stand corrected and marked that section from the blog post as BS; please accept my apologies. ****

Update: looks like my assumptions might be completely wrong... Please ignore my initial post, and I will check if/when I can provide an update to the blog post, potentially discarding the sqrt PI idea.

Thank you for your valuable feedback; it will take some time to process, and I will adjust the blog post as my insights grow (potentially discarding the whole idea, but for me it's a learning process.)

Addendum: this is what I was referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_integral

Could you elaborate? Assume we convert all our happy path estimates to minutes. What I'm saying is that each "estimated minute" is more likely to have a gaussian distribution than a uniform standard distribution,because normal distribution is more likely to occur in nature.

while I can understand that this is a controversial assumption, I'm not the first one to make it. Referring to numerology seems a bit odd?

I'm really looking for a proper way here, I'm quite a rational person, so numerology is not really my cup of tea TBH.

My apologies, I'm by no means well versed in math, so I might use the wrong terminology.

Here is a good example video of what I am alluding to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CgOthUUdw4

Maybe I should refine my blog post or include the video in the explanation?