andygcook

This is a great story and I hope the film is able to be developed with quality photos. I would love to watch a documentary of this fellow talking about his photos and the history of the Boston music scene. He must have a treasure trove of rock and roll memories in his head.

For anyone curious, this is the general area PG screenshot for the map: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3815449,-71.1244449,16z

This is about a ten minute walk from Harvard Square near an area known as the Radcliffe Quandrangle.

That was a fun read. Thanks for sharing.

Our app is currently down as well and we host on Heroku. We received a down alert from our monitoring service at 11:32AM EST.

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29996432

The simplest and most effective hack I’ve found to curb my Twitter usage is to just log out every time I’m done browsing and set a time once I log in on how long I want to spend scrolling. If I’m logged out, it prompts me with the login screen and I have to really decide if I want to spend time on social media at that moment.

One of the good things about forming a legal entity is that it forces the conversation of how wealth will be distributed up front. One of the problems when forming an entity is that you don’t actually know how valuable someone’s contributions will be until you start working together. One founder providing more value than another happens all the time in startups and is why vesting exists.

This squad seems to operate like a DAO, but without any mechanism to reward ownership via a token. The author did mention being a pre-DAO collective, so maybe they’ll form an official DAO to determine stake.

If the goal is to just make stuff for fun and to learn, then perhaps it doesn’t matter. But if one of the projects becomes valuable, I could see it becoming a problem once money is involved to determine who owns what.

I don't know your specific situation (location, financials, etc) so I can't share specific advice, but will share what we experienced with my grandparents.

My grandparents lived to be 94 + 95. One of the biggest improvements for them and us was hiring in-home help aid as they aged. Someone to do laundry, cook a good meal, clean up a bit, etc. It took a lot of the time commitment off my parents to constantly be making sure they were ok. Not to mention it gave my grandparents some much needed social interaction outside of our core family.

Another important factor was attempting to get their financials in order before they passed away and became incapacitated. After some review, we found some... shady accounting from a family member who was managing their affairs without much oversight. I'm not sure who is handling your parent's finances or if you have other family members, but once money is involved, people can get weird about inheritance. I've experienced and heard multiple horror stories about families breaking apart because of mismanaged finances.

I'd also recommend keeping your parents moving, and trying to keep their brains engaged. Bodily health is a vicious cycle once you lose muscle mass. Falls are also a huge issue for elderly people. YMMV, but installing smart speakers in each room of their house that they can use their voice to call for help in an emergency after a fall might be smart. We tried to get a life alert bracelet for my grandmother, but she always took it off. You'd have to train them to use it, but it sounds like your parents are tech savvy enough to get it. My grandparents missed the window for learning how to use the internet, so Alexa was tough. My brother actually took this funny video which got featured on a few meme sites of my grandparents trying to use Alexa: https://www.rightthisminute.com/video/rtmtv-grandpa-doesnt-g...

Finally, I'm going to plug my older brother's service, nanagram.co. It allows you to sms photos to a phone number that get printed and shipped to your loved ones in the mail each month. He built it to get photos to my grandparents without the internet. It won't fix the core problems you're describing, but can be a convenient way to give older people something nostalgic to look forward to each month, especially if it's pictures of their grandkids in the mail that they haven't seen on a photo stream.

Full disclosure re: Nanagram - I helped get the product off the ground, but am not involved anymore. Just a proud younger brother sharing a relevant service.

[Update] Another thing you should do is record their stories sooner rather than later. Using old photos as a story prompt is a good way to get the synapses firing on old memories. Once they pass away, all that history in their heads is gone, but it's easy to document some of it with video nowadays. If I'm missing my grandparents, watching old video of them and hearing their voice also really cheers me up.

[Edit - grammar/typos]

> 2. People mostly just want to work when and where they want with clear objectives and a chance to earn a good chunk of what their labor produces. I would argue for many that having a decent equity stake in a startup that is worldwide remote solves for this

Do you run into a lot of overhead managing all the different laws in each country for full-time employment and equity compensation?

It’d be interesting to see paintings of scenes from books that haven’t been made into movies, then diffing her mind’s eye from my own based on the description.

E.g. What did Gollum to look like to her based on the description from the book?

But I’d imagine it’s hard enough to paint like this, so probably easier to work off an image with input from a different medium than just words.

Apple was founded in 1976, which is a full twenty years before Netflix.

Noah's a fun person to follow for those of you who are interested in indie businesses and are on Twitter[0] He's been sharing his MRR growth and learnings while building Potion for awhile now.

@noahbragg - Given that you're built 100% on top of Notion (or at least I think you are), how are you thinking about platform risk long term? They could cut you off their APIs, end life for some undocumented API you rely on, or just build your features into their own product at any point.

[0]- https://twitter.com/noahwbragg

I was surprised to see this is an internal Google presentation.

FYI the way to advance it on mobile is to click the slides. It took me a few seconds to figure that out.

Here’s a link to the original makers own account of running the site: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit...

As someone who grew up with the advent of the world wide web and got my start coding on Geocities, I very much appreciate the choice to add a scrolling marquee and visit counter towards the bottom of the site.

The investment is being done on a SAFE with a $100M valuation cap, not a $100M valuation with equity grants. That means theoretically Gumroad could never have a qualifying event by selling, going public, or raising a properly priced round by accredited investors. And therefore, investors never get an ROI. Dividends also require actual equity, not promissory notes. I’d imagine even if all investors did convert, paying dividends would be a non-starter given their company size and the number of investors.

Using a SEAL or the Indie.VC V3 terms seems more inline with how they want to run the company because it includes an instrument for investors to get an ROI with a payback clause if you choose never to sell.

I’d imagine there will be almost no pressure to sell because to my knowledge, no past employees or current contractors have equity, nor do they have outside institutional investors that want a return for LPs. I’d be curious to hear what the board structure is for oversight as well around important topics like salary comp, potential acquisitions, etc. There isn’t much stopping the founder or a group of people from pulling out all the profits for themselves or just paying outsized salaries.

Anyways, not dunking on it and just stating how some of the structures work from what I understand. The Gumroad story is an interesting one and I appreciate how they publicly share the experiments about how they’re running too. Will be interesting to follow over the years.

[edit: grammar]

Most standard bank loans won't give money to SaaS companies because they don't have physical assets to back up the loan and the founders won't make personal guarantees. SVBs venture debt is really only available to venture-funded businesses that are likely to raise another round.

There are specialized lenders now though that know how to properly vet and value recurring revenue:

Lighter Capital Clearbanc Capchase Flywheel by HustleFund

And many, many, others.

Twitch received quite a lot of backlash two days ago for using the term womxn. The sentiment was that it isn't inclusive and is instead transphobic, because it separates trans/non-binary women from other women.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56251452

As a viewer, I'd like to see the original datasource linked. It's not clear if this is a milestone that may be outdated or if it's a current MRR number. I'd also like to know if this is self reported vs. verified by the payment gateway (e.g. Stripe via Baremetrics)

The conversion to base thousands for MRR was also confusing to me. For example, ConvertKit's MRR seemed way off at $220K, then I realized it was $2,200K = $2.2M. Might want to convert those so viewers don't have too or at least add some commas. They may be an outlier though on the Open Startups movement with such a large revenue number.

Overall, it's an interesting list. Thanks for putting it together and for sharing.

For anyone missing the sounds of their local coffee shop, checkout Coffitivity: https://coffitivity.com

Not affiliated. Just like to put it on sometimes with a good indie playlist while I'm drinking coffee and doing work.

Right. Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that the book doesn't cover that scandal (which it couldn't have, as you mentioned) and that the Pixar story isn't all roses.

For anyone looking for a deeper dive into how Pixar iterates on their movies and how highly-functioning creative teams can work in general, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull is a really interesting book.

It goes into the history of Pixar and some of the detail of how they work with actual stories from the movies they've made. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book is how they nearly almost lost all the work they did on Toy Story 2 and almost went under.

One caveat is that the book doesn't cover the news about John Lasseter's misconduct, so it's not all roses, of course.

Nice job by the way. Would also be interesting to be able to click on a bar and see a spark line chart over time to show trends.

Thanks for the clarification.

Would love to hear more on the methodology that drives the chart. Is it raw number of mentions of a stock, or does it use sentiment analysis for positive/negative mentions of a stock?

I'm happy for this founder's success and wish them the best. However, there are no "learnings" in this article at all. It's just a promotional piece from Google for this program. It even ends with a CTA to join the program.

Wouldn’t a better solution be for parents just to talk to their kids regularly about safety? An outsourced certification to me just seems like a way for parents to skirt around the hard topics and deflect responsibility.

Agreed with you. When I read the article, the last parts of the quotes below stood out to me that he's basically acting as a stand-in for a licensed therapist:

"At times he will participate in a gaming session to make up numbers, turn up to send off people who are moving away, accompany those filing for divorce, or listen to health care workers who have become mentally unwell due to their exhausting work."

Also, "She asked him to stay beside her when meeting a man for the first time, and also had him listen to her talk about her views on love, which she could not divulge to her friends..."

I've seen a therapist off and on over the years and can't recommend it enough. I also found it pretty helpful as a startup founder/CEO for pushing back on my assumptions/biases.

Listening intently without injecting criticism, condemnation, or your own complaints/opinions is extremely difficult. In fact, that skill is one of the major tenants of the timeless classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People. This quote is straight from the book:

“Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”

With isolation becoming a major issue during the pandemic, I'm not surprised people want to hire someone with these skills to just listen to their ideas and stories.

I liked most of the content from AthleanX. Here’s a body weight highlight real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKNIYblazQg

The host is informative without being too bro-y. He also talks about the physiology behind muscle movements which I liked.

The start to my routine was just alternating between a push day, pull day, and legs/cardio day with all body weight. I also worked in core exercise each day because I knew my abs were very weak.

For the first two months I really couldn’t do much beyond body weight. Once my own weight wasn’t making me sore anymore, I layered on the bands.

Sample push day: 3 x 12 tricep push-ups https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrq4_y_5vnA 3 x 12 wide grip push ups https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr6eFNNDQdU 3 x 12 pike push-ups (shoulders) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sposDXWEB0A

Push-ups with a hold for 3 seconds

With bands: Chest press https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3ccNPK-P4U Triceps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCJaO-hCO2M

Pull day - tough to do without bands or a bar: 3 x 12 Chin-ups (fingers facing you) 3 x 12 pull ups (fingers away from you) Then I used a 5 gallon water jug for one arm dumbbell rows

Bands: This is a good video on back exercises for the bands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-9f_tULVVo

Happy to answer more questions. I’m admittedly not a pro, but I’ve definitely got stronger without getting hurt using the above. My main recommendation would be to just start with your own body weight and get into the habit.