bcx

Companies like these do exist. I think if you looks for smaller companies, bootstrapped companies, and/or companies that are run by their founders who managed to retain control and valued culture you'll find folks who are more values driven.

At some level though, you need management to be focused enough on revenue to keep the lights on, and make sure you are getting raises and career progression. (I do think like many posters have mentioned, there are teams within bigger companies that are values driven with good management that shields ICs from the bigger org challenges -- until they don't)

The incentives do change when outside money is involved.

A few ideas:

- Companies that serve values driven industries (gov, nonprofits, medical)

- B-corps

- Bootstrapped Companies

- Higher Education / Research Labs

Some examples:

- https://www.olark.com/values (company I founded - which fits your target, but isn't currently hiring)

- https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp/

- https://smallgiants.org/

- https://www.usworker.coop/directory/

My guess is smaller companies in general will have less politics and more autonomy.

If I were in your shoes I'd take a look at:

- https://buffer.com/journey (founder retained enough control to drive culture)

- https://automattic.com/work-with-us/ (I've always admired wordpress and the team behind it, they've been customers multiple times and they've been a joy to work with)

- https://careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/client_mit/externa... (I am a former academic, the pay isn't great, but lots of cool problems to work on, search for "media lab", teams are small enough politics is likely less of an issue)

fun problem to solve, I am curious where you'll land.

Yes AND!

It's pretty amazing what you can accomplish with a philosophy of progress over perfection, the right framing, and some specific goals.

I'd challenge you all to set some public goals for accessibility (even if they are small) (for ideas: you could see what we've been doing, see: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/olarks-accessibility-journey-... , which links out to the goals and results for the past 3 years)

and then check back on them in a year. NOTE: if you are inside a bigger org, odds are you won't be able to post it super publicly, but at least write them down somewhere and come back to them to check progress, and set goals for the next period.

I'd challenge you to expand your understanding of disability and ability.

Small and Medium businesses "waste time" on all sorts of things, one anecdote that might help your libertarian leanings is that majority of disabilities are age related, and the majority of the wealth is controlled by older folks who are far more likely to just not spend money at said small/medium business without providing any feedback to said inaccessible business.

In general, I might look at the "curb cut effect". Curb cuts are those things you see on sidewalks that let folks roll bikes, carts, strollers, walkers, and even wheel chairs when cross streets. You might take for granted that the build environment for folks is far more accessible than it was in the 80s pre ADA.

My philosophy is well designed systems fully embrace the constraints and benefit everyone.

I was curious too. Joe and Jennison started GAAD 12 years ago from a discussion on a forum/blog post (https://accessibility.day/about/). So I suppose if you want to put 10 years into trying to get something mainstream, you too could start a day for something that folks weren't paying enough attention too ;).

That said, I'd say Global Accessibility Awareness Day is mainstream enough at this point to be called out, given that it's being mentioned at the bottom of Apple's press releases for accessibility (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/apple-previews-live-s...)

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla.

The browser wars are basically over, and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet.

With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge.

Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mozilla 3.9% - Safari

I recommend taking a look at https://teachaccess.org/ as a starting point. They are non profit focused on bridging the gap between accessibility and education.

I think they are mostly focused on college level exercises, but if your kids are doing coding I'd imagine their tutorials would be something to take a look at: https://teachaccess.org/initiatives/tutorial/

As a complete aside for anyone reading this post, I think of improving accessibility as the "curb-cut effect", curb cuts (those ramps on sidewalks while cross streets) were created to improve urban access for those in wheel chairs, but also make it easier to use strollers, bikes, carts, and really for everyone walking in a built environment. When we as technologists make design decisions to make things more accessible I believe we end up with better products for everyone.

We (Olark YC S09) are in the process of building out a fully accessible platform for realtime communication (live chat, bots/automations) for both agents and visitors, and regularly work with folks to help our team test and improve our work -- it's still early days Progress Not Perfection :).

I am definitely interesting in talking, you can apply as a tester here: https://www.olark.com/ada-accessible-live-chat

And you can ping me personally on Linkedin if you want to chat more. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencongleton)

We work with both individuals often as contractors, and agencies as well.

You might want to talk to the folks at lighthouse SF, they do consulting for a lot of tech companies, and have a matching program, I am actually going to be at their offices Thursday, so I can follow up with best way to get in touch, but I'd assume the emails on the below link will get you what you need. https://lighthouse-sf.org/programs/access-technology/

And we've also worked with Fable who manages engagements like what you are looking for: https://makeitfable.com/community/

I think there is some nuance here that is helpful to unpack.

We'd almost all agree that:

1. Things that get in the way of solving customer needs are annoying. Most modals, popups, proactive notification that don't happen at the right time. This could include chat, email capture, cookie banners, chat bots, popovers.

2. For almost every business there are some sets of customer needs that require a conversation with a human. This could be building trust, conveying nuance of someone's situation, dealing with an exceptional case, helping someone make an ambiguous decision, etc..

3. Doing customer communication well requires investment and commitment from the business. (In almost all businesses you are serving customers at scale, where 1 representative at the company is serving anywhere to 100s to 1000s of customers, this ratio is important and varies based on LTV / productivity support etc)

I have some experience here. I cofounded Olark live chat (https://olark.com) in 2007. We've seen customers see significant boosts in building trust as demonstrated by chats leading to repeat shoppers and increased retention (this holds across SaaS and e-commerce) when support is done well. This trust also translates to front of the funnel lead growth and word-of-mouth as well (linking to case studies seems like too much for HN).

Where customers suffer is when chat is seen as a cost savings device at companies not committed to service, or when marketing thinks you can just spam the heck out of customers and see results -- notably there are results -- but they tradeoff customer goodwill -- these are often the same folks who love popups - and interstitials -- or kind of face customer service with qualifying bots.

Love seeing this conversation on HN btw.

I thought by this point PayPal would be "a bank", however (https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/start-....)

Clearly states

"PayPal is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Synchrony Bank, Member FDIC. PayPal Balance account is required to use PayPal Savings."

So maybe part of this legislation is some sort of attempt to have these payment processor "pseudo banks" have to be more like real banks and deal with banking regulation.

What I think is surprising about this legislation is apparently Zelle is not required to do the same reporting threshold. https://www.zellepay.com/faq/does-zelle-report-how-much-mone...

So IMO, this set up is almost entirely an anti-fintech play by big banks.

It does seem like there is a way to flag personal verses business transactions as in the FAQ, https://www.irs.gov/payments/form-1099-k-frequently-asked-qu... -- gifts and splitting meals should not be classified as 1099-k income.

I imagine the net impact is more folks will want to get paid via Zelle, to avoid the hassle.

Academically, It would be interesting to know who decided Zelle didn't need to be reported, while Venmo/Paypal did need to start reporting everything.

I spent 3 years in a PhD program, like many of the posters it was one of the most fun experience of my life. I ended up dropping out to do Ycombinator, but it was an incredibly hard decision.

Like many things in life not all PhDs are created equal. In my program I was able to take classes across the University that helped broaden my narrow business / computer science undergraduate experience. I was paid somewhere between 20-30K/year, but was able to take graduate business, econ, architecture, anthropology, and computer science classes. I was able to publish papers and travel internationally. My peers were way smarter than me, and went on to find industry and academic jobs, a few dropped out like me and ended up building very successful careers.

In general my advice would be, find a program that suits your interest. The benefits of 3 years of largely self-directed learning is not for everyone, but can be an incredible way to grow. Also, your advisor will make or break your experience, I worked for an amazing guy, and still stay in touch, even after dropping out.

Does it only fall one time to 6% in 6 months or will it track against inflation over time?

(i.e. short-term return > long term return?)

I'd be curious to understand the interest rate the US government is paying on the debt verses some other highly indebted countries.

I poked around on google, and it looks like China has around 50% Debt to GDP ratio , Japan had something like 250%, and Russia's was around 20%. I have no idea what I should conclude from this -- other than I don't think it's possible for someone to foreclose on the US for not paying it's debt --- and that if we had massive inflation, and Debt is not inflation adjusted you could drastically reduce the debt -- but you'd have to increase the interest rate on new debt you were issuing.

Thanks for the nostalgia :)

I cut my teeth in a very similar way and ended up with the same conclusion webalizer was far more maintainable than AWSTATS. Though the UI on AWstats was definitely pretty nice. At some point I actually had a perl CGI script that I was selling that did basic website analysis (can't find any references to it on the internet quickly).

I still use webalizer on a small site I self-host for my dad.

I agree. This is poignant indeed.

In general over time communication has become far lower cost and more ephemeral. The richness of the faxes back and forth, or handwritten letters from even earlier eras - in contrast with your average SMS message is interesting to think about.

Faxes and paper letter existed on paper. How many of us expect to be able to find emails or SMSes from 40-50 years ago?

If we could only write one SMS/txt to a person a day, and they responded in 24 hours -- how would that shape our conversations?

Does any one expect to be able to get anything out of FB 30 years from now :) ?

So much to think about.

Personally, I don't see what the hubbub is about. A 409a is a standard instrument used to price options, a standard approach to a 409A valuation is the base the value of a company on its comparables, including public comparables.

If I were conducting this valuation, I haven't done this myself, but I most definitely read our 409A valuations closely. I'd imagine that the outside firm hired to conduct the analysis on Fintech would use data like:

BLOCK (down 49% in last 6 months)

PAYPAL (down 60% in last 6 months)

COINBASE (down 75% in last 6 months)

INTUIT (down 30% in last 6 months)

VISA (down 5% in last 6 months)

SHOPIFY (down 70% in last 6 months)

Everyone at these fintechs, has seen the valuation of their company drop significantly (with the exceptions of VISA in the last 6 months. It's possible that stripe's performance is closer to VISA than to SHOPIFY, but only dropping 30% is likely pretty generous given the broader market.

Anyone with options at any of these public companies is dealing with the same challenges.

Or even better they could continue to vertically integrate their stack and provide affordable housing to warehouse employees.

I think it's interesting to summarize this thread as:

- Government can't offer competitive pay due to politics.

- Government contracts big projects to 3rd parties who pay competitively, but lack the transparency that government is required to have.

In a way it would seem to be that government contractor organizations are acting as an abstraction, and are in essence a way of government allocating funds without needing to provide the transparency and accountability of doing things in house.

In essence, if you follow this line --> contractors are basically government. (i.e. Working for SpaceX is basically working for government without the page/scale political challenges of getting stuff done, SpaceX is more or less funded by Gov)

Perhaps things are working how they should.

I want to hear the story about how they went from 4M in sales in 1998 to 170M in 2021. It might help more entrepreneurs choose to follow a similar direction in building long lasting, opinionated, mission driven companies, and pushing through hard times, rather than taking the quick life changing payouts to see their businesses disappear as they become folded into bigger entities.

Both the comments on this thread would fit well on https://www.shlinkedin.com/, if you haven't seen it, it is basically the sarcastic version of linkedin that you all live in.

Personally, Linkedin has been incredible for staying in touch with a large range of business contacts over the last 10+ years. It's provided me far more value than any other social network -- but the feed is mostly a joke :).

With all the sensationalized headlines around flight cancellations I've been looking for actual data on the number of flights cancelled, and really appreciated the graphs and analysis.

Anyone who can become the youngest head of government (his first elected position was when he was 31) is impressive. I am not sure how chancellors in Austria are elected, but Austria has 72.45% voter turnout, and I'd imagine anyone who can get elected is fantastically well connected, motivated, and good at coalition building.

Seems like a win for Thiel, assuming Kurz remains motivated and driven.

My only question would be is Kurz a good team player, and what specifically was corrupt that led to his downfall? Is this behavior considered corrupt as a capital manager?

I once TA-ed for the guy who runs https://www.sakailms.org/, I know his vision is to make a good opensource LMS, so you might be able to tell him what you are finding lacking in other projects.

Dr Chuck is one of the top professors on Coursera, and I understand he's mostly using the money he makes on coursera to fund Sakai as a passion project.

Impressive achievement. But for fun, as a skeptic, let's assume he outsourced some of the work, and then serves as an editor. How would we know the difference between this, and him answering the questions himself?

Would we care?

Keep posting about this stuff. I can tell you this is a feature our customers often ask for, but we (https://Olark.com) refuse to implement, we do lose business over this.

I'd like to believe the karma for not letting any of our customers be creepy (and/or violate their customers' privacy), pays for the lost business many times over.

It seems like this is more of a critique on the tax-code than anything else. By not realizing any gains, and taking a small salary it seems like an exception to the tax code wasn't meant to handle. I think we can all agree that the tax code if full of cruft, and could use some refactoring.

Additionally, I would wager any amount of money that Bezos outsources his taxes to professionals. So his name is only used for click bait.

I also am confident Bezos paid sales tax, property tax, and other taxes during this period.

So if we as a society are not happy with our federal income tax code, we should revise it. (Wouldn't it be amazing if it worked more like an opensource project, where we could git blame and do some root cause analysis)

As someone who spent time in Ann Arbor in the mid 2000s I think most of the monkeys were very much in the infosec realm and were good ppl. I would be curious to know how it all started if @dugsong is around maybe someone can ping him to learn more :)

If I had to guess monkey.org was started around 1996, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a BBS before it moved online ;)

I remember /dev/payments back in Summer of 2009 when were were in YC with the Collisons I am curious if any of the APIs are actually 11 years old ;)

(that said, I am curious what happened in S09, we wanted /dev/payments badly, but nothing really happened as far as we could tell, and Stripe went through a future YC batch again)

Does anyone still use podcatchers? I've been using stitcher for podcasts for a super long time, and found podcatchers pretty annoying throughout time. The only use case I could conceive is storing a podcast to listen on my apple watch.

Though I am hardly a "pro" podcast listener. I guess my question is, are podcatchers already dead? And if not, who uses them?

It's not surprising intercom has raised their prices so much given intercom has raised close to 300M, they really need to push their pricing up into ACVs where they can pay for the sales organization they've been building, and grow top line revenue.

I expect drift to adopt a similar pricing approach (raised 100M) to justify their valuation and push their ACVs up.

I appreciate the shoutout for http://www.olark.com (raised 85k total including YC) and noticed a few comments about the visitor UI being a bit dated -- I agree with the sentiment, or did, but we recently updated the visitor UI and it's currently live on Olark.com and will be rolled out to all customers by January. Probably time to update that review ;)

Live chat software was instrumental in helping me compete when launching my first hosting company, and a must have for startups, glad we are still hitting that niche well :) --- also have a bunch of really exciting things in the pipeline, I'll drop them on a Show HN when they are ready.