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I think somewhere along the line the expectations for what people get when they click on a floating chat box changed.

When we started Olark (http://www.olark.com) in 2009 it was novel to show status before you clicked on the chat button, and to float on the screen.

I both were super important, because like you I hated clicking on a box, button, icon, for instant help and having it say "leave us a message" - and I didn't like having to dig around to find some way to contact a business.

Now-a-days many chat/messaging products occlude presence in favor of collecting as much contact information as possible without letting you know if someone is actually there to answer the question --- or if you will be funneled to a bot.

There are a couple of reasons for this: - the relatively high cost of having a person talk to you. - the allure of getting leads for low cost (i.e. chatbot < $$ than person) - it's far easier technically to ignore presence as boot-time or never even implement it. - the growing lack of user expectation for an immediate response.

I think good human-to-human conversations are essential whether you are starting out or scaling a business. The trick is consumer behavior is changing due to dark patterns.

I have no idea what stage you are at for your idea, but I'd recommend trying to line up customers who love the product based on something you sketch out on a notebook (piece of paper) as a step one.

I'd also validate that the problem you are trying to solve is a really strong pain point for whoever is running into it. Having someone offer to pay you lots of money to solve it as a consultant is a good sign.

You can actually get pretty far with validating an idea before writing a line of code. You can even get potential customers to commit to paying you once it's built (some will renege later)

TLDR: - there is a ton you can do before writing a line of code. In many cases since you are new on this journey, and your background is technical (stats, dabbling in code) the EASIEST part of the journey will be learning to build saas apps and/or finding a technical cofounder.

useful fix :)

This is the same situation that happens on most platform plays.

You can see this in how Salesforce and Shopify are leveraging their platforms to learn what is popular and produce/buy their own products to sell to their customers to capture 100% of the value, rather than 30% of the value of the solution to the customer.

I'd like to see a version of this article and headline that figures out the effort required by the banks to administer a program like this.

Quick read looks like 2.8% off the top, for 0 risk (10/349).

Total businesses receiving loans was 1.6M (https://www.pymnts.com/loans/2020/sba-lenders-approval-ppp-l...)

Average money a bank made per loan was 10,000,000,000/1,600,000 (assuming all banks made an equal distribution of loans)

Or $6250 per loan. Given that all loans ran out about 1 week after the program was started.

I imagine the person effort per loan was pretty variable, but that's some pretty crazy capture by the banks.

(Banking sector employs almost 1.5M people), So even if every employee working at all banks, was allocated to work on one loan each for a week. (HINT THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN) the annualized salary for each of these people would have to be 6250*52, or 325K, which it's not).

I guess my question, is how was the decision made to offer banks such a big kicker for administrating loans with nonzero, but practically 0 risk?

(of note, theoretically banks are going to need to do some serving of the loan over it's lifetime, and deal with this loan forgiveness program, etc.. so if that's the case and it's more like 2-3 weeks of person work per loan, you still get some pretty big numbers, but they feel a bit more sane)

Automatic Pro-rata was a relatively recent addition to YC.

(i.e. when we went through in 2009 it did not exist) It also clearly isn't scaleable without infinite capital.

Plus, if you had complete information, why would you ever want to automatically invest any time a company in your portfolio raised money?

My guess is the only reason they made it automatic, was to minimize the impact of a negative signal. It sounds like they hope the new changes will still minimize that signal.

This post made me wonder what happened to ICQ.

"(2010) AOL has sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's largest Internet company, for US$187.5 million. DST's offer was apparently more attractive than those of Russia's ProfMedia and China's Tencent. ICQ, originally released in 1996 and bought by AOL in 1998 for US$407 million, was one of the world's first major instant messaging systems. Although largely forgotten in English-speaking countries, it remains widely popular in Central Europe, Russia, and Israel. Moscow News has additional coverage of the deal."

(https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/01/1516234/russian-com...)

I shared this article for two reasons.

1) I thought it did a good job of calling out the role of leadership as “direction-giving”, “meaning-making” and “empathy”.

2) It highlights the concept of using a transparent "alert level decision-making framework" as a tool for citizens to make sense of that is happening and why. (see: https://covid19.govt.nz/alert-system/covid-19-alert-system/)

This is particularly relevant to startup founders who are in the process of making decisions for their companies, and may find value in providing a framework to their teams for decision making before making decisions.

Theoretically, and JUST for the sake of argument. Apple could buy Disney, give themselves a perpetual license to all content, and then immediately spin off the parts of Disney they don't want (including any executives, theme parks, etc).

It sounds like the company wants to work with you to work out a good solution.

How have they responded when you told them:

* I'd like to keep roadmap control

* I'd like to be compensated for the work I put in on my own time out side of work. (which is well documented from the commit logs, and the fact I wasn't using an employer owned computer)

* I'd like to keep working on this on my own time outside of work.

If you are worried about long-long term, i.e. the time that exists after you leave the company, with the right software licensing strategy it's likely you could fork the project down the road and retain roadmap control of at least a fork of the main project.

You may want to consider working with your company's lawyers to choose a license (you can re-license open source software -- https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-...) or figure out if the Apache license meets your needs.

Short term it sounds like the outcome is pretty clear, long term seems like you have a lot of options.

thanks.

I think you need to understand the audience for this post.

Dan is trying to demonstrate that there is room for many more large VC style returns by investing in companies that's primary value is being an API.

His argument is that the market is bigger than people think it is today, and we've just seen the first ripple.

This post is to help him establish himself and Accel as someone to go talk to if you are building a API based company, because he's a believer you could be a unicorn.

OR if you are a LP, and want big returns on this 'new' wave come talk to Dan at Accel.

I do agree it's an Ad.

FWIW I like the graphics :) and it's a good argument.

There is some version of this that creates a dystopian future where AI software companies shed liability by outsourcing ethical decisions to armies of contractors.

With AI currently set up as the "next big thing" this article is just another version of the "Natural Language Processing" and human augmented AI, that is being used by almost everyone to "fake it until you don't need humans any more" (see Apple, Amazon, Google listening to our audio as a backup for Siri, Alexa, and Now). A necessary stop gap.

I think there is a big opportunity to look past the stop gap and talk about technologies that are going to 10x the things humans are already good at (creativity, empathy, intuitive problem solving, ...).

I could understand this excuse if instead of 2003 it was written in 1920.

That said, it only contains the word "boy" once in the entire article, and only in the provocative headline.

I think we can all look past the provocative headline.

Another proposed title: "Why you need to be rich and have a white collar job to have time for leisure activities" Subtext: _less than 1% of rich people are active triathletes_

Some of the people with free time and money spend it on endurance activities. Some of them spend it on watching TV.

For tri-athetes: (back of envelope math, 120K a year is top 5% of income in US - source: http://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/)

Population of US is around 325 Million. 5% is 16.25 Million.

(Total membership in the USA Triathlon organization: 116K in 2015) https://www.teamusa.org/-/media/USA_Triathlon/PDF/About-Mult...)

116000/16250000 = ~0.7%

Conclusion less than 1% of rich people love triathlons.

We (Olark) specifically decided not to implement the "read-ahead" or "sneak-peak" feature because we thought it was creepy and broke customer expectations.

When you are typing a message to customer service as a customer you should have a chance to compose your thoughts, and should have an expectation of privacy in whatever you are writing before hitting enter.

Is profitability necessarily a good milestone? Wouldn't it indicate that AirBnB has reached a local growth maxima and doesn't know where to invest the rest of its huge amount of cash effectively to generate more returns?

No :) Just off the shelf DBs so far. But the FoundationDB guys are HS friends ;).

I learned that basically all of Imessages and contacts are stored on foundation DB, it's pretty great this is making it into opensource. Thanks Apple!

It seems that ultimately this just subsidizes the commercial real-estate owners.

1) Force companies to not have free cafeterias

2) Workers have to buy lunch from local businesses

3) Restaurant Location becomes more valuable given the large number of workers forced to find lunch and buy it.

4) Raise rents on restaurants because space is now more valuable, since it is basically subsidized by nearby tech companies.

5) Restaurants pay higher rent, landlords make more $$, due to California Property Tax policy, landlords do not have to pay proportional additional property tax on their now more valuable property.

The reason something like this is considered speaks to the power of commercial real estate to shape policy for their own benefit.

I more or less have ONLY worked from home for my entire work career, so my experience might be different than most.

Like many of the commenters here I think the following are key:

#Creating Time for Work (work hours)

- This could mean setting hours for yourself, closing a door, getting yourself in a certain mindset. Setting clear expectations for others in your life that you are 'mentally' at work even if you are physically present, this is ESSENTIAL.

#Creating Space for Work

- I've worked at home through remodels, nannys, and guests. If you have a one room apartment, and a few kids, working from home is likely impossible. However, if you have at least two rooms with some separation of space. You can close a door, go to a coffee shop, or generally find somewhere where you won't be distracted.

#Creating time and space for NOT WORK

- This is probably more of a challenge for startup founders and work-a-holics but if you don't. You will not be productive. period.

#The ability to focus and prioritize work

- I am blessed with the ability to block out distractions when I am at home, and be very focused on what is going on, on my computer. I have no idea how to describe this to others, but I can often miss comments from my wife, text messages, etc when focused on a task.

#Some basic nuts and bolts:

- You need good internet - You need backup internet (I have both a Verizon hotspot, and LTE on my iphone) - You need an employer and coworkers who understands that working remotely requires a vastly different set of communication protocols than working in an office.

I am skeptical of these findings. The graph comes from LSE's center for economic performance (http://cep.lse.ac.uk/), but I cannot find any reference for a related study when searching google.

I also find that it would be very difficult to summarize 4000 research papers into a clean graph about subjective life satisfaction in such a way that you could cleanly compare post divorce well-being and post unemployment well-being.

Given, it's VERY hard to find the root study, and most other peer websites are just referencing the Bloomberg article. My guess is the author of the article is conflating some data.

A few interesting references: https://whatworkswellbeing.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/unemp...

References: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/926/1/02-16.pdf To conclude: "Using a longitudinal study of 24,000 people living in Germany, this study found on average that individuals had lower life satisfaction following unemployment and this never recovered to the pre-unemployment levels. These results held for men and women but were stronger for men."

The authors of this study frame their results slightly differently:

"The findings suggests that even a short period of unemployment can cause an alteration in a person’s long-term set-point. Although there was substantial stability in life satisfaction over the years, unemployment did influence long-term levels, thus suggesting that in addition to personality, long-term subjective well-being can also be influenced by life circumstances"

Part of the reason the suburban schools in good districts are so good is because they have relatively low population density and relatively high property tax revenue. So they can spend more money per student.

At some point there are probably diminishing returns to the amount of $$ spent per student in a school system. But you can imagine that most suburban parents would have a hard time reducing the $$ spent on their own kids for the benefit of the greater good.

I think it's important to understand that is really happening here. Microsoft is merging Microsoft Research with their application oriented AI work. See the press release from Microsoft (http://mnc.ms/2ddF5dC).

MSR is already a pretty big group at Microsoft and does all sorts of work that is completely unrelated to AI. Now, I am confident the teams within MSR will have to start thinking about AI, and how their work relates to AI, but this initiative is much more of an interdisciplinary effort than a 5000 person deep learning team.

Olark is actually entirely done over XMPP, so you could theoretically connect directly to Olark with any standard XMPP client. Trillian is doing some cool stuff in their latest Mac OSX beta using some of our XMPP extensions.

One of the most exciting parts of this launch to me is that we did a ground up rewrite of the front-end in react+redux, which opens up a lot of really exiting opportunities to play with React-Native, as well as iterate quickly on bringing new user experiences to the chat box.

Olark (YC 09) | Anywhere, USA | Product Design and Customer Engagement Marketing

You probably haven’t run into a company like Olark before.

We are 39 people distributed around the globe working together to fundamentally change the way people communicate with businesses. There are over 10,000 organizations using Olark today.

You can learn about our values: http://www.olark.com/values

We currently have open positions for a Product Designer and a Customer Success Manager. http://www.olark.com/jobs

How many people are in your organization?

For those doubting whether Bill actually writes the reviews you should take a look at: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books.

Of the many books Bill has read, 81/195 have reviews (approximate). Given that he's reading on the order of 50 books a year, let's assume he's been at this for 4 years. That would be about 20 book reviews a year, and each book review on average probably takes him an hour or two to write, get feedback, and revise. (They are not really that involved: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/XKCD)

Seems like it is totally doable, and would not even really take up that much time.

Imagine some alternative titles:

"How I saved a company 100K a year after I was fired"

The employee could have debriefed his employer. Taken the moral high ground, and had an amazing story to tell at his next job interview + a lot of karma.

Or

"The importance of communication: How I implemented a quickfix without properly communicating the long term plan to anyone"