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How much permission do you need from paypal to do this?

I suppose the main barrier is how annoying their UI is? And your ability to get a share of the interchange?

I gave a talk about some caveats we ran into with delegating support early on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs2NN-qQZf0 a few years ago. In particular it bundled up a lot of customer feedback inside of one department/person and started isolating us from our customers.

I agree, I am not sure there is really that much interesting in this article. I'd love to have the author re-write it looking at the distribution, rather than averaging in returns for the top companies which makes up less than 1% of YC companies.

We are up to 27 people now, so for us it's super important to have everything scheduled and organized. We have shifts and a shift switch board, that let's us switch shifts when people are going on vacation, or have other items in their schedule.

I know Wufoo started off pretty informal, and their formalized support rotation was largely in reaction to not everyone pulling their weight. In my experience it's really important to formalize things so that everyone is pitching in, and it's not just up to a few people to volunteer.

Brian great comments, but I think there are a few things to think about from Jeff's comments.

Having an engineer respond to level-1 support is actually incredibly expensive. Especially, given that you could hire someone else who had a job specifically to respond to those issues.

In the cases where companies do choose to put engineers on frontline (once they've scaled to the point they can afford to hire dedicated support), they need to make a choice about the kind of organization they want to build.

The organizations Jeff is talking about and the one you are alluding too sounds like a pretty horrible place to work, where people are overworked, and resources are not allocated where they need to be to move the product forward.

Building a great organization is a challenge, and we choose to build an organization where everyone on the team has a strong connection to the customer. We do this with a strong understanding of how our team wants to grow and specialize. When done right, all hands customer service can work really well to align the team around the customer.

But you point is well taken, at many startups this idea that engineers should be doing "one more thing", when they are already responsible for "all the things" could be overkill. My advice would be to first figure out how to divide up responsibilities so people could focus, and then have teams interact with their customers every once in a while to remember what it's like to use their product.

I think you'll be surprised at how many engineers actually enjoy talking to the people they are building their product for.

Consolidating feedback is a problem for any team at scale regardless of who is doing the support. Dedicated customer service teams have a more complete view of what's going on with customers, than the average rotated employee, but at the same time both need a way to bubble up that feedback to the product team.

More importantly, it's essential to understand the difference between the problem you head about today, verses the problem that customers have been facing for a long time. (I do think that support rotations cause a bit of a recency affect in prioritization for better or worse)

In the long run my argument is the closer you are to your customers the better insight you'll have in general. Because we all make a ton of decisions that aren't clearly specified, and we want everyone on the team to have the best intuition for the customer when they make those decisions.

I've seen it done at on-boarding with companies like Freshbooks and Zappos, but I am not sure how often that experience is renewed. (i.e. the rotation aspect being more than one time)

Engineers at Zappos do support for just a few hours a year doing peak season after that onboarding. With a program called "Holiday Helpers" - http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/zappos-family/2011/12/20/holid...

It's pretty interesting to think about how to scale rotations of All Hands Support. It's one thing when you are like 4 people, but as you build a company there are a lot of resource constraints to think about. What's the biggest company you guys have seen that still does rotations?

Love the use of the !command feature, great post, and excited that it's helping you out so much.

Sometimes smart people do dumb things.

Tell management how you feel about the dishonesty.

Perhaps they could come clean to the potential client, and/or figure out how to make sure something like this never happens again.

Depending on the structure of the company (it sounds like you might be in a small company) it probably is time for some people to go, or at least take some time off and figure out their moral compasses.

Scheduling is such a hard problem. What other tools do people use for scheduling shift workers?

I wonder if the author's point would hold, if biological weapons were used by the attacker.

Smallpox made the first European invasion of North and South America a lot easier.

A few well targeted weaponized viruses with a reasonably long incubation period could greatly reduce our ability to defend ourselves. (The trick would be making sure they didn't spread beyond US borders in an increasingly globalized society)

love the concept.

Actual paper is pretty interesting: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/hci/pubs/pdfs/FoodMood.pdf

Congrats on the WSJ article.

It seems that this same exploit would work for anyone using apple mail. Isn't Linkedin-Intro is just exploiting the fact that Apple Mail renders HTML.

It is really interesting to look at this article through the lens of the PR agency/strategy that helped place it for NJOY.

1) Quotes from CEO

2) Little anecdote from Chief Marketing Officer

3) Big vision "Vaping" becomes common place.

4) Key differentiators: "building e-cigarettes that look, feel and perform like the real thing" (this is sprinkled throughout)

5) Celebrity endorsement, Big names: Peter Thiel, Brunno Mars

The rest (post first page) is a nice over view of the e-cigarette industry, and some challenges facing NJOY. I wonder how long they were working on a NYT article, of if this was something pretty easy for them to get, given interest around e-cigarettes.

This is insanely bad timing. They should shut it down in January of 2014 after all the E-commerce retailers make all their money.

No one in Ecommerce wants to touch their tech stack during the only quarter that matters to them.

[edit] Apparently the shutdown was announced in May. Regardless, it probably would have been better to shut it down in September, than right before Cyber Monday.

Sounds like this is probably more of a security feature. Prepaid cards are harder to track, and would be more suspect to fraud.

I love the Olark, trick. We actually have it fire a notification to us whenever a rails exception is thrown. (which might make you able to reach out even quicker)

A lot of these seem like bugs/features related to APC working with FirefoxOS, so you might need an APC just to know you've solved the issue.

"Buy an APC, Fix Bugs in OS, Your second APC is free"

It is interesting to consider the media bias towards 'bad' news. For some reason breaking stories always seem to be something negative. Whether it's terrorism, kidnapping, ponzi schemes, car crashes, you name it, but why do some negative stories run more than others?

At some point media organizations found that people would rather watch a train wreck than the launch of a new high speed rail.

http://www.essex.ac.uk/government/epop/papers/panel7/p7_soro... - Concludes there is a psychophysiological evidence that negative news is more arousing.

I suppose it follows that media concerning terrorism is probably more arousing than people being crushed by couches, and makes much better TV. And our perception of our reality is heavily influenced by what we are exposed to.

A great example of this would be the coverage of the fertilizer plant that blew up in Texas verses the Boston marathon bombings. These happened within days of each other. Which one did you hear about more? Which one killed more people?

Beat me by 34 minutes :-)

I think you could probably qualify this with the statement that most Fortune 500 companies are more willing to outsource live chat out side of the US because it's easier for a non native speaker to chat than to talk on the phone. Outsourced support leaves individual reps with pretty little power, and worse support for edge cases.

I am not sure what the right solution for this is, but many small-medium companies without outsourced support teams do quite a good job providing chat support. (i.e. Bonobos, Joyant, Rackspace, Gilt Group, Trunk Club, etc..)

I guess the real question is more about how do you scale good support when you grow. Especially when most people see support as a cost center. (Not every CEO wants to be Zappos)

Coming out of graduate school I had made 22K a year and lived pretty comfortably, with savings. I had an NSF grant that paid 30K a year, which allowed me to save even more.

You can support 4 people pretty easily on 3K a month even in Silicon Valley. (As long as you shop at costco, don't eat out, and are willing to have someone sleep in the dining room of your small townhouse ;-)

How does this thing compare to founders at work?

The zoomed in says he makes 143.. must be some bug.

Is the graph cumulative?

You guys should watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P-NMygTekQ

It really doesn't paint him in that bad of light. (I know nothing of the rest of his history, but I find the video pretty motivating)

When's my talk going up :-P