davidu

The only thing I wish I had done differently was reduce dilution, which is exactly what Aaron mentions here.

This is great advice that has been ignored for the 16 combined years I've been fundraising as an entrepreneur and investing as a VC. No reason it'll change now though hopefully writing about it helps a bit.

One of the great myths in company-building is that increasing runway beyond 24-36 months increases chances of success.

This perspective is understandable, but requires a lot more reading before you stick to it. There's a lot of bad bad history based on this viewpoint.

This is a bizarre article. North was unsuccessful in the market and basically ran out of money and time. Google picked up the people and IP and those efforts are now being directed elsewhere within Google. The idea that Google killed off a competitor is not accurate, as North had already failed to succeed. It was a good effort, and like most consumer hardware attempts, brutally hard.

Worth it.

I used to work with Matthew. He's next level smart, and very modest. We are very lucky he is a good hacker and not an evil hacker. :-)

"To analyze how VC deal activity responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant economic crisis, we use data from Pitchbook, CB Insights, and Capital IQ. We tabulate VC investment deals in U.S.-based startups by industry and sector using the Pitchbook and CB Insights data."

Pretty early to analyze this data. I find that both these sources take 20+ weeks to get close to accurate, and they are never really perfect.

FWIW, my view is that I think recent deal activity has been very high at a16z, Sequoia, Founders Fund, and others but that's just from where I sit.

Yes it was quite a reaction. Regardless, it all worked out, long since behind him.

Samy is my hero. (same guy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)

Very happy DigitalOcean customer for 4+ years. Great to see this, too.

It's not the your opinion differs, is that's you are presenting a cognitive dissonance. If you have years of experience then you would understand exactly how this happens, and yet, you think it was avoidable, which is a misunderstanding of operational failures.

If this failure was so easy to avoid, it would have been avoided. It was the result of a combination of failures, as all failures in highly-available systems are. It was a failure in bitrot, in planning, in execution, in communication, in reluctance to failover due to a concern about failing back, etc.

That said, like Matthew said, this is the kind of failure that happens once.

It's confusing to me to read this -- you write like you know what you're talking about, but that can't be the case because if you knew what you were talking about you'd understand how the kind of mistake that happened can happen.

As Matthew said on Twitter, this isn't the kind of mistake that happens twice. But for those of us who do operational work, it's easy to see how this happens once. Bit rot in a cab, work orders from someone who didn't know about the legacy patch panel or assumed too much in their instructions and a catastrophe. From now on, photos for every smart hands will probably be a part of the prep-procedure.

Just FYI -- Most colo facilities are prohibiting customer access during the COVID-19 lockdowns and have gone to 'smart hands' only for health and safety reasons.

It's https://startbootstrap.com/themes/sb-admin-2/ which is free.

This headline is weird. It appears this is temporary, and in the EU. But good for CamelCamelCamel, seems like the right call.

One of the hardest things about this process for a sensitive and compassionate leader is knowing when to not try and "make it better."

This is probably the greatest video clip on the subject of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTjhHrcyiQI

Church / Religious gatherings are exempted, which is, insane.

In SF, I think all religious services have moved to Zoom-style video format with very positive feedback from what I am hearing.

Yep. I’m not sure you read the whole thing, as I cover the grandma birthday example. Sentiment-wise we agree, tactically it’s still not the best practice. I know it sounds like it is.

It really depends on the maturity of the workforce and leadership, as I mention. For a lot of startups, that’s in short supply and just saying today is the last day of work is easiest. It shouldn’t have the feeling tossing them out. It can be end of day, folks (not boss) can arrange a meet up at a bar nearby, etc. I’ve seen it go sideways on both sides before when it’s too ambiguous for people or drawn way out, especially for junior folks in IC roles. The right thing really is just let them go, pay them as much as you can, and let them start figuring out what’s next.

If it were me, chances are I would not make the day of notification their last day unless they wanted it to be (most would I bet) but I also know what I’m doing. :-)

Thanks and yep.

I could have and maybe should have added that. Totally agree. They can take it home and review and you should send it digitally anyways so they have a copy.

I know. I edited that a few times. Didn’t quite get it right. Subtle nuance to “you will get through this” and “you will be fine” I guess.

Not perfect.

By all means, do more. Many companies thought they would raise in Q3 and have little chance of that now and need to make immediate alternative plans to have a chance to stay in business. If they can pay more — I hope they do.

And on the latter point, as I point out, depends on maturity of workforce and leadership.

Minor last point — I’m sorry to say that if I’m normalizing eight weeks, then I’m raising the norm. You can not like it, and I don’t, but that’s reality. Eight weeks is generous for a startup, or most companies.

Hah! For those who don't get it, this is an homage to how Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone.

He said (a few times): "An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator... these are NOT three separate devices!"

There are a few startups pitching a "nuclear power station in a shipping container" idea -- and having heard them and done a bunch of reading about the state of nuclear, it's hard to not come away with a complete and strong belief that:

1) It's a really good idea.

2) Nuclear power, more broadly, is probably our best bet to quickly the tide against climate change.

Not sure what any of your reply means. Adding OS support isn’t required. People just run a local resolver that supports these things. No different than any other application. Nothing arcane. Certainly no more than HTTP and SSL.

I think you have some reading to do.

Doth protest too much.

People don’t take issue with DoH, they take issue with an advertising supported browser like Mozilla’s unicast (and now bicast) centralization of DNS traffic that was previously distributed.

We invented DNSCrypt. There’s also DNS over TLS. Lots of ways to encrypt DNS without centralization.

They make this about DoH when really the primary issues are with how they went about it.

I switched my default to DDG yesterday. Very happy so far.

New Google SERPs are insulting to me as a user.

OpenNIC is no different than ICANN aside from being a failure. It just appears to be better since it uses a talk track that's attractive, but structurally, it's probably even worse than ICANN.

SaaS is another way of outsourcing IT. Personal IT or someone else's.

You could replace dropbox with an FTP server, too.

But most people value their time more and will just pay $90 who want this set of features.

This is the wrong dichotomy and it's a false one perpetuated by Mozilla.

Users can have end to end encrypted DNS and browsers shouldn't be hijacking it.

To put it another way, you don't want the people who only care about eyeballs (Google, Mozilla, etc.) picking your DNS provider.