dsugarman

Everyone is so negative, cynical, and bitter on HN now, it's really sad to me. I went through YC in 2012 and I feel like the community here is unrecognizable, the quality of discourse is so low it feels hard to participate.

Our employees average less than 2 days in the office a week and we had remote work before the pandemic. I myself work from home often. Our situation is different than Amazon obviously. I am living the life of the other group if we're talking about remote workers, I certainly don't think I said anything aggressive or condescending.

I am genuinely confused and alarmed by the rhetoric of your post. It feels beyond personal

I don't think OP actually disagrees, the chest pounding rhetoric is likely because they're covering up something deep inside that's saying "I know this is the right move for Amazon but I'm terrified of what that means for me".

Your feelings are valid and they're doing this to perform better as a business.

I don't know nearly enough to make a firm claim here but I don't think what you're describing sounds like a definitive counter example. There's a big difference between giving lower level employees creative freedom and letting c level executives have free roam over their domain with little oversight or Founder involvement.

Exactly my point, it's not a purely financial decision. It's barely a financial decision.

I think another huge factor is that you are making a prediction on the future value of your degree over the next 40-50 years as a 17 year old who is probably more focused on succeeding socially and sexually. You add in the student loans that may or may not be forgiven at some time in the future and the free market is not in play. Same with Healthcare, insurance clouds all free market mechanics.

I'm a huge capitalist and I think we need to be honest about where capitalism isn't working. It's always due to free market mechanics being removed from the equation by layers of obscurity. I don't know the right answer but this shit is not working

you don't really clarify why people should stop flying, I'll assume it's due to global warming? Personally, I think this is a fantastic idea, to simplify the user experience of flying to make it accessible sounds incredible. Private jets are the ultimate luxury in life that so few have access to today. If it is global warming related, then I think that problem needs to be solved as well, but it's somewhat separate. EVs have become a reality, and there needs to be a lot more work done to solve global warming, not a reason to stop all progress.

that makes sense but it still seems like there is an imbalance on expectations.

It reads as they're great and there's not a lot of people as great as they are when in reality it's probably more like the overlap between the set of people they desire and the set of people that desires them is impossibly narrow. This sounds like a tough personal problem that they can 100% work through by looking in the mirror and working on themselves.

I'm too great to ever find someone as great as me is frankly a piss poor attitude and outlook on life and I feel really bad for them to be stuck like that.

If everyone had a requirement for marriage that you marry someone as smart as you, exactly no one would be married.

Sounds like a people issue

People have free will; market rate is driven by supply, demand and economics of production and revenue. It's similar to people in the US willing to forfeit their financial future to see taylor swift live and the reseller market understanding and exploiting the market dynamics. Are the resellers the problem? or is it inevitable when people value the financial security of the rest of their lives less than seeing taylor for one night?

Doesn't sound terribly different than how I perceived the actual movie. I often describe Dune as a 3 hour trailer. I didn't hate it due to the visuals and the immersive sound at the theater but I would have probably been pretty upset with my wasted time if I saw it at home.

Frankly I think you're answering your own question when you say "the Fed tends to err on the side of triggering a recession." Yea that's the point, maybe it would be less offensive to say they view their job as creating as mild of a recession as possible to bring down inflation.

In response to your direct request, here's Powell talking about a "soft or softish" landing specifically calling it a recession that is not severe. https://youtu.be/Ue1aDKboQcQ?si=HRcPcJFT22kYxYQT

I find the whole back patting themselves on a "soft landing" a total joke and offensive to the American tax payers. They create so much pain, especially to those without net worth, in the name of stalling inflation when inflation is directly caused by money supply. They created the problem not with 0 interest rates but by literally injecting cash into the economy, they lied about it's effect on inflation and then they could have sat on their hands and inflation would have evened out without destroying everyone's bank accounts. They really don't need play God on the economy, it creates more problems than it solves

No, that's exactly how they look at it. They see it as they can't really change supply but they can lower demand by removing all purchase power and they look at the recession as a necessary goal to tame inflation.

The fed pumped interest rates to bankrupt everyone and create a recession to drop demand off a cliff to fight inflation. The recession never came because people have weathered the storm through credit and other means. Fed is starting to drop interest rates because inflation is under control.

Inflation was caused by the massive increase in money supply due to the fed buying up assets and to a lesser extent the covid stimmys. Inflation followed the curve of the money supply pretty closely. The interest rates just hurt everyone, we need some brighter minds with more open thought handling the central bank fiscal policy in my humble opinion

I don't really understand how any crypto is "unregulated money" and it's intrinsically the most tracable money store

[Edited for some horrible mobile autocorrect attrocities]

The thing is, you were probably getting offended often but not identifying your emotion, so it comes out in other weird ways. By identifying what was going on internally that you were surpressing, you were able to escape the toxic patterns you were contributing to. When you get good at that you can just share the emotion rather than acting it out too, which results in really positive and effective conflict resolution

what do you mean by this? that inflation is currently 1% or 10%? it's ~3.5% right now

The mindset is super on the right track, going from working on something polished to "trashy" before validation. It's just not far enough in the not doing work until the idea has some validation axis. Yes, making an android app is probably a bad idea, but how do you even know before you talk to one potential user, if you have no one that has told you they would use it, why build anything?

It's actually the reverse. The product direction is dictated by the goal (OKR). Our objective is to increase engagement from management which we know we are accomplishing by hitting the key result of admin users increasing average usage from y to x. From there a product team can generate ideas or prioritize ideas that fit the mold.

From the actual paper, it looks like what they did was worse than just adding the two and the article is nonsensical

>Overall, our results revealed that 68% (23/34) of flavored and 13% (5/38) unflavored consumer Ω3 supplements exceeded the TOTOX upper limit set by the Global Organization for EPA and DHA (GOED) voluntary monograph standard of ≤ 26, with 65% (22/34) flavored supplements and 32% (12/38) unflavored supplements failing the PV upper limit of ≤ 5 and 62% (21/34) flavored supplements exceeding the p-AV upper limit of ≤ 20.

There's a lot of incorrect math in this article. It says 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your users then suggests a hypothetical pricing change that results in 43% of your revenue coming from 20% of users.

It also says going from $10k in revenue to $14k is a 60% increase.

They did the same thing for everyone though (until they figured out how to scale that thing). It's not wrong to do whatever you got to do to get your first couple customers but you should also be thoughtful on how it's going to impact your company. For example, our second customer wanted us to do a deep integration into their erp system to sign on for $2k/mo, instead we did an audit of their current process and saw they were doing manual imports and exports. We gave them import/export capabilities which still greatly reduced their daily manual work and has been a longstanding, heavily used feature. They're still with us and both their revenue and the account has grown over 4x.

Bugs happen, it doesn't mean incompetence. letting your team know the impact of the bugs in production is helpful but breathing over their necks or throwing a tantrum when you have an impactful bug is not. Tell the team, make sure they're working on it and give them space to breathe.

Push for move fast and be understanding when things break, especially early on.

Every feature you add will add a ton of future maintenance, so don't do custom work for every new customer, it will bury you over time. Do proper customer development and include your technical co-founder when you want to consider a new feature.

I think in general it's safe to take a cynical view on every vendors aptitude. Many, if not most, people are terrible at their jobs and it's your job to find the good ones and hold onto them

My whole point was to care about enterprise value and growth rate over market cap and p/e

Toyota has 9% yoy growth, $220b of debt and a $260b market cap, tesla has >50% yoy growth, $5b of debt and a $820b market cap.

Why are you focused on p/e ratio? It tells basically none of the story

I think you have to define quality. If you define quality as the absence of annoyances I think you're probably over optimizing the wrong thing. You want to provide a clear, fast path for users to solve their problems and at scale you have to prioritize providing paths to solving big problems for users rather than fixing the volume of small annoyances, it's incredibly more impactful.