evancharles

"Threads is a Slack replacement designed for makers," from https://www.linkedin.com/company/threadsgroupinc/

You're going to get a ton of skepticism, but I think it's possible in a dense area to find enough people who have enough overlap in the staples they consume who are willing to pay for this. I would try to focus on quality first, proving that you can get super high customer retention and unit margin, before trying to be cost-competitive with a larger grocer.

I am involved with a company called Teamshares that helps small businesses convert to employee ownership. A big part of what makes it work is exposing company financials to all employees in a way that helps connect one's actions with financial performance.

We are hiring software engineers, in case anyone is curious. https://www.teamshares.com/careers

The funny thing is this is more functional (and took longer to create) than the first version of DoorDash.

Entering the working world does not mean you have to give up diving deeply into new topics!

Our real estate and land markets seem hyper fragmented, not close to being a monopoly? Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

When I've seen founders try to keep investors at arms length it seems to result in mistrust, leaving investors feeling like they can't get the real story, and thus decreasing the likelihood they invest further. So rather than keeping insiders at arms length, I'd suggest being direct about wanting to meet other investors. I suggest uncomfortable candor over comfortable misdirection.

My guess is he means that VCs don't make decisions out of friendship.

thx so much for showing an example, very helpful. btw, if I may, it might be nicer to stick to just serif or sans-serif fonts in your deck, the mix is making my eyes a little sad.

I agree, but the opportunists are within that set

One trick to catch opportunists: start with those looking to increase their headcount faster than baseline (as any good opportunist will attempt), and then see if they will adopt an opposing logical argument as long as it leads to the conclusion that their headcount should grow.

This is a flavor of looking for those who make different arguments depending on the audience, which in general is a helpful warning signal.

Although it's impossible to entirely route out opportunists at a high quality, quickly growing company, as the author notes, I still find it is worthwhile to maximize the number of leaders in your company whom you trust to make arguments in the service of making the business work.

This seems like an extreme stretch and the motive doesn't check out. Oride was shut down two weeks ago for reasons unrelated to competition.

https://www.pymnts.com/news/ridesharing/2020/softbank-backed...

I think you underestimate owner costs of turnover. Risking an empty apartment for even a few weeks can erase your yield for the whole year. Landlords, then, are only likely to hike rent aggressively if it's worth that risk, in other words, when the market price is dramatically higher than the current rent rate.

I'm weary of getting into this, but I don't think that's the right conclusion from the beach issue. I'm not intimately familiar but if you care about it, I'd recommend reading what he wrote about it. https://medium.com/@vkhosla/martins-beach-a-matter-of-princi...

(I work at Khosla Ventures and have raised money from Khosla in the past)

Thanks for sharing! I was just searching github for something like this for my own wedding.

Love the persistence. Happy to help edit your app or do a mock interview. Random idea for your product you've probably heard before - wedding website providers might be a good channel.

Interestingly YC has encouraged startups to offer more equity to early employees and I'm not sure it's had an effect. See pg's recommendation in http://paulgraham.com/equity.html

Customers are also a great source of project ideas. You can pick a customer, like "small business owner" or "wealth advisor," and interview them.

My favorite question that leads to ideas is "tell me everything you did from when you started your day until now," and dig into all the annoying/painful things they mention.

I once visited a career office at a community college that I wanted to hire out of. What I saw was crushing - a small office run by a student volunteer with nothing but a few binders of reading materials.

I'm excited for private companies like this to help students who want to put in the work.

If this is easy for you, you should quit engineering and run a growth equity fund.

We're a startup that builds software to simplify real estate, and we use capital markets to power that experience. The ability to buy the home directly allows us to put the homeowner in control of their timeline. I like pg's definition of startup here http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Internally, we talk about fundraises as "moments" but not milestones. Fundraising takes work and is critical to growing our business, so we recognize that effort but don't celebrate rounds as successes for the business or for our customers.

While great CEOs of large companies do edit much more than they write, I see early stage CEOs that think they can start editing right away, because they're the CEO.

For the first couple years (at least), it takes heroic effort to get something to work and then to build a growth machine around that thing that works, and a founder/CEO needs to do a lot of "writing" to make that happen.

whoa.. I think we were literally in the same class at Lab. Nice to see you here!

Btw, David Derbes, the writer, is perhaps the most overqualified high school physics teacher there is. (He was my teacher.)

How did we do? We're working on shaving off as much time as possible, that's where partnering with the restaurants really helps.

I like this idea. Managing a workforce like ours (DoorDash) is incredibly difficult, and our ability to do it well is probably the greatest advantage we could have. The idea is to make software that makes complex tasks simple.

I do it to reduce contrast, not increase it. White on black is awfully harsh. Never use black: http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/