hari_seldon_

Agreed. I also saw a talk by a PM from Blue Apron a while back, and it seems that another problem is that people subscribe with the hopes of cooking more but then discover that having the meal kit still involves enough time and friction to limit them from doing it. I think that many people love the idea of cooking more often but still wish it were more convenient. To Blue Apron's credit, they have made it fairly streamlined!

^ this. I think the bigger question becomes "why does it matter if something is a tech company?" Is it because that is what makes it easier to raise money today? If that's the case, then I wish more investors and analysts would go back to first principles and understand why slapping a "tech" label on a company does not necessarily mean it will scale well or succeed in the long run.

The way that I think about a "tech" company is that it is able to scale its growth non-linearly with its staff (or human resources). This isn't a binary rule, and obviously many successful companies are in a gray area -- but I think that it serves as a good litmus test / starting point when thinking about companies.

For example, an app that is running on a few servers can gain users more quickly than it needs to hire additional workers. A company like Blue Apron has to grow its warehouse staff as it gains new subscribers, effectively meaning that its SG&A and overhead costs scale fairly evenly with growth.

They already do manual review for many of their high-serving ads, and people shouldn't shy away from some human intervention in these processes.

AI and machine learning are most effective these days when they help assist people (flagging potentially malicious code, bubbling up anomalies, etc.), and it isn't that expensive to get a pair of eyeballs to double check conclusions!

I have a 2015 15-inch retina macbook pro and a surface pro 4. Ever since Windows 10 added a native ubuntu bash shell to its OS, I have preferred using the surface for all of my development (some web stuff where I ssh into other boxes and some python number crunching done locally). A big factor is that the surface pro 4's screen looks a lot better than my retina macbook pro because it is more dense and has a higher resolution. A few years ago I would not have believed the stuff I am writing in this comment, but here we are!

They are in a tough bind because they used to be interested in that space and were slow to move on enterprise, allowing Box and others to have more momentum in that space. Now with Google and others dominating the photo storage consumer space, where should Dropbox focus its efforts?

Agreed, and my comment was just that it goes beyond Stanford and Silicon Valley...

Agreed! If you actually talk to recruiters and teams at top-tier companies, then the stronger Ivies still do well when it comes to CS careers.

It was a bit more controversial than I intended, but I still stand by the opinion that Silicon Valley is weighed a lot more than any other location. I don't disagree that the figures come up from time to time, but they are rarely on the top of comments lists unless the submission is specifically about them.

Many people on HN seem to forget that many strides in computer science, computer architecture, and mathematics came from schools that don't start with an "S" and are from outside of the Bay Area. I think it is more that the definition of how you measure innovation has shifted over time -- now it is based on how many dollars are raised for your venture vs. actual strides being made in academic fields of study.

Quick aside, many people who go to Harvard Business School receive financial aid or pay for it out of their own pocket -- the school determines need based on your assets and not those of your parents. While there probably are still students who get support from rich dads, it is not the same kind of only-for-the-rich place that you are depicting...