hectormalot

> part of me imagines a group of MBAs sitting around watching Justin Timberlake play Sean Parker, thinking that actually a billion dollars would be pretty cool.

My experience is that MBAs looking for money go into corporate roles, not startups. Around me it have been the more idealistic ones that join or start a startup, and for very different reasons than getting rich. e.g. feeling that they can be more valuable here than in corporate, wanting to create something new, etc. (all the normal reasons for start-ups, MBAs are no different)

disclaimer: I have an MBA, and I did apply to Mondo (did not work out, but no hard feelings), and I usually don't daydream about making a billion dollars

On the other hand, I took a lot of ubers last year (in Amsterdam). We don't have uber X, but Black and Lux. Pricing of black is on average 10-20% below normal taxi's. All driver's I've asked have said that they prefer uber for mainly 3 reasons:

1. Control over when they drive

2. Higher utilisation (which in extension should be a big driver for Uberpool)

3. Friendlier/less troublesome passengers

Some actually bought (nice) new cars (Mercedes/BMW) and explained me a bit more about the economics of buying a new car and how it made sense for them while driving for Uber. Many I spoke to share the car with another driver to get more rides done per day.

As such, I wouldn't assume that most drivers don't account for the total cost of ownership. To me it seems that many do.

True, but I believe the stats only look at the working population? If Germany has a much higher number of part-time workers compared to Greece it's easy to explain why they work less hours per person on average

And account for correlations. It would be interesting to see if multi step projects with overruns tend to overrun in more steps then expected. I could imagine a stakeholder management heavy project to be more likely to overrun in every step. In other words, even by summing the distributions you might be underestimating the expected time of completion.

Bottom of his post he replies to Alex his post:

> I never contacted Facebook or Alex using my work email account. It was only after Alex contacted my employer via email that I sent a reply from my work account. Alex indirectly contacted me at work, not the other way around.

If that is true, it is either poor judgement from Alex, or bad intent to call Synack

Actually his write up makes pretty clear that he didn't use his company email until after Alex went over his head to the CEO.

Second, everything else being equal, Alex going to the CEO without calling or mailing the researcher first was a mistake. Going to someone's boss and saying "please do something, I don't want to get the lawyers involved" IS an implicit legal threat, both to synack and the researcher.

I'm a chemical engineer and self taught programmer who turned strategy consultant. Graduated from my MBA a few weeks ago, so I might be a bit biased :)

I've found that different people find different things valuable in their MBA. We had an entrepreneurship prof who was also an investor who took us yoking from term sheets to buy outs. Found that super valuable, but yes, no doubt could read up more on this online as well. Same for finance, which was a topic that I didn't know that well before. From a course perspective also got more out of strategy than I expected, but that seems to be very dependent on the prof teaching. (Read 'profit or growth' by bala if you want a book, but more suited for large corporates)

Above all though, i think you get more out of the MBA in personal development (leadership in group work, dealing with pressure, being confident with new material, etc.) and network (after 1-2 years you are at least well connected to a group of people that have high business ambitions, plus alumni). In that sense it's difficult to replace the full MBA experience with a set of MOOCs.

Finally, I've always found it powerful if someone in a room full of technical people knows more about business than any other tech guy in that room (or vice versa, being the only biz guy who understands tech or can program in a room full of biz guys). The MBA is one way for technical people to make that step.

realizing that I didn't answer the question... Here are some things I think would also be interesting, regardless of the paper for more tech oriented people:

- time value of money (finance)

- basics of accounting (p&l vs cash flow, you'd be amazed how many startups die by running out of cash even though their p&l is positive)

- understanding competitive advantage & successful market entry (strategy)

- basic operations: the difference between efficient and market responsive supply chains (right supply chain for right product, i.e. Don't typically airfreight toilet paper); and the newsfeed or model if you make real products

- lots around marketing (pricing, channels, etc.)

- some stuff on more executive lvl management (do executives have most impact by the decisions they make themselves, or by the premises they set for others in the organization within which they make decisions? If the latter, how do you work best as an exec?)

- negotiation 101: there are some great HBS cases available online, it's even fun as a Friday afternoon to negotiate between people and see what works best.

- governance and boards

- basics of investing, leveraged buyouts, private equity/VC

When I decided to leave my co-founder we asked advice from the local chambers of commerce (In the Netherlands they provide this). I remember feeling the same: surely all my effort put in must be worth something.

The advice was clear. The value of the company is based not the future expected cash from my work, not my effort. In small start-ups, a leaving co-founder often takes about as much value away (e.g. relationships) as he/she thinks he/she deserves.

Difficult to accept. In the end I told my co-founder that it was important for me to see some compensation for the things we had build up. I got a few percent of the next project he did, and walked away with 10-20k EUR.

Looking back, that was totally fair. It has been 2 years since, and the company is still going well and generating good cashflows. Most (all?) of the income now is due to his work, not mine. I've come to appreciate over time how we solved this.

Excuse me if this is a dumb question, but I've seen a lot on HN these days where people would suggest Erlang/Elixer for this kind of use case (high performance distributed). Any reason (beyond syntax preference) that this was not one of the languages considered?

I don't think deflation has to drive wages down actually. Deflation simply means that your dollar (or CHF) can buy more tomorrow than today, and hence unless you can invest in something that appreciates faster than that rate, you would keep the money in cash rather than spending it, unless your expense is really necessary (say food). Inflation then of course means that your money is worth more today than tomorrow, and therefore you are more likely to spend it (and more investments become attractive, as long as they perform better than the currency).

Will wages come down, over time in a purely deflationary economy probably yes. But unlike most inflationary economies where it is usual to have a x% salary growth y/y, I think the barrier to sign a contract that says: "your salary is X, and will decrease by z% per year" is a lot higher. So, if a country has only mild deflation - like Switzerland - the real value is actually likely to go up.

> wages go up (people like that)

That's also not a given, its likely to have a raise in contracts, but if I promise you a 2% yearly raise with inflation of 3% you are not really getting a great deal, are you?

> [..] major demographic issues

True, I see inflation as a great way to equally tax 'old money', and in a way that is almost impossible to escape.

In the end inflation is good for those with debt (governments/corporations are first in line), deflation is great for those with cash (but not necessarily other assets, those will probably adjust to the new price level).

The main reasons are probably regulation and effort/difficulty to serve.

Assuming you are a US citizen, I highly invite you to come over to Switzerland and try and open a (savings) account if you wish to experience it in person. I'm currently living here, and talking to my US colleagues, I've found that it is near impossible for them to open an account, even though they would bring money to the banks here.

Reasoning? Issues of the US with the Swiss banking system has made these customers more of a pain than a benefit. I'm sure a similar argument can be made for people who (perhaps accidentally) have a bad credit score

No. The article states that electricity is sold at the highest bid to meet the demand, and that wind was only supplying up to 40% of the demand. I.e. It is the coal and nuclear power plants that are also bidding negative.

The market is working, to such an extend that during times of extreme oversupply power generators have to assess if they will temporarily turn down production (which has a cost, especially for coal/nuclear, as they are difficult to switch), or if instead they are willing to pay people to take the electricity.

Yes, without subsidies, wind would probably minimum bid at a $0/MWh, but that would still leave fuel based producers running at negative marginal cost.

What's missing in this market is flexible demand. I'm pretty sure if our appliances would spin up real time at low prices that it would be almost impossible to hit negative prices again, as demand will rise much more rapidly in response to lowering electricity prices.

The fact that CERN is not publishing the name of the company in question makes me think they know exactly know what to expect from the online community. I don't think it will be an alternative superior solution, but certainly some backlash against the company.

Would that be a justified response? By the exact reading of the law/agreement probably not. But then again, this student was free to use the software at CERN, he just went out of his way to also work with it on his laptop (for the same project I suppose). That means the company is punishing someone for using their software, even though there was no lost sale. For me it feels unnecessary to put a 30k CHF fine on someone that way.

For one, you might find the bill boards from the SVP, that shows minarets (the tall part of a mosque) depicted as rockets, or the one where they show white sheep kicking a black sheep out of Switzerland. I think it is a good example of how 'direct' Switzerland can be if you are a foreigner there. (I still love the country though)

And that is exactly why the other eurozone countries had so much leverage in the negotiations. I suppose Tsipras could have foreseen this from a negotiation point of view.

As a Dutch citizen, I'm not particularly proud of the way my government (and Germany, etc.) handled this. Silver lining is that it includes a 12.5b investment in the Greek economy, if invested well will boost economic recovery.

I ask myself, would Greece be able to improve government spending and reduce corruption without this pain?

Not actually my own project, but a Swiss start-up that I'm helping out during a few weeks. Key difference with existing solutions is that it will encrypt your files locally in your browser and never transmit the key over the internet.

Very interested in hearing your opinions on how we can improve this idea.

Exactly. I can only add that the borders are indeed very open. I took a plane from Frankfurt to Amsterdam last week without even showing my passport once. (boarding pass yes, passport no)

There are exceptions, e.g.:

* Switzerland, although part of Schengen, will sometimes do boarder checks

* The UK, although part of the EU, is not part of Schengen and will require ID for entry and exit

Has worked pretty good since initial configuration. Only hick up I've had was after a password reset at Heroku, which disabled the ability for workless to start the worker (and failed silently at the time...)

Side project: an automatic roster for evening and weekend emergency duties for groups of dentists. We run on Heroku and most of our saas cost is a dyno ($35), an SSL add-on ($20), and some phone/sms cost from Twilio ($5-10). We use workless to spin up and down a worker dyno when needed.

Since the tool supports an offline process we don't have incredible loads, so we use the free tier of most other services (e.g. SendGrid, etc.)

What are you spending your $200 on?

http://www.cloudvps.com/ A Dutch company that I've used for the last 18 months to run my VPS without issues. It also provides VPS's to the largest online accounting software company here (Exact software) has reasonable customer support

11 Euro (14 dollars) a month for: 1GB Ram, 20 GB HDD, 250 GB traffic and a single core.

If you want even cheaper you could try hetzner.de with 8 euro/month, 512MB VPS.