jacobwal

Hadn't heard the documentary story, thanks for sharing!

Were there any choices in the first few years that you think made a particularly big difference in setting Amazon up for what it is today? Anything you're particularly proud of that you did there?

I think you're overall on the money here, but I would probably be a bit more cautious on #3 (at least private units). Some of the managed rental providers that focus on urban markets seem to be doing OK. Sonder raised a new round in June[1], albeit after laying off part of their workforce.

1: https://shorttermrentalz.com/news/sonder-series-e-round-june...

Swedish and biased here, but as far as I understand a large share of the deaths come from nursing homes. The tactics to limit the spread in those homes failed. However, that is largely a separate question of policies for the broader population, which is what most news outlets have been reporting as controversial.

They're pretty transparent about that too: https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-....

They get a partial advance on the ISAs from other investors, but the bulk of their revenue is collected when students pay.

Not sure about Second Measure specifically, but many credit card players sell anonymized purchasing data. Investors often look at this to predict how companies are performing.

Approach 1 doesn't give you a work permit. It's merely an explanation of how you can spend 90 days in the US as a EU citizen. But I don't think Yellow Incubator would dive that deep to see if you have the proper immigration papers.

Approach 2 makes sense for some. If you're just setting up a company to be in this incubator, then I 100% agree with you. But if you're working on something, and you think it'll have a better chance at succeeding if you're in the US, then it might very well make sense for you to get that kind of a visa. Many people (not involved with this incubator) do : )

As others have said, there aren't any clear cut answers. Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, and you should ask a lawyer to be sure. At any rate, a few suggestions (assuming you're EU):

- You could enter on an ESTA, which gives you 90 days. If you leave the US (Can+Mex doesn't count) and come back, the counter re-sets. Note that you're not allowed to work on ESTA, which means that drawing a salary is a no no. But if you desperately wanted to, you could probably figure out how to get paid in your home country or whatever would work for you.

- E-2 visa. A lot of EU countries have a treaty with US which says that: if a company is A) majority (>50%) owned by people/groups from your home country and B) someone from the country (doesn't have to be you) has invested ~$50K-250K (equity, not debt) in the company, then the company can apply for an E-2 visa for their key employees. It takes 1-3 months to process from what I hear, and the investment is substantial, but it's at least one more route that is available.

If anyone has more info on the two above, please feel free to correct me - I feel like I learn new things about the E-2 every time I speak to a new lawyer.

Does anyone have the bull case counter to this? Similar to aresant I don't mean to belittle WeWork's achievement but these facts, alongside the headlines from CEO claiming that: "Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue."[0] it's easy to be skeptical. Again - would be great to hear the optimist's take on this, if anyone has it.

0: https://www.axios.com/wework-ceo-valuation-based-on-energy-a...

Other than telling friends about it, anything users can do to help?

Looks great! I'm a huge fan of content like Alt-Shift-X and Every Frame A Painting, do you hope to move in that direction over time? Not necessarily yourself, but providing tools/space for creators to produce it?

Seems like it. But you have some new models - like Lambda School - that are showing a lot of promise

Not OP but Kesté is great.

This is their site: http://kestepizzeria.com/en/home/

Not to be confused with the Slice site, which is linked on Google Maps (https://www.kestepizzavinonewyork.com/)

Liked his post on LinkedIn[0]. A level of detail and personal responsibility that I don't think we see too often in these post-mortems. Hope their learnings enable Kevin + team to build something even more useful next.

0: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-cant-wait-you-see-what-we-d...

I hear you. I don't find the argument that robust given that everyone is limited by their time - car salesman included - but I hear you.

Agree that more data helps. For a headline I'd rather see revenue than margin or profit, as those are more subjective (or net revenue, if you're selling goods).

Unscalable business? Obviously a subjective take but, to me, that means anything where you're charging by the hour (e.g. consulting).

A fair point. However, those are all relatively fixed. A car dealer needs to buy a new car to sell one. They don't necessarily have to invest more in the items you mentioned to grow their revenues.

TLDR: businesses that scale vs those that dont : )

Yep, use it every day. Agree that it takes a lot of resources. But lack of investments in one aspect of the product doesn't mean that they haven't / aren't investing in other aspects.

By no means am I calling the product perfect. Resource hogging is an issue that is particularly important to most HN users.

But would you say that they're _not_ investing in the product? They're improving on search, their API, adding new integrations with Github, etc. Those might not be the things that matter the most to you or other HN users, but they are investments in the product.

But the inputs to his podcast are merely time (and one-time equipment costs). As you point out, a car dealership needs to spend a ton of money on the inputs, but that doesn't translate to a podcast business.

Also allows them to invest more in the product, which is great for the users

I think it's fair to say that those videos you linked are not examples of MVP / Lean, given how sophisticated the product was throughout the demo. The example that I've always heard (and couldn't find a link to now, so might not be true) was that, while Dropbox was in YC, they put up a landing page and a teaser video that only explained what the product would be once released, without even releasing it. That video generated a lot of buzz and signups, which was a lean way to validate the idea that people wanted the product.

Seeing as I can't find the video I imagine this story might've been embellished over the years, so if anyone was here for that I'd love to be corrected.

Tried signing up but it crashed. Was able to create a team but then got a broken page at https://app.getctx.io/account/auth

Working on something in similar space, so I'm curious to see what you've built!

Thanks for sharing that. A few friends and I are trying to explore a product in this space, and what you said is pretty much what we've arrived at as well. If you have any other feedback you think we should keep in mind I'm all ears

Thanks for sharing your POV

Thanks for sharing that, I'm a fan of threading as well but see a lot of Slack groups that operate as though it wasn't an option

would you use something that made it easy for you to save stuff from Slack in another place where it wasn't floating around? Like how you can star something for yourself, but instead you could star something so that your entire team could see that this was an important message?

that sounds really cool. What was great about it?

Great point, I don't use these nearly enough. Thanks!

Cool. Do you find it easy to locate? I've struggled with their search at times.

Also, do you end up extracting conversations into docs, or something that's easier to share with your team?

For those who use Slack at work:

Do you often use old conversations that your teammates have had to solve problems? Do you search Slack to find it? I've never been in a large Slack team and I'm curious how many people actually do that.

Cool product, excited to try it out!

Apologies in advance for unsolicited feedback, but I think you could benefit a lot on the revenue side if you played around with pricing. I've done a lot of scraping stuff in the financial services world, and this would definitely be worth more than $199 per month for them if it can help them get an information edge.

Patio11 writes some great stuff about pricing here https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/