jordigg

SOC 2 is mostly about proving you do what your policies say, and there’s more flexibility than people think.

For small teams it doesn’t have to be heavyweight. A risk register can be a simple doc with a few real risks and mitigations.

That said, I agree there’s a lot of theater. For smaller companies and budgets, it often turns into rubber stamping. Auditors rely on the evidence you provide, so the report can look much cleaner than day to day reality.

Still, it has value. It forces you to formalize basic practices, and if you want those customers, you’re signing up for that level of scrutiny.

One of the recurring actions I need to keep helping other non-technical folks with in macOS is zipping with password. IF you can add that, it could become very useful for a lot of folks.

edit: Just found MacZip as another nice alternative that does it all. Would wish I could look at the code for security purposes.

Loom is an excellent piece of software, but from my perspective in IT I've never been able to justify it's ROI.

I've been always pushing for it to go away as soon as had to start looking at SaaS spend. Looking at the analytics only a few power users really made use of it while the biggest majority of users never used to record or maybe only recorded 1-2 videos a quarter. It was too expensive and video is very expensive to run on the cloud.

Zoom released a competitor recently and that must be killing them. Other companies are also offering cheaper alternatives and egress traffic for video-centric businesses is crazy expensive.

They had layoffs not so long ago, like many companies, and during my last negotiations with them they were very aggressive with pricing. Aggressive to the point of their executive team asking what amount we wanted to pay, and they actually committed to the price we offered...

Glassdoor reviews and Blind comments weren't good at that time either, but that is true for most companies. I think they couldn't keep the revenue curve up-to-the-right to offer a decent return to their investors and it was turning more into an OK business. Time to sell, stay there for a year and move on to start their next thing. For Atlassian is a relevant acquisition, especially as they are also focusing more into chasing freshdesk or zendesk as a customer support platform.

I wish them the best, as I said, the product itself was very well designed and engineered compared to any other alternatives out there. I think they missed to make it relevant and a must have for companies, maybe focusing more to sale to sales and customer experience/support teams which tend to have big budgets compared to other teams.

This has been true since the integration was released and main reason it's been disabled at most companies I've worked at. Definitely nothing new and reported to Slack and Google multiple times, always replied with working as expected. If you don't like how it works, remove it. Recently the UI and options changed a bit and you can now disable previews but I believe is a user setting and not a organization setting.

There has been an effort to standardize MNDAs with oneNDA (https://onenda.org/), at least in tech and I've seen it work well for SaaS deals. I think they also released oneDPA but I haven't used it yet to understand if it accepted or not.

I wish more companies would use standard contracts, definitely helpful for smaller orgs with non-existen or very small legal teams. Now we just need them to be well accepted...

I just dropped a message to the CEO via LinkedIn, hope they can check on it. Didn't pop-up for me, either adblock or just being enabled for a sample of the visitors.

I did set up something similar on postmortem.co (dead) that was being populated by subreddit r/shutdown plus other contributions, main problem was to get proper explanation on why they failed and not just the public statement.

Legal, reputation among other reasons force people to don't share why something failed. I'm convinced it would be a great resource for learning on all kind of areas.

Hope many more will follow, my sincere admiration.

Here the SEC filling: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001326801150...

Imagine those who don't work on tech.

Just guessing... First they will check if it was worth to try it again once the first batch finishes. I'm sure it will be soon after the normal winter batch if the move on with the new Fellowship program.

Here you have what they have open sourced: http://www.ycombinator.com/resources/#documents

Last week I saw this from Sam.

> If we don’t invest in these companies, they don’t happen… The thing about Y Combinator that’s cool is that most companies won’t happen if we don’t fund them.[1]

I thought YC was always looking to fund those that would exist with or without YC. I have seen less and less "crazy bets" every batch, but I have to say there's more diversity of founders and topics (biotech, energy, farming). Companies generate revenue before DemoDay and many are startups that work for other startups. It's not a bad thing but would love to see more Airbnbs or Reddits around. Those are the ones that can generate a true impact on society and can only exist thanks to YC giving them a chance. The fellowship can be a great starting point for those.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/23/sam-altman-and-jessica-liv...

YC is doing the VC job by curating and selecting good bets. LPs can go straight to these deals and avoid the middlemen. How is that going to affect the traditional LP > VC > startup model? Will LPs go straight to "top" accelerators and invest directly on these startups?

There's an application process to access the data. The application can be found here: http://www.bigdatabcn.com/en/

> Big Data CoE Barcelona is a new centre driven by Barcelona Digital Technology Centre, the Government of Catalonia, the Barcelona City Council and Oracle that will build, develop and provide tools, data sets and value-added Big Data capabilities to enable companies on defining, testing and validating Big Data models before its final implementation. The center will also offer training services for professionals looking for specialization within the field and a dissemination programme focused on showing trends and Big Data success cases to spread among businesses a new culture based on the value of the data.

[1] http://www.bigdatabcn.com/en/about-big-data-coe-barcelona/

Really happy seeing these initiatives and the way the White House is thinking about bringing technology to the government.

I just can't understand why other government bodies and countries still give all their work to big corporations asking for ridiculous amounts of money for delivering questionable work quality. Their only thinking is how we can deliver the worst software ever that require us to maintain it for as many years as possible.

Give the work to smart folks who are willing to make it happen because they believe in that country and how they can make a true impact and you'll get wonderful software at a reasonable price that will just work.

I think is the natural choice. Their social network "Google+" failed, they are now implementing live streaming for games (after laughing about Twitch[1]) and already offer live hangouts. I'm sure the next step is to use Youtube ala Periscope/Meerkat, maybe with a standalone app. If they want to keep their influencers and Youtube pros they should offer this functionality to them but Facebook is ahead now.

[1]https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/580524413604478976

Periscope had a great start, support very early on from investors, influencers and was bought by Twitter before going live, that helped explode the app from day 0. Something that did hurt Meerkat a lot was being cut off from the Twitter API something that became pretty normal on several apps that started getting traction.

Periscope acquisition by Twitter seems to have slowed them down on launching new features, but I have to say that their app and streaming works better than Meerkat and numbers don't lie. They are doing a great job.

Meerkat is great at innovating and moving fast. The "Cameo" feature looks really cool. Everyone thought they were going to be bought by Facebook, but they just launched their own app for famous people and journalists (at least at the beginning to try it out). Let's see how this space evolves once Facebook releases the app to the public and Google starts doing the same using Youtube.

Yesterday I had PG's Startup School 08 video[1] on the background and he spoke about them just after being a cockroach and how companies succeed not just by not being evil but by being good.

Really happy for them. Great team.

[1]https://youtu.be/q7K0vRUKXKc?t=891

I've been my entire life working on projects, where I'm from no one knows anything about startups. I didn't know anything either. I thought Google and Microsoft had been there for years and were created like any other traditional company. Couldn't imagine anything built out of a garage or a dorm room.

I got money from all my different projects but never thought about them as companies, I used them to learn and pay for my hobbies. I never thought they could turn into real companies so I worked on them at night after my normal job.

Right now I got back to a project and idea I had back in 2008 when I even registered the domain and created the landing page and sketched a logo. Finally, I want to turn it into a real thing, into a company, but I still think about it as a project.

Same happens when I have to explain to family and friends why I left a well-paid job on tech in Ireland and moved back to my parents home in Spain to work on a website while the country is still broke. By saying "I'm working on a project" seems less serious. They still ask if I can live out of that but if I try to explain I'm working on a company people just freak out and things get really difficult to justify taking the attention out of what's important. Hope one day they understand.

So all google divisions are now individual companies inside a conglomerated called Alphabet where Larry is the CEO and Sergei the President. Sundar Pichai is now the new CEO of Google. Is that right? Why do you think they are moving this way? Regulations? Taxes? What about Eric Schmidt?

I don't know much about trading, but look at that "after hours" spike! http://postimg.org/image/ho5ecyr99/

EDIT: All google subsidiaries are now subsidiaries of a conglomerated called Alphabet. Google is a subsidiary too. Google stock will now be Alphabet stock.

It may take you longer to get there, but you can do it without rich families, good connections and "pedigree". I've proven it myself many times. Just want something and work your ass off.

Haven't downvoted, I'm too young!

Luck (probability) exists, but I'm of those ones who believe that what you get is a result of what you have done before. Do you really think iPad is selling more than Microsoft because a lack of passion or luck? Same with Google and YT.

I think you are wrong here and most of the times people use the excuse of bad luck, timing, etc. to protect themselves of their bad execution.

It's just my personal opinion, difficult to prove or measure, but I believe Jessica's point after meeting and working with over 900 startups and getting to know so many founders.

We should learn the other side of the equation and analyze people who didn't succeed and why. Then we will be able to compare and prove (or not) increases probabilities.

My personal experience, it did for me.

> Having these traits alone won't make you succeed but if all other conditions are met your will have bigger chances of succeeding.

I said that I agreed with your comment. Those traits may increase chances of succeeding when starting a startup but aren't the only thing you need to succeed.

I think we all agree here, but Jessica's point is about some traits that many successful founders shared among themselves.

Having these traits alone won't make you succeed but if all other conditions are met your will have bigger chances of succeeding.

Would love to see a new book about successful and not so successful founders and lessons learned along the way. Comparing them with the first book to find interesting facts about how things and people's perspective have changed over time will be very interesting. Something else would love to read about is international founders and how moving to the valley helped them succeed comparing when they were in their respective countries.

Thanks to Jessica for all her work and heart she is putting helping founders succeed and this way inspire others around the world to keep creating great things.

Well, I get what bsammers said because is what heap have been offering since day one and what made it special. You are even using gradients with that orange that reminded me about them.

I'm happy you took the non-coding approach, it will be much easier for the analytics or marketing team that won't have to wait for the engineers to push changes to the tracking code.

I didn't find it on the website so I'll ask here: Do you do like heap and track all user interactions and then allow to track whatever you need on the fly, event past events?

Hope you take the same approach on the web version. It's the only pain point I see on Mixpanel.

Thx, and keep up the great work, I use MixPanel a lot :)

It's great that every time is getting easier and easier to track analytics. No need to change the code or ask your engineering team to push changes. Seems they are trying to do what Heap analytics (another YC company) is already doing. Even they are using very similar colors as Heap. I use them both on my projects, hope they join forces some day!

Don't underestimate that 12k + YC network and help. Most unicorns that came from the YC program started with 20k not long ago. Too much money can kill a small and inexperienced team, be lean, scrappy and bootstrap to prove then raise to grow.

Been using it for some months already and love it. I'm missing some features like being able to dump or upload an entire DB backup from a file (have to use another app for that). Hope I can get all functionality in one place soon.

UI is great and really easy to use. I really recommend it to anyone using PostgreSQL as DB.

Great job from Jakob, the developer behind it.