Yes it’s a lot like going for it on 4th and 1. Statistically you have a better chance of getting a first down than not but no coach on the planet will risk it. In my own experience I worked remote for many years and I was incredibly efficient but I also was outside of the office politicking which was good and bad - for me it was probably more good because honestly the less I’m involved in politics the better. Later when I confounded a startup our mgmt team was 100% remote as a consequence of all having prior worked at a large company with many offices. It was productive but we found ourselves having more frequent and longer off sites to compensate and eventually we did coalesce most employees in one of three locations though many still had the option of remote. I enjoyed it a lot because it prevented work life from becoming too routine and we were still productive.
I think at this point it’s more helpful to think about what individuals and private organizations can do rather than look to a central government organization to solve all of our problems. See Gates Foundation decision(s) over past few days. I also know plenty of people in state orgs and can say I have a lot of confidence in them as well as the many healthcare orgs. I’m not downvoting this despite the obvious political nature in the hopes that by not turning on each other we might instead use HN to educate and drive awareness of what is being done and how we can help.
Agreed - I like fiverr over hiring direct because I don’t really want to be in someone’s rolodex as a customer they are going to call and pester. As for maids, I feel the problem there is you rarely get anyone who is going to do more than feather dust your home. So a “service” isn’t going to radically improve that. As for glasses I really want to like WP but their plastic frames really are subpar. It’s a far better experience to buy off the rack at Costco if cheap is what you’re seeking. For years I would spend $600/year buying zero G from a small boutique until I decided maybe instead I should have five pairs of WP... so I tried that and every single one of them had something I didn’t like.. so one day I found myself in Costco and decided to give that a go and have never looked back. Heh that’s probably indicator #641 I’m turning into an old fart.
I would agree - I managed a team that was mostly Europe and US. Everyone was roughly on par in terms of pay and capabilities and the tz differences were actually advantages. the overlap allowed us to essentially double what could be done in a day. We also had a lot of wfh.. my only issue was I had to keep reminding people they couldn’t check out in meetings. I had one guy who would take calls during meetings and never had a clue what we were talking about. Pretty much everyone did email during meetings... but that’s not just a wfh problem— I had to ask plenty of people in the office to leave their laptops out of meetings. It took awhile but eventually folks paid attention. Personally I’ve worked at least half of my twenty years from home or remote office. I really enjoy being able to mix and match and be strategic with my time.
anyone who looks at my comments on Boeing knows I’m fairly critical. However, it’s probably fair to say anyone with any bonafides in commercial aviation by definition is a Boeing insider since it has either squashed or acquired all of its domestic competition. We talk all the time about banks are too big to fail yet when it comes to defense we simultaneously create projects that only Boeing can bid and look the other way when Boeing acquires companies that might represent an alternative while increasingly taking delivery of weapons systems that don’t work as intended. One doesn’t have to look that deep into history to see scandals like the Air Force tanker which rose all the way to the Supreme Court, or the failed SLS project which has sent so much pork spending to specific congressional districts that Spacex could build something like 300 falcon 9’s instead, to see that Boeing’s relationship with the US government is problematic at its very core. Blaming both parties is surface level equivocation that does nothing. The simple fact is Boeing is too big, they know it and the government knows it and unless we want our defense to be outsourced to foreign ownership, preserving this status quo is quite literally the only thing keeping Boeing from reverse-mergering itself out of this country. We have overlooked our own strategic resources - be it pharmaceutical, manufacturing, telecom, etc, for far too long and have pursued incredibly near-sighted policy objectives to our own detriment. In the spirit of HN, I’ve already gotten too political here but I will say one final thing: don’t equivocate both parties as equal, neither should you be complacent and assume what your party is telling you is the right direction either — there’s more to this issue than simply saying oh let’s arm the regulators with more regulations and vice versa.
I will agree with you 1000% that I really hate getting pawned off. But I don’t think you can draw a particular conclusion from it. A lot of times ceos just want their team to get their arms around things quickly. There’s no reason you can’t
Come back to the ceo and maintain a direct line of contact. I find that often if there’s a particular process for accessing the ceo, it’s much better to learn it and leverage it. I just don’t think there’s much to be gained by getting offended by how someone chooses to organize themselves. Better that than the person who over commits and flakes half the time.
It’s less of a book than maybe an introduction to a framework he uses with his coaching clients. It’s not Hemingway but the key insight he exposed for me was that entrepreneurial parents raise kids with higher rates of depression. I don’t think he did a study to arrive at this conclusion but it was more an observation of people he knew. So he created a way for parents to engage their children using a format called the family board meeting. It’s basically a four hour one on one session doing an activity of the kids choosing without a cell phone involved. Kind of obvious but very hard to commit to when your business needs constant attention.
That makes a lot of sense to be very supportive of your coaches. Maybe also keep it to a small cohort initially... As I’ve meet various gig workers one common complaint is that many feel like there are too many of them competing for too small deals or that they find it difficult to match deals with their specialty and end up passing or getting passed over because there wasn’t a perfect match in skills / career history. Back on the hippa topic... to me just even saying we talk to a psychologist about our kids development has stigma. Like what’s wrong your kids or you... so just even having an account May be a problem for some parents... also I bet quite a few will ask about using fsa dollars (which I assume you won’t be able to take) but maybe something to look into. Stigma aside I bet a lot of employers would pay for part or all of the fees as a perk.
I was a cofounder when rip good times came out. We were not a sequoia company but in hindsight we were really appreciative they published their advice publicly. Our team happened to be at a quarterly offsite when it came out. I remember we fiercely debated whether or not to believe it but we eventually came out of the offsite taking action - we cut founder salaries significantly, cut other non essential priorities, adjusted our forecasts and expectations and had an all hands meeting where we informed our employees that we’d extended our runway by another year and the cuts we’d made were to preserve their roles. Things turned out nearly exactly as sequoia predicted - we had just enough cash to grow the business, keep everyone on board, and get to an exit without raising another round. I’m hopeful coronavirus won’t be as bad across the board but I would strongly think about my alternatives before betting against sequoia.
It seems like you’re being thoughtful about your approach. Another question that comes to mind - how will you curate your providers? I think that’s been a challenge for similar models in other areas - they end up with a ton of providers ... too many initially to serve the customers they have...
The kids love anything by Susan Wise Bauer. The Story of the World audiobooks narrated by her father are in constant rotation in the car and these provide a jumping off point to go deeper into topics. There are a few used booksellers on eBay that sell just about any title for $3.99, so when I see something that is related to a recent topic, I just get it. Magic Treehouse is great too - we found someone selling their entire collection on Craigslist.. occasionally I introduce challenges like how to calculate the orbit of a satellite (we all failed to find the Starlink train but we learned our mistake). We also take lots of field trips. Wildlife is an endless topic of interest... we introduced iPads and raspberry pi’s early on but this was an absolute disaster so right now it’s old school: books, paper, experiences and lots of talking.
The first thing I would say is to resist typing your kids as xyz. I think everyone is genuinely afraid / hyper vigilant of kids who are “on the spectrum.” (As an example)... don’t give your kid a label. Second advice would be don’t evaluate your kids without evaluating yourself. Your kids are a reflection of you. As for books, I can’t say there’s a complete book that I can recommend. At best you find snippets here and there that provide ideas. The best thing we’ve done is connect with a psychologist. The kids don’t see her, actually don’t even know she exists.
Very good to hear that. How do you intend to use ML (I read one of the founders has an ML background)? Also what makes the service different from healthgrades other than facilitating the video call? How do you intend to ensure your providers follow hippa and/or aren’t charlatans? I’m genuinely intrigued... so above aren’t intended to shoot down your business.
As a privacy-conscious parent with five children, all of whom are gifted in numerous ways, we do often speak with a psychologist about how to keep them challenged, how to steer negative behavior into good behavior, etc. I couldn’t imagine not having such a guide at our side in addition to all the books and content we consume as inspiration in our quest to nurture our family. However, I would also caution you - and pardon me for being presumptive about what this service will do, but please don’t run ML on my kids. I really don’t need their lives contributing to mass collection of psycho-data and analysis.
While I do find the back and forth of finding a date to meet one of the most mind numbing tasks one can do, I think the author here is placing way too much importance on this CEO’s actions. Would he still write the same if the ceo used a bot to perfectly impersonate the ceo?
Agreed... I remember during Ebola feeling almost as if we simply gave up trying to stamp every little possibility and instead focused on making sure the right patients made it through the system to get the right care. At the same time it’s a little hard to excuse the lack of measurements or even the ability to determine if the virus is present.
That’s a great term for it. It’s maddening to see it in the enterprise and just downright depressing when it creeps into a startup - like why do you think you’re here? To give enterprise vendors half your ebitda?
Toddlers you say.. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a senior leadership weekly meeting where someone thinks it would be a good idea to assign a senior executive the task of grouping together everyone’s phone plans and deciding policy on who gets the company phone, who gets reimbursed and who is sol.
I think one thing you have to do first is decide what’s really institutional knowledge and what’s really a make-work project designed to appease the people who still get a kick out of playing solitaire. Documenting how to make a Saturn V rocket engine is institutional knowledge, documenting endless workflows that will be stale before you’re finished are not.
It’s actually cheaper and nicer than a golf cart...maybe it would be a big hit in the US just as a replacement for gated neighborhoods / golf communities.
If water treatment plant can't operate because the workers are sick...I would imagine the first step would be similar to a flooded treatment station -- a boil water condition. Provided you have gas/electric to do that.
We can't speculate at this point what kind/likelihood of a civil emergency we might face with this or any other disaster that hasn't happened yet.
However, having been through Sandy where we had 16 consecutive days of no power or heat and a snowstorm with a foot of snow and fouled treatment facilities with boil alerts, here's my recommendations:
1) Hold 10x24x16oz bottles of water and use them in FIFO. When you finish one flat, you buy a new one and put it on the bottom of the stack. It's not that crazy to hold 2 weeks of drinking water in your pantry/garage.
2) In many places around the world, the sink water isn't treated at all. Have some sterilizer solution available for washing dishes but don't risk drinking water that isn't treated
3) peanut butter has a really long shelf life, easy to store, is really cheap, and if you don't have nut allergies, not a bad source of nutrition.
4) figure out the electrical needs of critical devices - phones/tablets CPAPs, air machines, etc. GoalZero is a pretty user friendly brand of solar / battery combos.
5) get a 100W 12V adaptor for your car. If you need to recharge something that isn't USB, you can use your car as a simple generator.
6) be prepared to live without heat or A/C but if you do have power, make sure your filters are clean. Ask your hvac guy to recommend the max level of HEPA your HVAC can tolerate.
7) have squirt bottles with disinfectant in every room with a sink.. not just normal countertop cleaning stuff. Bleach IIRC needs 7 minutes to achieve a maximum log reduction of bacteria / viruses so keep in mind when you're cleaning, its not possible to kill everything, you're reducing the load of bad things over a period of time.
It also doesn’t state what is obvious to those of us who build infrastructure: Germany and Denmark have no way to store wind power so it has no choice but to pay others to take it. Norway is home to one of the worlds largest batteries.. its hydro power. Already cheap, but has the added benefit of being storable for sufficient duration to take german and danish wind power when it suits them (ie when they get paid). It baffles the mind why the danish and Germans don’t use some of their subsidy to invest in storage — but therein lies another catch 22. The lithium needed for that isn’t being mined in sufficient quantities in Europe and 100% of the supply from China is earmarked to autos. There are some jr mining countries spinning up in Europe but it will be awhile before any meaningful impact will be felt. One wonders if by then other storage techniques will be viable. In the meantime, they will be forced to pay the Nordics to take their green energy while supplementing with coal from Poland or succumbing to the siren call of another controversial Russian pipeline.
Thanks for that clarity on the rules. I’m neither upvoting or downvoting... I think the first half of the comment is very well written and something I would have liked to have written myself. The second half, the idea that we must all sit down together and have lunch, I struggle to accept. In my opinion, regardless of part of the political spectrum you are, i don’t think you should have to shed your guiding principles. However, that said, I don’t think your organizing principle should be to get everyone to agree with you or to implement your system as the only system. Just as there are thousands and thousands of plant species and what? Millions of insect species, I think it’s important to reflect on the fact that our individual minds in a way make each of us an individual species. While we may from time to time see beauty in collective acts, humans are not meant to be starlings flying in a well orchestrated flock. I cannot begin to suggest I understand depression but I can say that I resist psycho-labeling what goes on in my mind or in yours. Every thought is a gift.
Walks n talks are great but they aren’t 1:1’s in the way the author is envisioning them. The difference is a walk n talk is something you do when you have unscheduled free time and want to sidestep email for a direct conversation. A 1:1 is More like a weekly postmortem.. you celebrate wins, you figure out how to not repeat mistakes. But from a manager’s perspective, a 1:1 is all about ego management. For example, if I am a ceo, there’s some things I can do in a staff call to resolve conflict and bottlenecks but not much - otherwise I squander the energy of the staff meeting. Instead, I can have 1:1’s starting first with revenue... what are the roadblocks. Outside a 1:1 setting I can’t get the sales manager to get honest with me and own up roadblocks that his/her own doing vs the ones from other departments. From there it’s a cascade of meeting with successive department leads until I’m down to the one guy who owns fixing them all - product. If you’re the manager of a team further down in the org, you don’t have this end to end ownership for the entire business but the theories are the same... organize your week so you’re building a pipeline of issues and then meet with the people most able to resolve them. Doing it in a regular 1:1 session helps isolate egos and creates consistency.. if you’re trying to solve roadblocks that appear/resolve inside that weekly cadence, you’re doing too much of your own employees work for them. Ideally you’re focused on the next major milestone and the one after that.
Good grief man... I’m saying they assumed the candidate phoned a friend for the answer and then fed it back as his own to save his application. I honestly have no idea what happened, no one does... but generally there are no do overs and that kind of sucks given he figured out why they weren’t able to run his code.
These are good questions... i suppose if you’re flying under the flag of the East Valles Marineris Mining Company, your ass belongs to them. But if you charter a private flight to your own homestead well then parder I guess it’s just you, me and this here cosmic ray gun.