mattrp

I’m guess that’s the reason they never got back to him.

I have a pretty long resume at this point (23 years now in the workforce)... I use the cover letter to try to summarize a few takeaways using very short sentences. It seems like if you don’t hit at least one positive talking point within the first 5 seconds of reading they will never bother reading the rest of the resume. I once actually did step into recruiting at a startup I worked at once. We had about 25,000 emails come in for 20 positions and the recruiting team was going insane trying to sort them. I wrote a few quick filters to draw out interesting resumes but I ended up reading nearly half the resumes... over a weekend. I get that reading resumes is tedious but I just have so little sympathy for these people who have so little attention to detail / ability to structure their work passing judgement on my ability to conjure some algo.

That’s what I don’t get - they spend so much time hiring for these narrow skill sets and then the guy next to you takes longer than five minutes to figure out Jira.

They probably assumed someone else did the debugging. People assume the worst in these situations because they haven’t bothered to learn about the person.

I once worked at a company where hr would go for months saying there are zero candidates for x position. I finally escalated and got access to the database and there were loads of candidates. The issue was they were purposefully holding my req because they were sorting out a budget issue in another department. Even after that got resolved I literally had to go into the database, read them all, and then say this person, that person, etc..completely useless.

I had a recruiter reach out to me recently about a VP role - when I looked her up on linked in seemed legit. But then in the “people also searched for” section there were all sorts of recruiters that appeared fake. I can’t explain it but just seemed like they weren’t real. In any case this one recruiter told me before they’d talk to me I needed to take a “cognitive” test at a third party site. I get testing... but the whole encounter felt like they were just feeding profiles into a machine.

My great aunt married a Norwegian who was a teenager in WWII... he told us a story once that he and some other kids wanted to know what they could do and they were told to carry laxatives with them and drop them into any open container they saw.

Apollo happened when it did because the inflationary excess of our monetary system hadn’t caught up to us yet... but notice that when the bill came due (1970)... Apollo was dead.

I tend to think the answer is somewhere in the middle. The 60s promised fusion vtol cars and what are we talking about now? Electric vtol Uber’s. There’s a lot of similarities between both era that suggests to me we aren’t going to see half of what we can envision as being this “ “ close to reality. At the same time, I think a lot of what we did achieve in the prior era wasn’t complete - we didn’t know the questions to ask that today we take for granted. For example, we didn’t know back then that no one wanted SST’s flying over their house at Mach 2. Sure we could do it but not only did it piss off everyone, the planes themselves really weren’t sustainable. Look at almost any system these days from seatbelts to guardrails to the phones you use. Everything is more integrated, does more and works better than anyone in the 60s could have imagined. The next 40 years is really going to come down to one thing - can we avoid a global conflict that decimates whole regions and generations? If we can manage to do that, I can only imagine that the new paradigms were are only starting to experience now will really have an amazing impact on how we live in the future.

Thank you for writing this. I was the outsider kid who didn’t move on when all of his friends did. My friends were all military brats. Years later I reconnected with one and he didn’t even remember the two years between 8-10 we were inseparable. If there is a flip side, I have family members that can make friends with a brick wall and they are an open book to everyone they meet - charlatans included and they constantly wonder why they are being taken advantage of.

I used to subscribe to the idea that facebook helped you stay close to friends and family. But the issue is most of the friends and family who I want to hear from and wants to hear from me have too much going on to really be active. So the remainder of facebook is peripheral contacts who think that by posting someone's else content (a meme, a political thought, a call to action, whatever) it's somehow valuable to everyone else. I hear marketplace is useful and is supplanting craigslist. But when I look at it, it's full of off-site ads for products I have no interest in buying. Very little of it is actual neighbor to neighbor legitimate items for sale. I deleted the app from my phone over a year ago and haven't really missed it. More importantly, I really fail to see the value that facebook provides.. can you imagine if they'd really pitched to VC's what they've become they'd ever been funded in the first place? "Hi, we are going to attract users who used to forward email spam to all their contacts in the CC line and give them a place online to collect all their BS on one convenient place and then we're going to market all sorts of crap at them."

To be honest, I find it very difficult to argue against the point you're making. I think it is somewhat logical to have SSO be the demarcation between individuals and enterprise, but if I rewind a decade or so, I imagine the line then was HTTPS (which today is totally ridiculous -- everything is/should be HTTPS). If I could go one step further, I think it's completely wrong for SaaS to blunt force security policies on user's accounts (i.e. ACME would like the ability to read/write to your Google profile). I think enterprises should be able to enforce their policies on the SaaS provider rather than the other way around. And to build for that...I think is going to be a little more complex than a typical user/pass. Maybe everything should be a little more expensive?

You just made the case for higher pricing. If it’s that valuable then it’s worth the price to secure it. It’s not that sso costs money to implement it’s that the price is tied to value of the data and the organization security needs.

Edit: I do agree with you that a lot of enterprise pricing can feel like the vendor simply figured out a % of your ebitda and decided it sounded good to them. But in the examples in the article, most enterprise pricing was fairly well documented / published. If you want to really get into some of the bad actors don’t look at the list from the article, look at the enterprise platforms that are easily into the hundreds of thousands per month... I won’t name names but if your an enterprise IT manager you know who they are.

MWC is a 100,000 person French ski chalet... it makes total sense to cancel it. “Show flu” is a thing... so if just the booth workers come back through customs with even so much as an elevated temperature, it will unnecessarily crowd the quarantine facilities for weeks. You may have math on your side but you’re not winning this one.

I don’t know but there’s actually a name for it: food desert [1]. But think about all that we just learning about gut health and mental health.. it kind of makes sense. I think the author does make an interesting point that modern development land-use leaves little for actual buildings, but I think for many cities they have been far more preoccupied with not letting big chains in because they don’t want the sprawl that it’s created a situation where chains end up in the suburban perimeter while the core becomes even more car centric to reach these retailers. In recent years smaller footprint stores like aldi, Walmart’s neighborhood market, and lidl have been able to come into these areas. It’s possible that more last mile delivery like Prime Now could help but I think we have a long way to go before the author’s utopian vision of an ideal city is realized.

1.https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press...

I agree that Santana Row is particularly well done... but I think the author is reminiscing for something more like downtown Palo Alto. What he misses is a few things:

a) Palo Alto can hold onto its old town feel because it’s literally the epicenter of Facebook, google, sand hill road and Stanford university. Some random town in Florida isn’t going to have all that.

B) in places like Florida, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Houston, etc, it’s simply not feasible to constrain parking when a good part of the year no one wants to walk a half mile or more to get groceries.

There are other ways for places to be nice and not look like an early 1900s town center... I’d submit Austin as an example: it’s totally car centered but has lots of intriguing and distinct neighborhoods and plenty of variety while also being quite suburban and housing quite a lot of strip mall retail.

The small downtown can also be very restrictive and expensive for lower income families. For example, in New Jersey, and eastern PA there are quite a few quaint little towns. Oh sure their town centers are full of small restaurants and dog grooming, pharmacies and banks, but conspicuously absent are grocery stores. I know of whole towns with 10-40k residents and not one grocery store. It’s worse in places like Chicago where lack of access to quality fresh produce has been linked to higher rates of crime.

These small towns create high rates of NIMBY-ism and while they do retain their turn of the century charm, I would suggest that it’s just as Hollywood as the new urbanism but in different ways.

I think we can all agree strip malls probably weren’t the best invention and new urbanism isn’t perfect but at least developers are trying to do something appealing rather than just put up another crappy building with nail salons and vape shops.

Second this... even when you’re right you could be wrong. Options just amplify the effect.

Yeah I’ve based out of PHX a few times as well as LAS and would agree. If there was a subscription air charter at either place I would think it would be gang busters but that’s just me.

Not anymore...

My inlaws have lived there part-time for the past 20 years.. I would say people should just read your comment above and save themselves the "shoot-me-now" angst of the article...I wish no one had ever said it would be a good idea for every article to be 2k words or more. In any case, I would also add that anyone looking to hack a cheap physical presence in LA or SF should consider Las Vegas. It's pretty trivial to fly in to either and the cost of the airfare and reasonable if not extravagant lodging in Vegas far outweighs the costs of actually living in either CA market. If something like surfair were to materialize in Las Vegas, I think it would be a fantastic way to commute.

I’m reading the reddit thread below and I’m inclined to say maybe as a permitting organization, there’s not just a place but a critical need for an org like NASA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/f2a1yx/eric_berger_...

But at the same time, how can it accomplish its mission without going on boondoggles like SLS? I just saw an article yesterday about a project they funded for Lockheed Martin for them to explore an SST that doesn’t create loud shockwaves... I guess you could say this falls under the Aeronautics mandate but really? Is this an area of research that needs government funding? Or can they say anything that furthers the understanding of safe flight and NASA’s regulatory mission of private space flight, then its justifiable?

I’ve often wondered why BO hasn’t achieved orbit despite it being public knowledge that Bezos spends a billion / year on it. Other than space being hard, why do think that is?

my first advice is to Approach this as if you are running experiments... you don’t know the outcome beforehand and you’re likely never to know it. A forecast is not a crystal ball and it’s very important both for your survival as well as the company’s never to treat it like one. What you’re doing is creating a set of future benchmarks and then trying to understand actual performance to those bechmarks. So the first step is a mindset. The second step is to build your process so that the forecast gets revised every month. You want a handle on revenue and cash burn.

In terms of creating the prediction, what I recommend is to have everyone involved name all the known potential deals... what will it take to close, what is the timing, what is the revenue, what is their confidence. The idea is to mimic how hurricane forecasts are built... they take everyone’s best model and then show an ensemble of all the tracks a storm could take. That’s the range of outcomes. You need someone to play the pessimist if there isn’t already someone in the group. Once you have an ensemble — ie a range of possible outcomes - you can average them into a single line.. you can weight the inputs and then average, etc...

Finally you need to reconvene and discuss risks, features, Investments, all the moving parts that you’ll need to manage to make this forecast a reality.

Even when you have historical trends to leverage in a statistically generated forecast, you still need to coalesce into action. Will power is what makes predictions a reality... whether you are one month into it or have several years behind you.

As for the mechanics, I recommend a book called the ten day mba by Steven Sillbigier. Don’t attempt to read it cover to cover. keep it as your bible... if you want to go deep into theory, get the McKinsey book on valuation.

Edit: one more thing: never ever accept an assumption because it sounds reasonable. For example, your sales guy says I can close the first two customers in six months, an then the next six months I’ll close four and then the next year I’ll do 12. A lot of people will say, that sounds reasonable, the first ones are always the hardest. I can tell you right now that forecast will fail. Same thing with looking at peer data... if you only look at velocity of the revenue line and don’t accurately assess the factors that contributed to that growth, it’s a guaranteed fail. Never use one estimate, never accept in input because it seems reasonable and never look at a trend without a regression next to it. Many people eyeball trends and it’s amazing how many can see growth in a flat or declining trend. Don’t fall for it!

(Ok that was more than one last thing...

A little tangential but the SLS itself is an attempt to reuse technology off the shuttle... and yet, hundreds of billions later and nothing... the whole concept of technology repurposing is fine on paper... but for some reason NASA can’t even seem to do that right either. It’s a colossal mess...

Not to mention SLS which is just nonsense at this point. As well as the numerous delays on the demo missions to the ISS. This feels to me like an ultimatum to NASA... move the ball forward or get out of the game. I get the sense there is real fear we could lose the idea of ‘space’ if we don’t start showing some progress. As it stands now there isn’t a platform for the moon and there’s not going to be a platform by 2024 unless some really remarkable things start to happen.. I wouldn’t be surprised if Spacex does it but if it does I can’t imagine NASA will have anything other than token participation. Perhaps that is really for the best...

Are you seeking help in constructing the mechanics of a model or in taking an existing model and projecting it into the future? Or both?

I think it’s awesome that you’ve created this list. I have thought about documenting my own ideas for years and never have because I’ve Never felt comfortable with it. It’s not that I think they are that great or that I’m afraid someone will steal them —- Id actually love it if someone did steal one or two. In any case kudos for putting your mind out there for all to see.

So I guess we shouldn’t provide military service exemptions to conscientious objectors either. You either have separation of church and state or you don’t. As a practical matter I’m unaware of any church organization even the Mormons who are ‘killing’ it with the exemption. Very few people give 1% of their income to their church much less a full tithe or anything more than tithe despite the favorable tax treatment. I submit you’re angry about organized religion, the size of the investment fund or both... but neither are a justification to change separation of church and state.

Fair enough I enjoy my relative anonymity here too. The whistleblowers do allege that the profits from investing have not been charitably distributed. But the issue in my meager understanding is not the amounts, it’s whether lds is acting charitably in its totality and I believe that’s fairly undeniable even considering the other controversies mentioned above. But let’s see...

Generally I’m with you but in the case of religion, I think it’s a bad idea to tax one’s belief in God. The key issue here is the state isn’t supreme... just because there is untaxed wealth doesn’t mean it automatically belongs to the government... especially if we believe in separation of church and state.