mblevin

In my experience it's neither greed nor obfuscation, but rather along the spectrum of ignorance, cash conservation paranoia, and and/or a misplaced sense of justice.

Ignorance in the case of not knowing it can be done - many "startup" lawyers are operating with a playbook written in 1996.

Cash conservation in the sense of "holy schmoly I'd have to pay $X,XXX upfront in taxes to cover their option purchases???"

And "justice" in the sense of "well I'm taking a personal risk as a founder, so if you're not all in with me then suck it and your options will just go back in the pool when you quit."

I don't think treatment is unnecessary at all - I assume if he was on medication he'd be gainfully employed writing code somewhere, and potentially producing even more interesting things.

Rather I was highlighting that individuals possessing a certain artistic talent, potentially correlated with propensity for mental illness, when untreated may produce incredible works of art as a side effect.

I'm not at all saying that him or society has a net benefit from that at all, but rather it's a second-order effect that is quite different from what we often observe (and stereotype) in terms of schizophrenia and mental illness.

Purely an observation vs a judgment.

Throughout the span of modern history, we've had gifted creators whose talent is at a minimum intertwined if not completely predicated on their mental illness. Whether it was Van Gogh or Kurt Kobain, we've seen it consistently.

Terry is potentially one of the first if not the only creators of this type using a completely digital medium.

TempleOS is essentially a 10-year art project.

What data are you ingesting to build similarity and how are you creating your index? All the searches I did are way off.

For example, when I put in my company - Indicative - you identify us correctly, but I don't see any other web/mobile analytics companies, only a bunch of completely unrelated companies - everything from digital coupons to banner ad A/B testing.

You're talking about two different dimensions.

Enterprise and consumer run along one axis (B2C vs B2B), self-serve vs custom deployment on the other axis (low friction vs high friction)

Much of the innovation we've seen in B2B has not just been the consumerization of the interface but also the move to self-service models.

It's breathless reporter-speak, and it's often not actually intentional or conscious. Many reporters truly believe they are uncovering Woodward and Bernstein level stuff every time they hit "publish".

This is less about THE future of FB rather than a bet on ONE possible outcome - transaction monetization on a many-to-many network, vs continued growth of their highly targeted advertising product.

On the internet just like in real life, someone has to be selling something to somebody.

When you're a "free" service (e.g. your users are your product), you can either facilitate transactions and take a cut (e.g. payments, in-app upgrades/stickers/etc), or you can direct the user firehose to someone (advertising, B2B services, data, etc). Facebook has predominantly been successful up until now doing the latter.

Messenger is a both a hedge against declining app/website engagement numbers and continued bottoming out of CPM/CPC for digital ads, as well as a bet on a Westernized version of WeChat and LINE have done, particularly in payments.

Moving comments down completely can break the threading - e.g. you could have a highly upvoted parent comment with a single child comment that was heavily downvoted. You can't move the child any further down the tree.

You CAN indicative that the comment has been downvoted - the fading accomplishes that objective.

Interesting development for a lot of the in-database visualization players (Chart.io, Looker, RJMetrics etc) - a lot of the older and weaker players have depended on lock-in and inertia to keep them around; this squarely puts them in a bake-off similar to what's happening in the hosted analytics / customer communication space.

I, for one, welcome our new database overlords.

Segment integration has driven more refugees from other analytics platforms than a lot of other channels

More competition in this space is better - let's compete on value for our customers, not lock-in and hostage-taking.

This is an interesting and unusual (but not unprecedented) move that actually aligns interests.

99% of founders have a goal (it may not be the primary or secondary, but trust me it's there) to be "F you" rich. Maybe 99.9%.

This move doesn't make either of the founders remotely close to that. If the founders checked out now, they wouldn't be able to retire - they certainly won't worry about paying for college for their kids, but they're sipping pina coladas on the beach either.

Taking "just enough" money off the table de-risks the whole operation for everybody. The risks in a startup this size are

a) Founder fallout / burnout

b) Running out of enough runway to really scale the biz and make the right long-term product investments (being cash-flow positive doesn't mean you can do this - plenty of breakeven startups out there just treading water who are one bad product cycle or market shift away from biting it)

c) Inability to hire and retain the right people

This helps tackle all three.

Win-win for everyone.

Remote work online is absolutely going to be his best bet, and it will pay better.

Check out:

https://weworkremotely.com/

http://hnhiring.com/ (search for "remote")

http://remotenation.co/blog/top-5-sites-for-finding-a-remote...

"Warlord" implies a military bent. Many of the worst culprits are bureaucrats - spending most of their time wearing $10,000 suits while being wined and dined by Western leaders and skimming millions into the accounts of their inner circle. Power is not always held by physical force.

As someone who has spent extensive time in West and Central Africa, poverty is as much a second order (or third or fourth) effect as the Ebola outbreak, and much harder to fight. System fragility (whether it's relative to disease, famine, or other natural disasters), is a function of poor leadership more than anything. What is scary is that there is plenty of evidence that government to government aid does more harm than good, and Western attempts at fixing the problems only make things worse.[1]

[1]See any of Bill Easterly's writing - http://williameasterly.org/

The goal was free marketing via the press who zeroed in on what appeared to be an ongoing SV story - Bubble 2.0 + gender imbalance + hapless engineer stereotypes.

And by any measure, it was outrageously successful.

Two words: Double opt-in.

As simple as it seems, that is the primary driver of the success of Tinder, helped generously by a smart on-campus initial seeding strategy for the customer base.

Every other dating site allows members to contact other members at the initiating member's will. All it takes is a few people with a dearth of tact and an overabundance of time to completely blow up (mostly women's) inboxes.

Basic free-rider problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

Congrats guys. As a Segment partner, we love that people can "take the Pepsi challenge" in terms of other analytics platforms. Helps prevent lock in and forces companies to continue to push value and differentiation vs relying on "ugh I guess we'll keep XYZ because ripping out the integration is such a pain"

As a former M&A guy and later a founder - It's not just that your interests aren't aligned in terms of financials or IP, your timelines aren't aligned and your desired outcomes aren't aligned.

There is ZERO hurry with a lot of BigCo acquisitions - there are layers and layers of board approvals, analysis, opportunity costs, competitor research, etc.

There may not be any actual interest in an acquisition of people or technology, but rather a curiosity about the space - e.g. "what are smart and hungry people in X space capable of actually building?" or "what does technology Y in the wild actually look like?"

It's all fun and games for the BigCo but can absolutely kill a startup with delays and 180 degree turns on the product roadmap.

That's precisely why we price on a per-user basis at Indicative (https://www.indicative.com) and not on a per event basis.

What you described is a lot of work to build and maintain and very brittle. We've had quite a few customers switch to our platform from Mixpanel that were doing the same thing - aggregating data or sampling.

The problem with either is that you basically blow up your user-level data (e.g. John Smith doesn't have the right activity history), you will miss potentially important trends that are statistically significant that only appear over time, and you limit the type of analysis you do by "property stuffing", particularly around cohorts and retention.