mwetzler

The piece starts out by very nicely warning us about the THREE HUGE OUTLIERS but then, surprisingly, doesn't take them out of the remaining analysis. (Well, they sort of do in the "founders that didn't win" part).

Would be useful & interesting to see the bulleted stats list in the first paragraph with averages & medians (with and without the 3 big successes).

I don't think the big takeaway is about how women should act/think.

Part of me is nodding in agreement, but another part is wondering 1) am I (unfairly?) biased against the author due to the story from Horvath and 2) is this another example of a woman being criticised for having a voice? Are we unfairly expecting her to be polite, not powerful and proud? Her husband's post was very proud and he didn't get the same criticism, though I think he did a slightly better job apologizing and focusing his message.

Not criticizing. Just sharing my own mixed feelings.

I agree - the common methods for measuring net promoter (surveys) seem to put a burden on the customers.

I think twitter could potentially be pretty effective if you combine the number of mentions with a sentiment score. But then, it's pretty easy to increase twitter engagement using various tools.

I'm also looking for a good way to measure net promoter, but for another reason -- to quantify it for investors. We hear great customer feedback and get referrals all the time, but don't have a measurement for it. Even though it's true, I'm not sure investors will just believe that "our customers love us!".

Reminds me of Aud which turns your server logs into audio so that you can analyze them the way you listen to a car engine for healthy and unhealthy patterns.

http://dzello.com/blog/2014/01/10/listen-to-your-log-files-w...

PG really only stirs up controversy because he won't admit the fact that we're all biased to some degree. Even women in tech are biased against women in tech. It's natural because pattern matching is natural, and female developers & founders are (currently) rare.

Women _on average_ may very well be better or worse than men in all sorts of ways, but that doesn't mean some of them won't be extraordinary.

We have to be careful about our biases so we don't miss out on the extraordinary ones.

It takes extra work to do this.

For example orchestras (traditionally very male dominated) tried to remove bias from their auditions by having the musicians play behind a curtain. The curtain increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent(!).

Bemoaning may be tiresome, but it can also lead to changes that really do make a difference.

I wonder if YC applications are gender neutral (names removed)?

^ Examples of jokes professionals wouldn't tell in the workplace.

Understanding your company's product, marketing, financials, hiring, and business strategy makes you an _incredibly_ valuable employee (though perhaps difficult to describe with a job title).

An employee like that shouldn't be spending much time ordering food and cleaning. Those things can be outsourced to people who can do them at scale for many companies at once, at a much lower rate.

At my startup we've used ZeroCater (Food for events), HomeJoy (Cleaning), TaskRabbit (Odd tasks), Zirtual (Scheduling meetings, booking flights), and Advsor (Accounting & Billing).

We also have a full time remote assistant that does things like coordinating team outings, ordering new tshirts, researching stuff, spreadsheet jocky-ing, etc, etc. They would also order food for us if we didn't have it provided at our co-working space.

I hope this comment was helpful and not condescending. I do some business ops work myself in addition to writing code and consulting. As the longtime only-female, I too had to deal with the assumptions about my role (outside the company, not inside).

All of these tasks are important and need to happen for a company to run successfully, but they don't all need to be done by an "Office Manager" just because that's how it works at some startups.

This related post "Tech companies, stop hiring women to be the Office Mom" describes "empathy work" and how it has almost always been significantly underpaid.

http://qz.com/47154/tech-companies-stop-hiring-women-to-be-t...

I like the reference to the fact that for a large part of history, many women worked completely without pay doing empathy & ops work full time (mothering families and running ops for households and community groups). As a culture maybe we have some residual beliefs about this type of work (and women's time) being basically free/cheap.

This is great, nice job! I work at Keen IO and we're kind of obsessed with smart device event data. Do you think Spark users would be interested in an API to collect & query all their Spark events? For example we have integrations so that any Stripe or Sendgrid user can collect & query their payment/email events. I could imagine a similar integration for Spark events. We also work with smart devices companies. There could be some really interesting partnership opportunities here. Thanks for sharing your post!

I'm a big fan of MG and this was so great! It really does paint the story in a new way. Thanks for sharing.

Still, David was intent on destroying Goliath. I want our company to be the best at what we do, but that's not the same as wanting to beat and/or destroy Google. I'd like for Google to stick around for a long time, inventing new cars and better internet and whatnot :)

We offer discounts for startups! Email me! michelle@keen.io

Hi! I'm on the Keen IO team. We have a limit around 1000 properties per event.

For small accounts, we don't currently enforce data archiving, so your data sticks around as long as you want it to.

For large volume customers, where storage & querying large data sets becomes a significant cost, we discuss retention requirements when doing the pricing negotiation.

The title was definitely a surprise! We don't see ourselves as David to Google's Goliath, though that title & dramatic shadowy photo might have you believe otherwise. :)

(Note: I work at Keen IO)

Heap is cool! Clicks in JavaScript are just one type of event data. You might also have events coming from your backend servers, mobile apps, smart devices, etc.

A tool like heapanalytics is a great example of something that could be built on top of the Keen IO platform.

The main differentiator is that you analyze heap data using their web interface. Keen IO has a web interface, but we are fundamentally a query API.

You can use Keen IO to build your own custom data views and frontends, to white label analytics for your customers, or to use your query results programmatically.

Everyone is sexist to some degree, even women, even me. We all have unconscious biases because that's the way the human brain works. We do pattern matching. And we currently live in an environment where women are _usually_ not amazing programmers and startup CEOS. Admitting that would add a lot more strength to PG's piece.

For more info and facts on unconscious bias and women in tech:

http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/resources/ncwit_the...

Unconscious bias is the reason a resume with a female name is rated more poorly, even by women.

Don't be fooled by this clever marketing for a scam service! Keen IO is the true market leader in /dev/null as a service! We released in April 2013 and have been serving customers with a 100% satisfaction rating ever since. See "Keen IO releases API for /dev/null" to get the full story and perspectives from industry experts on this robust REST API. Keen IO: /dev/null for modern developers.

https://keen.io/blog/46856249197/keen-io-releases-api-for-de...

Thanks for responding. I wonder if we just have too many friends on HN? We are not asking people to vote. Hmm....

I didn't tell anyone about today's post, although we did tweet about it. Maybe getting too many votes in a short period did it? Or is it the relationships of the voters to my account (e.g. some of the voters have voted for my posts in the past?).

Next post I'll try radio silence on all channels except HN. Will creating a new account help?

Now in a weird position where I need to actively communicate to people not to vote for our pieces... hmm....

Mods: Any tips on why the post was slapped from #30 to #78 in seconds? Are speakerdecks discouraged?

Can someone help me understand what is going on with the mods or the ranking algorithm here? This post was on the front page this morning, dropped from #19 to #50 within in one minute.

Then it reappeared on the front page for a good two hours, now mysteriously dropped from #9 to #50 within one minute.

It's like there is a bot or mod that is flagging it down to #50. I'm beginning to suspect I'm cursed or someone has it out for posts from this domain! Kind of disappointing since I worked really hard on this piece. I've read how the ranking algorithm works but I don't have a voting ring and there is no flame war happening here. Sad face.

That's what the CTO of Stanford Hospital listed as his biggest fear, interview #3 in the series (not in this post, but the one before it).

Thank you!! It's a slow process, but I'd love to make more. Some ideas I have are: Stories of massive growth/scale, Stories of horrific bugs/failures, Stories of mistakes/regrets, Stories of introspection (realizing something about yourself that changes the way you approach work). I'm particularly interested in stories of conflicts and mistakes -- I feel like people don't share them enough and they can be really fascinating, valuable, and relatable.

Love the post... and stripe webhooks! Integrated them with Keen IO in about 60 seconds and even made a (perhaps overly enthusiastic) blog post about it. https://keen.io/blog/48628875285/integrate-stripe-and-keen-i...

Might want to checkout Zipfian Academy if you're in the bay area! http://zipfianacademy.com/

Hmm... that does make your data collection tricky. Ideally you have something that captures events as they happen, in a nice format, rather than waiting on summary report views.

Looks like you already built an API similar to ours, but if you ever reach scale/maintenance/availability bottlenecks then check us out.

Most of our customers use charts that query in realtime when the page loads or the user adds a filter or whatever, but batching reporting like you describe is a way to optimize the page load time.

Generally we want to help developers before they already built the solution themselves. I think your homegrown solution is probably exactly what you need right now to validate your product in the market. When you want to invest more in your architecture for improved performance, scalability, or reliability, then you can consider building v2.0 on Keen IO :)

That's awesome! This isn't really a "Big Data" problem - dental transactions don't happen in the scale of billions per month. However, the transactions themselves are very valuable for the dentists --- that's great for you! You can provide insight without having to crunch a zillion data points.

This is an example of an industry vertical analytics solution. Our hypothesis is that analytics products will be created to support all kinds of use cases like this (insurance analytics, manufacturing analytics, distribution analytics, etc). We want Keen IO to be the platform on which people build those solutions.

The way we can help you is to first make it easy for you to reliably collect data from all your dentists (with client libraries). Then we expose all that data, and of our analytics capabilities (e.g. queries), by REST API. You can log into Keen IO and create a line chart, then copy and paste the javascript right into your site. Now you can build a completely white-labeled website for your dentists, while we take care of storing and querying your event data. Our scoped API keys will allow you to secure the data so a given dentist can only see data for her offices. You can also create an internal dashboard for your team so you'll able to do analysis across all the dentists. Hopefully you'll discover industry trends and benchmarks that you can use in marketing reports or to resell to the dental industry (assuming your dentists allow this!). I bet they would like to know how they compare to other dentists...

Anyway, this is too much fun. Let me know if you want to brainstorm more!

Agree! My personal experience: our customers at Keen IO constantly demand better visualizations and many expect a traditional analytics frontend like GA. However... our highest value customers pay for our API capabilities, not our line charts. Storage and querying at massive scale is the hard part and that is worth thousands of dollars a month, not tens or hundreds.

Stunning visualizations and a better web experience are definitely something we want to do when timing allows, but so far our true customer value is in the backend and our APIs.

I think there is definitely an opportunity to help companies understand their GA data, but our company Keen IO is proof that Big Data is not too fat for startups. We're finding a big opportunity in helping developers build custom analytics backends and white-labeled analytics. We've found the big bucks are made supporting customers with truly big data challenges. We can provide the scalability and reliability that would be arduous and expensive for them to build in-house.

It's tricky because you don't want the visitors clicking away and getting distracted reading the New York Times. You want them to stay on the site and read about your product in your own words :)

Support requests should be treated as opportunities to make a positive brand experience. Even if this person doesn't become a high paying customer, they might become an advocate. Perhaps they overhear a conversation about your product and say - oh I know <company> - they are so friendly and helpful!

If your support is good enough, people will even tweet about how amazing you are. It's hard to pay for advertising that effective!

If you're looking for a case study, checkout Zappos history!