petenixey

Straight into my top 10 favourite HN comments of all time

I’m not sure this answer is as true as you imagine. You extract money via a sale to then invest it and create a revenue stream. Which you potentially already have in the original business. It’s just it was invested in your business v someone else’s.

The question of whether to sell it is a function of how much money you need in a lump sum, how precarious or stable your business is and how much cash it’s throwing off. And of course of diversification.

It’s not defacto true that you need to sell it to realise its value though

Agreed - not least recruiting Matz which I thought was a huge coup

Disclaimer - I know the founders and they're a really good crew. Super solid background in business and really care about creating a great product.

The business model for this is all based around providing pensions / pension brokering. Since all UK businesses have to transition to providing pensions over the next few years there's a huge opportunity in helping make it easy and painless and that's what the guys behind Charlie are focussed on.

Sorting out pensions is going to be a massive headache for both businesses and employees so there's a huge window for a startup to take that pain away and make it all seamless. They've got lots of companies using it already and it's very well built and well funded so I think they're in a great spot.

Will be interesting to see how they compete against Xero or perhaps integrate with them but in a pure HR/pensions play there's a lot of room to make a swoop

hey - I'm just interested how much your comment resonated with the HN crowd. Do you mind telling me how many upvotes you got for this comment bsharitt?

Super impressed to see how far David and the team have come. I remember talking with him down the road from my flat three years ago about the inkling that Zesty was then. I remember when Chris first joined him and they showed me the first screenshots of the mobile app in a bar in London before they hotfooted it off to San Francisco and now they're raising $17,000,000. A pretty amazing ride. Congrats guys.

I've been using this now for a few days and it's freakishly good at its knowledge of people. You fear that it's going to be a bit astrological but then you try it on some of the people you know and it's incredibly on point (and the advice varies a lot).

Very impressed.

This looks technically strong but I'm interested in what the other use cases would be - why would you want this?

You pay to go on the tube. You can choose not to. That makes you a customer of the tube.

Far better surely that such a system is designed in mind that someone might choose not to use it than that they'll get whatever they're given. I'm not sure why you would be outraged by this.

It's kind of crazy to think that the platform-side doors will increase service capacity by removing the ability for people to commit suicide in front of trains.

The frequency with which there is "a passenger under a train" must have a tangible effect on tube capacity.

Shanee, I saw this and was immediately trying to figure out how I could email it to you. Then I saw the URL :) Nice work getting it on HN!

I agree. It's so strange now that I will often make references to Joel or his essays in talks and no-one will know who I'm talking about. I always have to explain that back in the day there were two big software essayists - PG and Joel. No youngsters knows Joel's stuff now - the internet's great at getting you today's news, yesterday's tends to get lost underfoot.

Joel if you're listening please come back to blogging. You're a great writer and I think you've got such an utterly different perspective on things now after having done SE and Trello that it would be a massive waste for you not to share it back with the world again.

Slate is hammering on such a huge problem in organisations. Spreadsheets are still the programming tool of the masses and there really aren't good debugging tools for them.

I'm really interested to see where this goes. Nice work guys.

Replying here because I can't go any deeper...

@jacquesm You make a good point. I wanted to show that even a product as tremendously successful as Basecamp can still find local minimas where nobody wants it. However as you say, I'm not sure I actually made that very well so have cut those paragraphs.

I literally just added a paragraph in to clarify that. I'm not sure I understand your question though, could you rephrase it?

Perhaps I didn't express it very well but I was actually making exactly the opposite point. That 37Signals is excellent at marketing but had they not been they might have never discovered the niche for Basecamp.

Marketing doesn't have to be an expensive business. Startups are in a great position to beget high quality PR and to do guerrilla promotion. Many many fail even to do that and in so doing also fail to find their natural markets.

I think that the premise of Hubspot is similar but also that it's way overpowered for SMBs.

FWIW I've seen exactly the same confusion that you describe in small businesses. I worked with the Yellow Pages for a while and went out in the field with their sales guys. They confirmed that most SMEs only think about advertising when the Yellow Pages sales girl walks through the door each year.

I would guess that a plug 'n play - put money in, get customers out for SMBs would do incredibly well. I'm not sure what it would take to deliver it but even if there is a service that's out there that does this, most SMBs do not know about it.

FWIW I agree with all the UX feedback but think that the name's great. I wouldn't change it. Also you've got brand equity in it now it would be hard to argue that with zero marketing budget you could outdo it at this stage (plus it's great :)

Best of luck with it, great story!

Slow is so more infuriating - as perfectly illustrated by this Oatmeal...

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/no_internet

I was just thinking the same thing as I re-read my comment. It is a false dichotomy and it was badly phrased.

The reason I asked it though is that if this is being used as a tool then it takes away from the real problem. I have no doubt that there are a lot of women in technology have experienced and do experience sexism and that is a very bad and sad thing

However, the amplitude and focus of how this story played out (in places as far as the British Sunday papers) and focussed on institutional sexism seems to be very different to the facts portrayed in the report. Such harassment and psychological pressure is of course terrifically difficult to document and I do know that there could be several different backgrounds that fit the report but there is still quite a distance between the two.

So the reason that I asked the question is that if this is the case then it's a massive disservice to those who are feeling the effects of genuine sexism and weakens their voice. I suspect that that was the net effect of what happened in the Sendgrid case and I think that is a very sad thing.

A lot of the press I saw about this case focussed on allegations of sexism.

However reading the release, the gender of the injured party seems to be independent and unrelated to the injustices which relate instead to the apparently inappropriate behaviour of TPW's spouse and her unsanctioned involvement in the company.

Sexism is a highly incendiary issue in this community. How did a case which apparently was not about sexism come to be so closely related to it? Is the report from Github incorrect or was sexism used to market this to the watching population?

joshdance is right. I'm not undecided as whether it's obnoxious but I wanted to see how it worked out as a way to encourage sharing. I'd not seen it done before and so I wanted to experiment.

FWIW so far it's not massively affecting sharing about 5x'd the rate at which people follow me on Twitter.

I have to agree with that Mark. However there is (or a least should be) a difference between writing something and committing something. It can be hard to hold a manager off when you've got "functional code that's still a bit rubbish" but getting to that stage first before going over the top can (in my experience) massively accelerate development

Being around other high quality founders. Having done YC I would say that that is by far the best takeaway from it and I think every other alum would say the same.

Good quality founders give you access to experience and perspective that you simply cannot find elsewhere and a value that no amount of blog reading can substitute.

An incubator is definitively only as good as the founders in it (which presents an obvious catch 22) and EF has managed to attract some incredibly high quality applicants.

The EF program is too young for a large number of those applicants to yet have become experienced founders per-se but in terms of quality of people and focus on engineering, EF is streets ahead of anything else I've seen in London.

FWIW it's also far, far harder to build a quality business solo than it is if you surround yourself with other people who are also doing well and pushing you to do better. You are as they say the average of your five closest friends.

Startup founding is not really an innate skill, it's about getting better at the plethora of different skills you need to found and lead a company.

What really makes a good startup founder is a prior startup founder. Ergo the more you pump into the system, the better the founders you eventually precipitate will be.

All founders are muppets at the start. The key to becoming good is doing it and then doing it again.

Thanks Patrick. I guess I'll try some sweet talking.

The problem though is that if there is even a chance a service will be shut down (with a year's notice or otherwise) then on a financial basis alone, the cost savings up to that point will be drowned out by the switching cost.

I agree entirely with @bcantrill's comment. I look at Google's PaaS services with the very real concern that they may be switched off or changed at any time.

The reality of this is not just that it will have a financial cost but may well deal a mortal blow to the business. Unless Google makes a long term implicit (big customer) or explicit (rock solid 5-year SLA) commitment to these services they're just too risky to build a complex business on (unless it's a business which is enabled by the marginal cost savings).

This is purely anecdotal however I've been doing Rails dev (and prior to that Javascript, PHP and even Matlab) for 14 years and I have only a vague grasp how most of that list works.

That's not because I'm lazy or scared or even disinterested. I've exhaustively learned everything about anything that what I do involves and how most of what it touches works as well. However the simple truth for me has been that I've never worked on things that needed to know about the things you're talking about.

I constantly do need to know more about the fundamentals of the systems I actually work with - Rails, Angular, HTML, caching, Node etc. I'm sure there will come a point when I need to know more about some of those things too.

However there is a tonne that I don't know even about the things that I need to know about and I will always invest my time in learning those things. That's why I would always focus interviews on the languages and frameworks that someone actually uses. Those may be the ones you describe but for plenty of developers may well not.

(sorry for sidetracking the excellent piece but...)

When I examine the ~13,000 hours I've spent programming I find it hilarious that interviews should centre around algorithmic problems. I've been guilty of it myself and failing FizzBuzz is definitely a true negative but it's so little of a true positive it's not even funny.

What I would really love to know about you as a candidate is:

- do you know how to actually name functions and variables well (unbelievably important)

- do you know your chosen languages and frameworks well enough to avoid cack-handedly reinventing them on paid time

- do you understand how to code an application that someone else (possibly just you) will quickly understand on coming to it cold in 18 months time

- do you understand the trade-offs between features and maintenance, the technical debt that features, designs and toys incur and when to invest in them and when to avoid them

- are you diligent and careful and do you check and re-check your code or just chuck it in the mix for other people to fix

- do you actually do real work for at least four hours each day

- do you take the time to write up the things you've done and share decisions and architecture with the rest of the team

- does your addition to the team on average make your team mates become better or worse coders

- do you understand the exquisite balance between too much testing and too little

In 13,000 hours I have had to wrestle with the consequences of O(n) complexity or binary tree search algorithms approximately NO TIMES.

I did not mean to sidetrack Rob's excellent, excellent piece on finding a job in Silicon Valley however I did want to take the opportunity to state the things that I have empirically found as a professional developer to actually matter.

I donated earlier today and I wish you the very best.

Please also don't feel bad about taking advantage of this opportunity at the top of Hacker News and add a clear link in at the top of your blog post saying "You can donate here".

It's hard for someone scanning to see that they can donate and while there's a time and a place for being shy it would be a shame to lose out on the opportunity you have here.

Very best of luck (and please do clearly add the link) Peter