ripberge

It's basically a SASS eCommerce app. Kind of an enterprise class OLTP solution, but with pretty unusual traffic bursts and due to what we're selling very high DB contention. We test with 100,000 concurrent users, have achieved about 10,000 orders per minute--much more than our credit card gateway (Stripe) will allow us to process. There are some rough edges here and there, but I've experienced just as bad and sometimes worse with AWS.

Can't speak to the Azure Resource Management API's but I've had a very different experience with Web Apps, Azure SQL, Storage, Traffic Manager. Other than a few short-lived bouts of missed writes into Service Bus and Cosmos (their worst product, IMO) the platform has achieved 100% uptime for us for several years. Pretty amazing. From what you're describing I'm guessing you're REALLY not their average user and they de-prioritize quality on your use cases. Probably better off on another platform if you can help it.

What is this method of transaction? Credit cards?

Enjoyed reading this article, all valid points. However, the one thing that stood out to me in this area was how light I was in effective principles of management and leadership. As a CTO of an organization of more than a handful of people you eventually "get things done" largely via other people rather than being hands on yourself. Had to read a lot of Harvard Business Review to gain the skills and confidence for that. Just like programming, there are indeed tangible skills to learn. It's not just common sense and you're not just born with it.

Longtime Stripe user and did about a year long stint with Adyen. Stripe beats Adyen on ease of integration, ease of using the back office, chargebacks, etc hands down.

Adyen had a better story for omni-channel commerce with card present, but they made us integrate with COM. COM! Apparently they have card present readers coming out that allow you to send some JSON.

In the end after hundreds of hours invested in it, we ditched Adyen. We did have it running in production, BTW. Their pricing was not any cheaper than we got from stripe with interchange plus.

If a key was indeed stolen, they must have stole the keys to the exchange's wallet, not a user's wallet. I heard in the press conference they don't have a multi-sig wallet so all it took was one key and not multiple keys.

You don't have anything vested at all after 4 years that you could exercise now? That seems unusual to me.

Sounds like equity in this company is really not worth that much because the company has yet to find a viable foothold after 4 years. If no investor will pay a reasonable amount for the equity, why do you believe it is worth anything? The ICO seems like a move out of desperation.

My advice would be to look for another opportunity while you're still gainfully employed. You may get into another opportunity with true growth potential.

Still long on bitcoin, but also wouldn't be surprised if it lost 70% of its value in short term.

He does bring up some great points regarding transaction throughput and the team productivity.

It seems like lightning network is the tool to get a lot of cheap, fast transactions done via bitcoin and turn it into a really useful viable currency.

However, that has taken a long time just to get to test mode. Much of the fate of bitcoin is tied to that github repository and pull requests. There has never been another open source software project with this much money riding on it. Can this team continue to deliver value?

There are other concerns like deflationary spirals, volatility, etc., but my bet on bitcoin is largely a bet on the dev team and whether or not useful pull requests get created & merged and what that velocity is.

If this is the financial world you want, you just need a government database (ledger) of who has what currency and an API. Would be a lot simpler than blockchain which is designed to be de-centralized. Using blockchain for this is putting a square peg in a round hole.

Lighting network channels don't require you to trust the other party.

Lighting network is also distributed, you don't need a direct channel between you and another party to pay them. You just have to find a route.

That’s also a sign that bitcoin could become the worlds most popular currency someday. Recognition and interest need to become ubiquitous.

What you are describing is an A/B test of a price, not typically what industry calls "dynamic" or "variable" pricing. Amazon tried A/B testing prices and caught hell for it. They no longer do it, but they will do dynamic pricing.

Same experience. Everything works great except for Bluetooth

Agreed regarding AWS being a non-factor. If any tech service gets credit here it's YouTube. They also leveraged ad-tech for precise targeting, re-targeting that was not possible in a pre-Internet era. Once they were doing very well online they were able to jump in with the big boys like P&G doing traditional media buys in TV, radio, etc.

I think that is the key here, Internet media helped them disseminate their message very rapidly.

I would also argue, easy access to capital was very important. Once that original video went viral, they had to really pour on the online ad-spend to acquire customers. Seeing as how their customer acquisition costs are high, the more customers they got, the more money they lost every month! Capital is key!

They were wildly successful before they were on AWS. I believe they started off on magento, then drupal before writing their own software (once they were having a lot of success).

They don't use Amazon for fulfillment. They used some other 3PL's and are now leasing and running their own distribution centers. In the beginning, Dubin was packing those razors up in his living room!

Source: founder a close personal friend.

Do you have some links to these performance comparisons for apps?

Not so fast. These are getting formed in Delaware, but I believe if you operate in another state you have to register and may be subject to their taxes.

In California there is a "gross receipts tax" based on revenue for an LLC. Do over a million dollars? Pay $6,000 in LLC Fees. Fine for a software co or a law firm not a huge deal. Ecommerce can be a crazy low margin business though and many Stripe customers could get hurt.

http://www.sandiegobusinesslawyerblog.com/2013/05/california...

I have a Lenovo X1 carbon and I re-installed Windows to remove all the Lenovo crapware after I bought it. Windows is easy to download and install now. It will save your license, but blow away everything else. It only takes about 30-45 minutes. But I do agree, this is totally ridiculous that you have to do this.

I did buy an MS Surface and it was by far the best PC experience I ever had, however they don't make a keyboard cover with a touch-stick, that's the only reason I went back to a ThinkPad.

I could see this one coming a mile away. I worked with manufacturers overseas for a few years and I would just slap my label on products and mark them up 200%.

Those factories should be able to sell directly to the consumer via the Amazon marketplace, but there's a lot of hurdles for them. And they're certainly not equipped to run their own Shopify store.

If Amazon can reduce this friction (and I think they can) I expect the prices of a lot of commodity types of goods (like salad bowls or bike pumps) to drop significantly.

Not true. Roger Goodell made $44 million in 2013. Kind of shocking you can do that and still be considered a non profit.

The big question is, if you're a Chinese factory and you want to sell directly on Amazon's marketplace, don't you still need an "importer" of record? I do recall hearing about this mysterious Samuel Shapiro Co as well. Is that going to change? If the goods are sitting in Amazon's warehouse, does the Chinese factory still legally own them? Who gets sued if they're defective?

It's hard to say, Stripe (or any other merchant account) may be blocking some charges, but you really don't have visibility into why a charge was blocked.

Regardless if they are blocking a lot or a little, they all let way too many fishy charges go through. They are just not incentivized to police fraud because in e-commerce its you who are on the hook for the charge back, not the bank or credit card company.

You cannot rely on your merchant bank (Stripe or anyone else) to do your fraud protection. You will get eaten alive.

Wouldn't be surprised if Dollar Shave Club brings some legal action against Dollar Beard Club.

They have copied them to such a degree with their name and their advertising it is creating confusion in the marketplace. And that's kind of a litmus test for trademark infringement from what I remember in my business law classes.

As someone who deals with several hundred thousand dollars a year in online credit card fraud, I would advise you to check out sift science or Kount. It's easy to integrate and is vastly superior to the checks you have and the other suggestions in this thread. We have killed numerous credit card rings with this. They typically go somewhere else that's an easier target now.

Been using Stripe for years. There is no more fraud protection there than any other merchant credit card account.

How can you be working just as efficiently as Western counterparts when you're napping? I don't know about being a lawyer, but in my own experience it is impossible for me to program effectively after about 10 hours. Wouldn't surprise me if there are rare exceptions, but generally the human body just does not handle that well.

Agreed. I really love coffee and the Starbucks Ethiopian Yirgacheffe made on the clover is one of the best cups of coffee I've ever had.

It consistently out-performs all the other extremely high end coffee houses I have been to. There is an Intelligentsia in my neighborhood where several of the baristas have coffee beans tattooed on their arms and hands as a symbol of their dedication to the craft, yet they cannot produce a better cup of coffee made by this machine at than the "McDonalds" of coffee houses. Pretty surprising.

Having found using Azure websites to be incredibly easy to deploy and scale .NET MVC apps. Fully integrated with Git.

Having done a little bit of work on stuff like this for Fandango a long time ago I learned a little bit about their view of customers from their marketing folks.

Their average customer is a person that sees all the big blockbuster movies. They are not discerning about what they see and they are not critical viewers.

Comparing these people's reviews to the professionals on Rotten Tomatoes is a little silly. As mentioned, Fandango has no motive to reduce the ratings, the more "must see" movies there are, the more money they make.

edit having read more of this article now, I see the issue with Fandango's rounding. Pretty lame.

^ This

What if that default browser was IE and they're obviously trying to get people off of that because it's now legacy?

Should they only change the default browser to edge if it was IE before?

Doesn't seem fair to them...