siruva07

It's a tricky balance.

I'm building this myself with a product currently only in English in a Spanish speaking country, for speakers of both, so it's top of mind.

IMHO, the automatic detection being wrong is less of an issue with a greater ease of language selection.

That's a great point.

In that case, I'd suggest the first two letters of the language, an "En" for English, an "Es" for Spanish, a "De" for German, etc.

Super sleek!

A minor feedback for the marketing page.

I’m an English speaker currently in Mexico City. The webpage first opened in Spanish based on my location.

It only took a few seconds to figure that I could change the language just above the footer, but my UI recommendation would be to put the location/language switcher next to the upper right sandwich (I’m on mobile) in a circle with the flag of my default country/language.

That would be much faster to find and have the added benefit of displaying how many countries and languages Stripe works in.

The same observations are made on container deposits and recycling rates in the USA.

There are 10 states in the United States with container deposit legislation.

The US overall container recycling rate is ~ 33%, while states with a $0.05 container deposit laws have a ~70% average rate of container recycling.

Michigan is over 90% as its deposit is $0.10.

So why don’t more states have “bottle bills?” Because Coke, Pepsi, and the beverage industry oppose it

https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/regulations/article...

Most gig workers should be given the opportunity to become franchise owners, not employees and lose their independence.

That could also solve the equity discrepancy, and give the workers real ownership upside.

How not to write cold emails to investors -- lessons from a serial founder whose companies have raised $150MM+.

TL;DR Don't chase. Be chased.

1. Don't write cold emails to investors. You automatically give the investor the upper hand by chasing them. It's counter intuitive, but it comes off as desperate. VCs write checks into companies that they have a fear of missing out, or that other VCs are backing, not those that end up in their inbox (e.g. Sacca & Pinterest: https://twitter.com/sacca/status/620344394189647872?lang=en)

2. Take the time that you would have spent emailing investors and build product. Get traction.

3. Get investors to email you.

Maybe not. Conceivably, everyone could be on payroll as contractors except the founder.

Atmospheric Water Generators

I mean IPO’d with one employee - the founder

Has there ever been a one-wo(man) SaaS founder to take a company public?

"Take away the goalie’s eyes. If he can see it, he’ll stop it."

One heckuva instigator, NY Ranger Sean Avery, figured this out in the 2008 playoffs against NJ Devils Martin Brodeur.

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec_2oKWe2Gw

The day after, the NHL made a rule that makes it illegal for a player to stand in front of a goalie and wave his or her stick in the goalie's face. Dubbed "The Sean Avery Rule," it results in a 2 min unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.

And yes, this play still has me riled up! :)

Great ideas and spectacular visuals. Good luck finding a new position!

From the title of the post, I thought he launched his own VC firm. FWIW It's a good name.

Got it. Looks like I pulled my figure on a quarterly basis which syncs with this annualized math.

FB is on the high end of ARPU. Most other services are cents to low dollars.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/facebook-towers-over-rivals-...

Since Twitter has effectively moved the default away from chronological order, what is really the purpose of a retweet? An upvote is naturally a positive interaction for “suggested tweets my followers should see”

A time or engagement based restriction would prevent this, i.e. having 3-5 minutes to edit the tweet, at which point the edit button is locked. Revision history would still show. "Undo Send" a la Gmail, but for tweets.

<sigh> I hear you. But Twitter is an incredible service. From the Arab spring to people like @balajis who broke COVID (for me at least) before major news networks.

The only interactive we have as users is positive (a heart or retweet) vs negative (thumbs down on Youtube, downvote on reddit).

I think a broken heart, </3, essentially as a downvote, could do a lot to make Twitter more of a community that rewards and punishes, rather than just allows people to exist in their own eco-chamber. The politicians of the last month would have likely seen way more downvotes / broken hearts than favs and retweets, and that might have done something for them personally...it's at least worth a test if anyone at Twitter reads this :).

Why does an edit button not make sense for a service like Twitter? How would it be abused?

Deleting and reposting hurts and would eliminate engagement statistics.

From a product experience, edited tweets, similar to Slack, could show an "(edited)" that when clicked on let's a user see the version history. That way, it can't be abused, but does allow for minor typos (e.g. https://twitter.com/sir/status/1353737949729468416)

Excellent acquisition. Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service.

Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.

Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).

It's almost a running joke, up there with Daft Punk playing at the trash fence, that Twitter just won't release an edit button. With a move towards paying subscribers, maybe Twitter will listen to its real customers -- content writers -- rather than advertisers.

Reverse osmosis is wasteful. The next goldmine is atmospheric water generation. The atmosphere is the largest untapped reservoir of clean water on Earth, and mother nature has already desalinated the water through evaporation. Far less energy intensive and wasteful to condense the atmosphere than clean water by R.O.

Similar values in Judaism.

Maimonides, the Jewish Philosopher, formulated a list of eight levels of giving, correlating to the degree to which the giver is sensitive to the needs and feelings of the recipient.

The second highest level is giving anonymously, where the recipient does not know the giver and vice versa. Receiving mutually anonymous tzedakah takes much of the sting out of being on the receiving end.

The highest level is helping someone become self-sufficient.

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/256321/jewish...

I think atmospheric water generation at scale is the solution

The incentive is to start pricing water appropriately. When water is priced appropriately it will be valued. When it is not priced appropriately, it is wasted and misused.

We should treat water the same way because water is a human right, a commodity, and a resource. This discussion is prominent in the early chapters of Planet Water (https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Water-Investing-Valuable-Resou...)

By mispricing the resource, we've gotten to where we are: 1) Massive inequality 2) Bottled water has become the default backup system to investing in rebuilding the tap water system 3) There is not enough investment to rebuild the tap water system. The paradox is best seen at an airport where a bottle of water is $5 in a single use plastic bottle (that lasts for 450 years) and the water fountain which is "free."

As a social capitalist, I believe "free" water is bad for the marketplace. I've written about this more here: https://drinktap.substack.com/p/tap-june-2020-update

I made this product because I'm on a mission to eliminate the single use plastic water bottle by connecting water to the internet.

Today marks the 1,000th day anniversary of my pledge to never drink a single use plastic water bottle again.

In celebration, Tap is gifting 1,000 activation stickers for those who wish to join the mission to eliminate the single-use plastic water bottle. Claim your Drinkware OS sticker (https://bit.ly/DrinkTap1000 Code “DrinkTap” auto applies at checkout).

The detailed announcement is available on Tap's blog https://drinktap.substack.com/p/introducing-drinkware-os

Bottled water sales have significantly increased in the last 10-20 years.

“In 2000, each American was drinking 53.7 gallons of carbonated soda a year, equal to 573 12-ounce cans a year, 11 a week. Soda consumption in 2015 was down to 38.9 gallons per person.”

Then add in the Flints, Newarks, Hoosick Falls, and more that will soon be discovered, where water quality is the issue. Bottled water has become the backup / secondary drinking system to our broken tap water system. We need to fix the problem.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/api.nationalgeographic.com/dist...

If anyone is interested in learning more contact me through my website. My link is in my bio.

They do.

One of the reasons the bottling companies were decentralized was because consumers preferred the taste of their local water.

Fountain machines have a sophisticated filtration system that is supposed to completely standardize the taste of the product. The company that supplies these filters also work with Starbucks for the same reason. BUT, often the owners do not change the filters regularly, which leads to an inconsistent / negative taste.

Plastic, unlike aluminum, cannot be infinitely recycled. ~75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today. Where as only 10% of all plastic produced has been recycled.

The shift will be back towards reusables. Coke was once served in glass bottles - but centralized for increased profit due to invention — plastic was cheaper than glass to produce and transport.

Now, if the consumer provides their reusable, a company like Coke only needs to transport concentrate, which is far lighter than shipping a bottle of mostly water. That will also decrease the cost of the beverage to the end consumer. That’s a win - win for the planet (no packaging) and the price of the beverage (saves consumers money).

I’ve expounded on this more here: https://www.samuelianrosen.com/blog/2018/12/16/the-future-of...

My solution, starting with water as our first product, is here: https://findtap.com/

This validates what VC Dave McClure has said since 2010.

He literally named his firm “500 Startups.”

https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/investment-thesis-fund...

thanks for the suggestion. ordered on amazon :)

Hi HN,

I’m on a personal mission to eliminate the single use plastic water bottle.

I always carry my refillable bottle but don’t always know where to refill it. In fact, water fountains currently aren’t points of interest on Google or Apple Maps.

So, we’ve plotted ~265,000 of them and created a compass to find the nearest water refill station where ever you are in the world using the phone’s GPS and orientation.

Sinks, Showers, Toilets coming soon.

I’d be very appreciative and grateful for your feedback and thoughts!