27,916 karma · joined May 9, 2008
its a good way to avoid ending up on the street...you'll always be able to get room and board with your kids.
Since our generation won't get any social security or pensions to live off, we are going to need all the help we can get if things go south.
Just look at the cars as the cost to own...not actual price you pay.
So even if a car depreciates 20% in that time period, you can still drive something decent.
A $10,000 used car...will depreciate $2,000 or $1,000/yr or $83/mo
$83/mo is a small price to pay to have a reliable car that's just 3 years old.
And if you want something better...
A $40,000 used car...will depreciate $8,000 or $4,000/yr or $333/mo.
$333/mo is nothing, and a $40,000 car started off its life as an $80,000 one.
And that's if you hold the cars for 2 years....if you sell them within the year...you can sell it for the same price you paid for it.
the point of YC is quality over quantity...if they go after quantity, they are just diluting what they have to offer.
If they have 1000 startups, how much support can they really offer?
I remember when they launched people submitted a ton of content...and in all this time, all they came out with is the most basic of languages
do they expect access to your email account? no...because that'd be invasion of privacy...so why is facebook different?
you are free to snoop on the public facebook page(even though thats not 100% ethical either, since you should be judging people for the way they perform at work)...but in no way should you even think of asking about getting access to private information
don't think of now...think of when you are 55...and noone will want to hire you because you are too old.
Don't think 55 is going to be a problem? How about 65? Or even 75. People are living longer and longer, the guys who are living up to 100 now, have had to deal with malnutrition and the stress of a world war. So its perfectly normal, to expect that in 50 years, the retirement age will get kicked up to 75.
Do you really want to program at 75? Do you think a 40 year old manager will want to hire a 75 year old programmer? Do you think you'll be able to comfortably retire off your savings?
The idea of retiring off just being a worker bee is gone. There are no more pensions, the social security income is going to get cut eventually...so all you'll have to live off is your personal savings. And whatever savings you make, when you retire, you'll have to severely reduce your lifestyle...just to make sure you don't run out of cash before you kick the bucket
What's so interesting about success is the number of
failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is
just one of many...
Frankly from his tweets it sure looks like the biggest failure on the team is the CEO...they just got lucky and instead of being humble, he is doing the completely wrong thing...and if he was such a failure as an employee, why did such a great manager keep him employed
and it's much easier to negotiate a price, where they just email you back, instead of making you wait while they go and watch TV in the break room(while they "talk" to their manager)
not all startups are created equal...not all of them will have an early Google atmosphere...plenty of them are started by corporate drones
so you get a bad work environment, paired up with a company that still hasn't figured out how to become profitable
then just go back and forth with the lowest #...until you are left with one dealer
i.e. there is an intersection by me that has 3 gas stations on it. They used to have identical pricing. Then one station started charging the same amount for credit card transactions as it did for cash(other stations had cc transactions cost 10 cents more per gallon)
result? that station is always packed...there is a line to actually get gas...while the other stations barely have any business.
So it costs them 10 cents out of $3.70 a gallon or 2.7%(you know the actual cost of cc transactions..that every business in the world pays without a second thought) to get market penetration.
And since now the cost of gas is pretty high, they are getting a ton of money, since every fill up gets them $40-80
that way they won't want to set the value high to pay the fees...and not too low since then the licensing costs would be too low
Very few people who decide to uproot to start their startup elsewhere actually choose NYC over SV.
Frankly, I don't see what the big deal is, lets face it, most programmers are more or less geeks, so all this talk about the better night life and clubs, dating/mingling opportunities etc probably doesn't even apply.
It's all about the person really.
Someone outgoing, will find all of those even in the middle of nowhere in Kansas. And someone with social anxiety will have problems no matter where they are.
Hell, even celebrities don't get their Google search histories published in Tmz...so you have nothing to worry about.
And if you are planning to do something illegal, then using a different search engine won't help you one bit
With Best Buy, you have to go get in your car, drive 7 miles to the store, browse for 20 minutes to find what you are looking for, then drive 7 miles back. So on top of $4 you probably spend on gas, you end up wasting an hour of your day just to get something.
With Amazon, you get the itch to get something, do a quick search, add it to the cart, and get it shipped + you can read reviews to find out if the item sucks.
And of course Amazon will tend to have lower prices...and with Prime, you'll have it very quick.
The only thing you'd go to Best Buy for, is if you have an emergency, and need something asap...and there aren't a lot of items that you can't wait a day for to avoid wasting an hour at the store
DDG seems to be the hipster search engine to me...look at me I'm at the forefront of search technology...sure the results suck compared to Google..but at least I'm not a sheep like the rest of the sheep using the internet.
They are still doing something that insurance companies care enough about to shut them down over.
and the investors are mostly tech guys, not real estate guys...which means there is no inside track into getting a meeting with heads of "big office corp"
so they'll most likely hit adoption issues outside of the bay area.
plus there are a dozen sites doing that, and besides the fancy UI, there is no real advantage over the other sites. And speaking of UI, that site is too javascript extensive....takes way too long to load
also the $/sqft per year seems a bit useless...at the very least should provide how much it'd actually cost per month.
finally the SEO on the site is terrible...you are trying to rank for "find office space" that gets 170 searches per month, when you should be trying to rank for "office space for rent" which gets 4400 searches per month...also lease should be somewhere in the title, since that's also getting searched for.
don't get me wrong, chances are they'll have some limited success in the Bay Area based on the YC referalls alone. But they'll have to deal with a major chicken and egg problem elsewhere...and as you can see, the search volume is pretty low, so they'll need to go offline to actually reach their target customer.