xstartup

Yea, but when everyone from ICOs to shady diet piet e-commerce companies uses same tactics, it no longer works.

Most people outside the US are probably committing tax fraud in their home country.

I suggest you take some legal counsel.

CFCs/POEMs/TIEAs will get you busted in no time.

I use to make my own apps when it was profitable to do so. At any point, we had 50-100 apps across many categories, different companies.

We were making good revenue, it was still early in the mobile world. These days, it's not as profitable as it used to be outside of few VC funded categories which are heavily subsidized, good luck making a big profit there.

Most apps today are complementary to running at loss. So, need a SaaS app (with enough profit margin) before you make your mobile app.

Today, we develop apps for small businesses which is much easier and doesn't require any special skills. 80% apps are just CRUD apps. If we need something advance like machine learning etc..., we delegate it to Google and Amazon like API providers.

There are some of our competitors in app business who are hiring wizards yet not able to compete with this formula ^

In fact, you can pay customers of your competitors $100 to ask them to request erasure of data from their competitor. Have fun!

I think the Human mind has the ability to control genes. So, if you focus much on a single gene, you can unlock its ability.

Some people have gained "superhuman" abilities with meditation-like practises in past.

Most people told me that I am good at math.

But I was like an addict solving every question I could find. I got a kick from solving it before anyone else, completing the whole book before others opened the first chapter.

I was looking at my wristwatch all time and solving it like my life would simply end if I stopped or wasted even a moment.

I was never burned out, never felt tired.

Facebook, in a few months the perks are going to be even higher if you are at the senior level position.

Facebook is launching dating service.

Their senior employees will most likely get a blessed account which is gonna match with more ladies.

This is something Google can't provide you. But yea, your cash compensation might go down a bit.

Correlation is not causation.

SimilarWeb buys data from ISP DNS resolvers. During the same time, Cloudflare DNS resolver was released to the public and marketed heavily.

Even my nontechy gf started using Cloudflare Resolver. She saw that on twitter was curious about the benefits and was not disappointed.

So, yeah usage did decline a bit but not that much.

Yea, it's great. We run adtech entirely out of Germany, we've found lots of talented folks but we operate in a village, not Berlin.

But then also, we just need AWS, payment processing (stripe) and a bank account.

24/7 power, high-speed internet, hardware.

Every service is dirt cheap compared to the US.

Hookers are beautiful.

Sometimes, group exits before you. It has more experience under its belt.

I am not sure why the above comment is getting downvotes but seems like a valid question to ask.

Extraordinary people need extraordinary compensation. Maybe pissing off a few people is part of compensation and company has no problem with that as she is worth 100 such people she is gonna piss off.

But does not doing wrong, prevents you from going out of business? What if you desperately need to sign a sketchy deal which helps you keep your business afloat and if you try finding some better way which does not exist, you end up losing your business.

I think what's good in market differs from what is good in general. Those two are a different thing, you might want the market to accept your "good behavior" as default but that won't make it more profitable by default.

There is opportunity cost as well.

What if you don't it then a new startup comes, starts doing it and soon they run your business and become an enormous success. Soon, you end up selling your business and your employees are left jobless.

One problem with employees is that they think that the business is going to keep afloat no matter what.

I think some low-level employees will greatly benefit from a class in philosophy.

It's not about the fault or that if the employee is right.

Founder makes a promise to customers. He comes with an initial vision. It might be a flawed vision but if the product has got any traction before you even joined. It means his flawed vision works in the market.

Don't mistake market for the world. Don't mistake your world-view for the complete truth of market or world.

Your worldview is just another way of seeing this world and unproven way since that's not what got him his first customers. Why do you want him to bet on your unproven worldview? I see newbie traders making this mistake over and over.

That's the only thing which matters.

That's his worldview and his company took off within his worldview, there is no reason to change that. Unless of course, you have an axe to the grind and you are clearly irreplaceable, try that and if he is any good and catches you halfway, next you are out of the company.

It doesn't matter who is right. It doesn't matter what is right. What matters how consistent you are in your worldview. That's what gives company success.

If you have a superior worldview, best a founder can do is - fire you, so you are set free and you start your own company, compete with them and then lose until you correct your worldview.

They do not want to bet on your worldview, you are not above the founder, no employee really is.

That's what you need to understand.

How hard is it to know? Young investors want to invest their free time. Make a product, which lets you invest your time and gives you return on that without doing anything.

For example, if a homeless kid wants to go to Thailand to have fun. BlackRock's startup should offer ROI for doing this.

Not really. If you are in a democratic but corrupt country.

Make local people aware that you want to offer the service and this service can only be offered if the government lets you lay cable.

Start laying cable and offer your people service. Offer them a good deal and ask them to protect your cables in return. You'll be amazed how good communities are at protecting their assets, provided they realize the benefit of keeping it in shape.

Then bring those people in front of government to vouch for you.

This is very true. Skype had huge exploits and some blackhat folks went to Skype support and told them that the victim's account is treating them and Skype banned victims can't without any investigation.

Skype also banned victim who was infected with a malware where malware would just post links to other people to remove them randomly from groups.

Skype just bans you for no reason. I've lost one of my most valuable business accounts to scammers who used malware attack to destroy my account.

The regions in Europe which have cheaper/faster access have either community managed infra or high population density/cheap power. Does the US have that?

Assuming that everyone knows how to take care of themselves is ignorance.

We don't live in a natural state, otherwise, it would have been fine for me to kill you for my survival.

Yes, but they are fat by choice not due to lack of choice.

Most people don't exercise because no one is paying them to exercise. If a government wants healthy people, they should pay up $100 per hour to just exercise.

I think this is the conspiracy of rich people to make poor people fat so that they get sick and rich people sell medicines, fast food, and garcinia combogia, gym membership (which is just another name for drugs like cocaine, meth etc.... but licensed and regulated)

We also spend upward of 200K per month on Google Cloud. And recently, we moved some pieces to AWS and OVH. We only move things there is it's gonna save us more than 50% of the cost. (including maintenance etc....)

You can fire at least half of the labor after launch and maintenance can be done by fewer people or ad-hoc contractors.

In adtech, we average over a 100 million operations per second and we don't even touch redis.

We've been using Memcache all while and have no desire to change that.

Not needing to enable wifi on smartphone and still being able to message from the desktop is one of the big reasons.

It's determined based on guesswork.

If you scrap a website, you'll know how what % of times an ad shows up.

Now, if you know the distribution for top N ads. You can skip everything and go straight to the ad network and check their total number of impression volume on particular website/GEO. You can pretend to be an advertiser and easily get access to this info.

Now, you know the distribution and total, can't you work out the impression count for each ad?

I create my best work in a state of chaos. I actually need distractions to reinforce my priorities without which I don't see the end.

Here is an example Pipeline which supports loading data from an unbounded source to BigQuery in batches using load jobs (evading BigQuery's Streaming Insert cost)

See: https://zero-master.github.io/posts/pub-sub-bigquery-beam/

Ad scraping can be very profitable.

See: https://adplexity.com/

"There has to be some chemistry between the two of you... the other person has to actually like you. That takes more than effort, money or time."

Every woman I pursued ended up costing me $1M. There was all chemistry at the start but soon it disappeared.

Disappearing love is correlated money transfer from me to them.

I've stopped looking for any love. I've accepted does not exist in real world.