Gaessaki

Mainly debt instruments (loans, lines of credit, etc.) and occasionally preferred shares.

Quebec probably has the single best cooperative financing ecosystem in the world (1B+$). There’s a need for more risk-driven investment instruments in the sector however to seed early stage ventures. Most of the funds end up getting reinvested in existing cooperatives who can already access traditional funding.

Welp, there goes another SaaS platform in our corporate ops toolchain. Anyone have a recommendation for a tool to handle the cap table for an early-stage cooperative with several hundred members that won’t cost us an arm and a leg? Excel?

This was a fundamental question for me before taking the plunge into starting a coop. Long story short, I did a lot of research and there wasn’t anything that really compensated risk in early stage startups hence the dearth of platform coops.

We ended up structuring our coop to have equity split from voting rights to allow employees to have ESOPs and investors to invest as they do in traditional corporation minus their control of the board. In theory we would be able to IPO down the line, and perhaps become the first coop to do so without demutualizing or a separate investment vehicle on the side.

Our coop took part in start.coop. Open to answering questions from anyone interested in starting a cooperative startup!

This is good feedback though, as I had the same issues. It shows the value of launching and iterating quickly with user feedback, rather than building in the dark in the guise of perfection.

Managing the dispatch of our delivery drivers and monitoring our infra over the holidays.

Wish there was some way to bond with others that are on-call while being on-call. It’s lonely with the rest of the company being away. I guess this thread is a close as we get.

Best of luck to you and anyone else with generator fires and Happy Holidays to all!

Our venture-backed cooperative startup board has 1/3rd of its seats reserved for its employees, which incorporates both corporate staff (devs, marketing, etc) and operational staff (drivers, support).

The other 2/3rds are divided equally between our restaurant and consumer members. Each member class votes exclusively for their portion of the board seats.

We’re nearing year three, and this arrangement has been working well for us. We’ll see if it can continue to scale as we expand geographically.

IMHO as someone who participated in a lot of these non-equity corporate accelerators, both as a startup and as part of the technical teams supporting the initiatives (at two different companies), it’s primarily cheap PR for both the parent company and the startups. There are some perks like the product and service credits as well as the opportunity to network with relevant teams at ParentCo, but I find the experience hardly comparable to a more traditional accelerator like YC. It’s a question of incentives.

If your partner has the bandwidth, I would consider applying for the perks, but I would be mindful of getting distracted by things that don’t entail building product/solving the core problem and selling to clients.

Send me an email (bio), organizing something with a couple of others!

Send me an email (in bio) and I’ll schedule a time!

Shoot moi un courriel (bio) et je m’occupe du doodle !

Montréal, anyone? :)

Didn't mean to imply that they were necessarily doing anything wrong or right (and I tried to clarify that with the last sentence of my post).

In my book, "taking down a notch" means to humble someone. Companies like Apple and Google can make uniliteral decisions that move markets (for better or for worse), in a way that other companies can't. The crux of the question is whether they'll be able to hold onto this liberty.

On the same vein, I think it's totally fair to ask whether a non-tech company like Nestlé could be taken down a notch.

All that being said, I buy your point. As long as their core offerings remain undisrupted/maintained, it's hard to envision things being different.

I could include another dozen or companies that I would target in this question. FAANG is simply a stand-in. I guess we could go with GAMA instead.

It seems like Stripe has an article on how to migrate data to their platform without business interruption on their site. I would imagine others would have similar instructions available.

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/account/data-migrations/pan-import

Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister.

No longer doing consulting, but found it invaluable as a tech person building a consulting team and trying to break into enterprise. Probably useful for any professional consulting through a firm (lawyers, accountants, big 4, etc.)

Someone mentioned Designing Data Intensive Applications which I’m partial to as well.

Thanks for the tips. We’ve implemented some of these measures already and it has helped. We’ve had phone verification from day one for example. we try to balance the opportunity cost when possible.

For example, we lose a lot of potential clients due to them being turned off by the phone verification, though we rationalize that by saying that the support and operational costs are a lot lower this way as the driver can get in touch with the clients should there be any issues.

I think the next steps as you outlined are to build additional flows for fraudulent users and regularly verifying some heuristics on our data. We’ve haven’t gotten there yet due to it not being that pressing, but it’s clear we’ll need to do so as we keep gaining traction.

I’ll definitely keep your contact in hand when we visit this issue further!

That’s an incredible margin. Is this gross before paying out drivers or after?

The suggestion for a local payment processor is a good one. We have another processing entity here in Canada called Interac whose fees are considerably cheaper, though consumers don’t reap the benefits of credit since it’s debit.

I’ve also read about Uber’s efforts accepting cash payments which I found to be very interesting: https://www.uber.com/en-EE/blog/india-growth-cash-payments/

That’s what I would have thought… Not to mention that with the in-person data we have from our drivers that other online merchants don’t, they would be able to sus out entire networks.

I don’t know if it would materially affect the individual offender. Lot of them are actually just teenagers. And the time cost for us would not be insignificant.

That being said, if there was a way we could signal to all the would-be-offenders that we took prior cases to court, that could be quite worthwhile.

We’ve had phone verification since day one. We’ve left the secondary verification stuff up to Stripe, maybe that’s the next place to look.

To be fair, the card fraud is not driving the business into the ground per se, just more annoying when it happens :) solving the problem is more of an opportunity cost thing for us

This begets the question, why present a backend demo to a non-technical audience?

Almost every time I’ve done this, the tech part was glossed over as the audience assumed I was presenting in good faith. Usually, the business needs garner a lot more discussion time.

If you’re doing some sort of sales or fundraising pitch, isn’t it worth mocking up a minimal UI?

Reminds me of an old Joel Spolsky post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/02/13/the-iceberg-secret...

Card testers are so frustrating to deal with. We run a food delivery platform coop that processes orders and then delivers them on behalf of our restaurant members. We’re an ideal card-testing target for the perps before they hit up the Apple store. Only basic anti-fraud measures because we’re a startup and as a reward, free meal if they find a card that works.

The hit is usually doubly painful for us as we not only lose the money, and get the 15$ Stripe dispute fee, but we’re still on the hook for the restaurant’s food and driver’s tip and need to pay that out of pocket, and we also lose valuable time from our drivers. So all in all, a 50$ fraud might cost us 80$.

The signs are always obvious. Always ~70$ orders. Asking for the food to be delivered to a person across the street. Obviously fraudulent names and emails. Postal codes from elsewhere in the province. Orders from only certain restaurants. The problem, we always catch this too late through manual reviews. The restaurant usually has the food made before we find out.

Despite mitigations, blocking blocks of addresses (digital and physical), Radar, etc. it’s still trivial to get around and make fraudulent orders if you’re able to constantly acquire a fresh supply of new cards. We can probably build more sophisticated detection mechanisms, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

We’ve resorted to just cancelling the order quietly once we find out, without informing the fraudster. When they invariably call an hour later inquiring about their delivery (with a voice totally not matching the name), we either tell them we’re sending cops or cuss them out loudly. The silver lining is that it’s fun to witness their reactions on the phone when they realize they’ve been caught.

The banks and police are no help. There are obvious fraud patterns (we’ve physically seen the crooks and know where they live) and we have compelling evidence we can provide, but they won’t do anything. Understandably, they’re fighting the problem at a much greater scale and probably don’t have time for small peanut cases like ours, but it’s still frustrating nonetheless.

In some ways, it can be better than lidar. The colour signal can be perfectly matched with the depth signal to provide further context. This is particularly useful for tracking moving objects. Vision-based systems also have a far greater resolution, especially when additional cameras are added.

But having both would be best. The drawbacks of camera are additional compute being necessary for stitching and the risk of occlusions occurring due to something like adverse weather conditions. It also only offers a calculated estimation rather than a true distance measurement.

Archived: https://archive.ph/enXkn

Spot-on and reflects the reality I’ve been living for the past two years.