fitandfunction

Pretty common. At mid levels (senior manager, director), base is ~50% of total. At senior levels (VP, CxO), base is less than 25%. At the extreme (CEOs of major corps), base is negligible (e.g. Costello's base is $14k out of a total of ~$8.7 mm).

The stock price has been driven by share buybacks, and the appreciation of Alibaba.

It's more accurate to say that financial markets, past acquisitions, and activist investors have driven up the share price.

That said, the share-price uptick has extended her "honeymoon." Hopefully, all of these acquisitions, cultural changes, etc. add up to something.

Agreed.

The obvious move for FlightCar is to partner with nearby garages, and offer a valet service to drive passengers to their terminals. To sweeten the deal, FlightCar might offer to wash or do basic maintenance (oil change) on the car for an added fee.

The passenger gets

  - convenience of getting dropped off at terminals (vs. walking from airport parking)
  - convenience of taking advantage of car "dead time" to get cleaned / serviced
  - some money (from the rental), to boot

No need to point to projects that are based on tutorials. Lots of githubs are nothing more than that at this point.

If you're going to go the coding route, put up a working page, publish a blog entry about it, publish a working app, etc.

The key is to show effort (I spent time on this) and relevancy (I'm solving a problem that you might care about).

Technical skills aside, the best piece of advice in the article is "show them that you want it."

I've conducted countless interviews / hires where it basically went: candidates P & Q are the best on paper and in person, but candidate P said x, y, z or did a, b, c, and seems to really want this job and work in our company

x, y, z was sometimes as simple as enthusiasm, and other times was in describing what he/she did in their spare time. a, b, c was usually a project for work, school or fun that was highly relevant.

Intellectually, I think I know that "enthusiasm" is a poor / weak predictor of success. But, emotionally, it's a go-to tie-breaker.

It's not just small companies.

I worked briefly for a mid-sized tech company that took a >$70 mm round, but will likely be out-of-business before year end. Like Ecomom, it is helmed by a "visionary" / fanatical leader with a "grow at all cost mentality."

To me, a big red flag is when senior managers make plans without both revenues AND costs being openly discussed.

Exactly. Problems with production databases are inevitable. It's just a matter of time.

The guy who should be falling on the sword, if anyone, is the person in charge of backups.

Better yet, the CEO or CTO should have made this a learning opportunity and taken the blame for the oversight + praised the team for banding together and coming up with a solution + a private chat with the OP.

Why do you think past efforts haven't "panned out" yet? Is it:

a) they're working on it, but just not there yet

b) the major EHR do everything in their power to delay progress by providing token access

c) it's actually very hard to sync medical records across so many different standards / systems

d) not enough patient / doctor demand / use-cases, i.e. people don't transfer as much as we think they do, diluting the value of inter-operability

? or something else? all of the above?

This area of HIT fascinates me because I hypothesize that it's a necessary precursor to reform. But, knowing little about the space, I'm not sure where to start my investigation.

This is a dream for retailers. "Augmenting" the in-store shopping experience has been a non-starter. Want to get product reviews and more info about this item? Well, why don't you pull out your phone, turn on the barcode app and scan the barcode. Now, you could ostensibly look at a item and get relevant additional information on-screen.

Yeah -- It's definitely by design.

It's also by design that milk and bread are in the back corners of the store.

But, ecommerce makes this disdain for the shopper unsustainable. 10 years ago, if you're store sucks, you don't really have a choice. Now, if you're store sucks ... well I can buy a majority of the stuff I need through Amazon, Diapers.com, etc.

So, could HelpPing be a timing play? Helping change stores right when they need to change ... so that they can survive to 2020?

This sounds too theoretical even as I type it

The "prototype" you see in the video is actually a Staples Easy Button with a piece of paper taped over it.

You don't like the shape?

Ha! I like the second "story."

Btw, I think it explains the lack of user traction of apps like Aisle411, ShopKick, etc. They take too long to use and they don't "fit" well with a shopping trip.

What keeps us churning on this space is the magnitude of the $ spent. $1.4T spent annually in low-service stores (e.g. Walmart). These formats have minimal shopper-facing technology (lots of great supply chain stuff) and have evolved slowly.

So, that goes us thinking ... so far, still thinking

Yeah. Thanks for that. We've done some of this and we're seeing (a) or (c).

We've kept going because we "feel" that there's something to be "fixed" inside a store.

For example, discovering new products inside a store is really painful. Typical "big box" stores are >100,000 sq ft with >100,000 products.

Want to find a "healthy snack that taste like wheat thins and goes well with cheese"? Well, we have a wall of a 1,000 products. What you're looking for might be in there somewhere.

What do you think of this related problem?

You make a good point, and candidly, we're not sure. The crux of the problem as we see it is that:

- If you enjoy shopping, you're probably pretty good at it, and don't need a lot of hand-holding.

- If you don't enjoy shopping, then a store is a bad solution. A better solution is "don't go to the store at all, we'll ship you the stuff," aka Amazon

What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this? i.e. Willing to go shopping, if stores can just make it bit easier when you get there.

Thoughts?

One of the problems we're running into is that this problem (need for location and advice) does not seem to be an acute problem for users. In other words, most people are bothered by it, but not bothered so much that they pull out their phone to download an app.

What's HN's thoughts on this?

Should we keep searching for users for whom this is "a hair on fire" problem? or, try to find a different related problem that's more painful (for more people)?

There are apps that handle different parts of this, e.g. Aisle411 for product location, AisleFinder, etc.

But, in our early tests, what we found is that shoppers quickly move from "where is x?" to "what do I need for y?"

Our general hypothesis is that you need both machine learning / automation + human agent to create enough value for the shopper that they want to come back

Thanks. We've dropped the "OnStar" adjective.

What do you think about the "Instant Chat" analogy?

We've seen this to. Target has been particularly good about doing this.

Have you used the current solutions? What did you think of them?

1. Make it short 2. Add a link to your domain 3. Add getClicky to your domain

A large number of readers will click on your link. As a recipient of some of these emails, I almost always click on a company name just to get more info on the company. So, if you keep the message tight, you can usually see if they read the email because there's a hit on your website.

sobered, frightened, confused, sad.

I had a chat with Jody last month, and every indication was that he was "crushing it and loving it."

It could be that I'm really shitty at reading other people, but I remember thinking, "wow, someday, I want to feel what Jody is feeling right now."

I was drafting an email to him yesterday ...

OnStar + Siri for Shopping. http://helpping.co

Shopping at Target / Walmart / Safeway / etc. and can't find what you're looking for? or just have a question about a product? or just need some help?

Press a button. Talk to a person. Get your problem resolved. Quick. Easy. Simple.

The point about the "very early stage" is that it's unlikely for one single person to have all the skills you want unless they had no other choice, i.e. they were the first or second engineer in a startup.

So, to find one person to satisfy your job description, look for someone who was an early engineer at a startup.

Or, hire two people (who will usually cost you less money).

In SV, the recommendation is to hire that one special person, but I'm not so sure. This is particularly true if you live outside a hub (SV, Seattle, etc) and this type of employee becomes even more rare.

Principal Engineer or Lead Engineer. In particular, you want someone with experience in very early-stage startups (where they might have been responsible for some hardware decisions).

The best thing I've bought in the last few years has been a pair of etymotic earbuds with "custom fit" earbuds: http://www.etymotic.com/customfit/index.html

~$200 total, $100 for the basic earbuds and another $100 to get the earbuds "custom fit."

When they're off, they offer almost as good noise suppression as earplugs. When they are on, I can listen to music with great fidelity. I mostly listen to classical and rock.

Most importantly, they are extremely comfortable. I bought them when I was flying cross-country every week, and I wanted to have something that wouldn't hurt my ears after a few hours.

I'd love to see someone (ryancarson or pg?) write a complementary article about "what if you have to do it alone?"

In other words, sometimes, it's not your choice to be a solo co-founder. Many people have compared finding a co-founder to finding a spouse. In both life decisions, I don't think anyone seriously advocates for "sucking it up, and going with the least bad option."

Sometimes, you're poorly geographically positioned, or in a "strange" market, or later in life (friends are already "matched up" or in secure jobs), etc

For myriad reasons, you could sincerely try to recruit a co-founder and come up short.

The question then becomes ... do you make the best of it and go for it anyway?

Or, is the lack of a co-founder a signal (to yourself and others) that your idea / plan is unworthy?

I hope the answer is the former because that is what I am doing. Someone remind me to write this article when I figure it out.

It takes a certain amount of "willful naivete" to try anything new and uncertain.

Doesn't mean you're an idiot to the facts. Just means that you're willing to temporarily overlook short-term problems / obstacles to pursue a long-term goal.

I'm with you on this one

Today is a perfect day for spam marketers to reach us.

I have read every single email very carefully today.