mifeng

In which the guy who wrote The Lean Startup builds the most unlean startup possible.

"All my teams were raising red flags about needing more time but he didn't give a damn."

Who in the world could Anxious_Bandicoot126 be???

"The board and myself were lied to one too many times."

Unsolicited advice: your problem isn't great - sure engineering leaders want to increase personal connections between remote teammates, but is that one of their top problems and how much are they willing to pay to solve it

I would iterate until you find a problem that people are willing to pay a lot of money to fix.

This is what I'm talking about. It's been 3 years, and they're still doing testnets? What a joke.

This article seems like it was written in 2017, not 2020.

Filecoin raised over $200m and hasn't shipped anything that I'm aware of in 3 years. Maybe it will be revolutionary, but the crypto industry has long moved on from white whale projects that don't ship.

As someone who grew up in China, I think this analogy is overblown. PG and others are up in arms about "cancel culture," but I'm not seeing substantial evidence of people's voices being suppressed by the masses. The few anecdotes cited (James Bennet fired by NYT, JK Rowling finally being called out for being anti-trans, random people being unfairly fired) don't seem to point toward a mass movement toward intolerance in the US.

On the other hand, it's clear, especially to young people, that traditional liberalism has failed at actually addressing inequality, racism, and other systemic problems that the US faces. A big part of what people refer to as "cancel culture" is frustration over the ineffectiveness of traditional liberalism, especially when the far right seems to play by a different set of rules.

I'm definitely concerned about far left zealotry, but I don't think that's what I'd happening in the US.

The only UX that matters in video conferencing software is connection UX, which is where Zoom excels.

Agreed, angels are a much better financing path for founders building profitable startups.

This is an important point. It's not about what VCs want to fund, it's about the types of businesses that founders want to build. Founders have a lot more choices than they realize.

I'm a co-founder of a 15-person startup. We switched our banking and credit cards from Chase to Brex about a year ago and it's just lot better - UX, fees, data, perks, etc.

I remember reading this article when it came out in 2013.

When I re-read it today, I finally saw all the obstacles and discrimination that Ellen Pao and Buddy Fletcher had to overcome just to be in a position to be embroiled in scandals like this.

This is exactly how we hired most of our devs at Hummingbot. We used to hire expensive Silicon Valley engineers before realizing that the folks we found on Upwork were just as good , if not better.

If you know Python, your background is perfect for a role with my company Hummingbot (https://github.com/coinalpha/hummingbot), an open source project for crypto algorithmic trading.

We have devs from Nigeria, Malaysia and Phillippines on our core team, and we work with extended devs all over the world.

Even if it's not a fit, I can try to help you find gigs. Because most crypto companies are remote-first and maintain open source codebases, we tend to work better with remote devs in developing countries.

This is bad advice. Spending money on SEM before you have any product validation is a waste of money.

I'm sure this post is well intended, but it just pushes new founders into obvious, crowded categories like virtual conference and remote work SaaS. To find good ideas, founders need to go a lot deeper than asking themselves "what is different about the world today?"

Don't work for a company with 50k employees. Don't live in a big city.

I was involved with similar trades at JPMorgan and Citi. Investment bankers gave these presentations to hedge funds to convince them to short the housing market. Then, they created a CDO, called the hedge fund the "manager" and tried to dump the bonds on Asian and Middle Eastern investors.

My first startup used computer vision to extract tables from PDFs. We had great engineers but my co-founder and I didn't know enough about ML back then to design a proper feedback loop.

My advice is to find a technical co-founder who has built and scaled a CV system at a larger tech company, but who is looking for a new challenge. There are a lot of annoying problems that can be solved with CV as long as you create a way for users to help you get labeled data.

Haha his first act was not to ask for help, but rather he "ordered five beers and drunk them."

Stock prices are based on the present value of future profits, so pointing out that Lyft is unlikely to be profitable for a long time is spot-on.

Do you work with blockchain / crypto companies?

The stack trace utility looks super useful. Getting the "Error: VM Exception while processing transaction" without any additional context is a huge waste of time.

I was CEO and co-founder of doxIQ (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/doxiq), a similar product. We were acquired by Nitro, another PDF software company, after a couple of years. DocSend started around the same time as us and has become the standard for final format document tracking.

My suggestions:

- read analytics are valuable, but it's hard to get people to pay for that alone given how many other products offer it for free

- pick your target user persona (SMB vs enterprise) and focus on making them happy

- focus on integrations with other systems that your target persona uses, like CRM/marketing automation/email/etc

- ignore shiny object syndrome. you'll be tempted to add more analytics tools or insights to "add more value." while YMMV, i've found this to be a waste of time.

Nominated for comment of the year,

Irony: a blog post about productivity inspires lots of discussion on the site where tech workers go when they're feeling unproductive.

I think it's a great idea and signed up for the beta. Just curious though - given the Binance hack today that seemed to only affect people who had given out their trade API keys, how will you ensure that people trust your bot?