petenixey

Straight into my top 10 favourite HN comments of all time

I’m not sure this answer is as true as you imagine. You extract money via a sale to then invest it and create a revenue stream. Which you potentially already have in the original business. It’s just it was invested in your business v someone else’s.

The question of whether to sell it is a function of how much money you need in a lump sum, how precarious or stable your business is and how much cash it’s throwing off. And of course of diversification.

It’s not defacto true that you need to sell it to realise its value though

Agreed - not least recruiting Matz which I thought was a huge coup

Disclaimer - I know the founders and they're a really good crew. Super solid background in business and really care about creating a great product.

The business model for this is all based around providing pensions / pension brokering. Since all UK businesses have to transition to providing pensions over the next few years there's a huge opportunity in helping make it easy and painless and that's what the guys behind Charlie are focussed on.

Sorting out pensions is going to be a massive headache for both businesses and employees so there's a huge window for a startup to take that pain away and make it all seamless. They've got lots of companies using it already and it's very well built and well funded so I think they're in a great spot.

Will be interesting to see how they compete against Xero or perhaps integrate with them but in a pure HR/pensions play there's a lot of room to make a swoop

hey - I'm just interested how much your comment resonated with the HN crowd. Do you mind telling me how many upvotes you got for this comment bsharitt?

Super impressed to see how far David and the team have come. I remember talking with him down the road from my flat three years ago about the inkling that Zesty was then. I remember when Chris first joined him and they showed me the first screenshots of the mobile app in a bar in London before they hotfooted it off to San Francisco and now they're raising $17,000,000. A pretty amazing ride. Congrats guys.

I've been using this now for a few days and it's freakishly good at its knowledge of people. You fear that it's going to be a bit astrological but then you try it on some of the people you know and it's incredibly on point (and the advice varies a lot).

Very impressed.

This looks technically strong but I'm interested in what the other use cases would be - why would you want this?

You pay to go on the tube. You can choose not to. That makes you a customer of the tube.

Far better surely that such a system is designed in mind that someone might choose not to use it than that they'll get whatever they're given. I'm not sure why you would be outraged by this.

It's kind of crazy to think that the platform-side doors will increase service capacity by removing the ability for people to commit suicide in front of trains.

The frequency with which there is "a passenger under a train" must have a tangible effect on tube capacity.

Shanee, I saw this and was immediately trying to figure out how I could email it to you. Then I saw the URL :) Nice work getting it on HN!

I agree. It's so strange now that I will often make references to Joel or his essays in talks and no-one will know who I'm talking about. I always have to explain that back in the day there were two big software essayists - PG and Joel. No youngsters knows Joel's stuff now - the internet's great at getting you today's news, yesterday's tends to get lost underfoot.

Joel if you're listening please come back to blogging. You're a great writer and I think you've got such an utterly different perspective on things now after having done SE and Trello that it would be a massive waste for you not to share it back with the world again.

Slate is hammering on such a huge problem in organisations. Spreadsheets are still the programming tool of the masses and there really aren't good debugging tools for them.

I'm really interested to see where this goes. Nice work guys.