romaster

Nothing wrong with sacrificing short term profit to meet a longer term objective.

So yes, it doesn't hurt. In fact, it quite clearly helps a ton.

Does that make them pound for pound competitive with one another? No of course not. But consumers are not necessarily buying one or the other on a price basis. Alexa got there earlier. Google has to do something to overcome that hurdle.. being practically free or getting stuffed into something else for free is a successful way to overcome.

The 'unrelated' business idea being the result of the inroads made by you being at current company CEO role and having those customer conversations might be a potential fiduciary issue.

You need to pick someone on the board you can have a candidate initial discussion with and take it from there.

The last thing you want is to start a second co, having thought you figured out the first co, and possibly one day having a disgruntled investor from Co1 come after you claiming you should have invested resourcing from within Co1 towards the idea that you got wind of from Co1 customers... From the trust you built with those customers selling them Co1 solutions.

No I'm not a lawyer. So this is far from legal advice. Just a fellow founder who would be concerned if in this situation.

Yeah except imagine instead when you should be due that commission but then they find a creative way to bake it into a new cushy position that they carve out just for you (with no more comms on other deals) and they pay that comm out to you over 5-10 years. And in the process, putting you in a position you dislike in an effort to hope you'll leave some of it at the table.

This seems like a smart and natural step for AirBnB.

Step 1) enable existing hosts who are great hosts to 'step up' to a prestige status which creates visibility and pushes more hosts towards wanting to get there too, thereby improving the overall quality on AirBnB.

Step 2) (I'm skipping a few steps) - eventually fill the void with AirBnB property/amenity management as a service for hosts.

Hosts who don't want to manage or deal with the pain of trying to get to Plus status will simply pay AirBnB for the cleaning, the linens, the supplies etc, no worries, no problems, and let AirBnB manage it all for you. Also gets more people wanting to host who are aloof to finding or trusting a manager they don't know.

It will take time but it's well worth it, even if it is only partially successful.

Good job.

The biggest problem is the centralizing of biometric data.

That's not only slower but a treasure trove once it is hacked.

An Opt-in as you're suggesting would be a positive move - even more so would be a decentralized biometric tokenization approach.

Device side biometrics that don't leave the user's device.

Works just fine at bodegas in New York, often with more than one. Just don't expect them to come over when your colleagues want to see them.

It is clear that user is the biggest risk in all systems, but that doesn't quite take away from the more important addressable question - specifically - is a password-less method better than what we do today (aka passwords.

I'd take a hunch that the number of users with easily guessable passwords outweighs the number of targeted malware attempts.

But I need not guess, any of the password dump files provides a good statistic showing % of passwords.. what was it something like 0.6% are still 123456? and another 2-4% some similar-looking cousin?

If we go with this logic - we also wind up getting extra wins: better usability, and cheaper to deploy/manage. But that's a whole other topic.

On the question of security and privacy - is my face being matched on THEIR cloud? or locally and then a token is matched?

Liveness on the whole has its own issues in terms of a spoofing 'arms race' and secondly the more complicated they make it the larger the risk of False Rejection Rate (rejection what should have been accepted)

On your latter point, it is a bit of a flaw that I feel inclined to address - Depends on implementation. on iPhone, your "fingerprint" is not exposed when you use that to unlock your phone... but then again when using that to maneuver in an app, you're doing no server side validation.

Per Apple Support (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204587):

Touch ID doesn't store any images of your fingerprint. It stores only a mathematical representation of your fingerprint. It isn't possible for someone to reverse engineer your actual fingerprint image from this mathematical representation. The chip in your device also includes an advanced security architecture called the Secure Enclave which was developed to protect passcode and fingerprint data. Fingerprint data is encrypted and protected with a key available only to the Secure Enclave. Fingerprint data is used only by the Secure Enclave to verify that your fingerprint matches the enrolled fingerprint data. The Secure Enclave is walled off from the rest of the chip and the rest of iOS. Therefore, iOS and other apps never access your fingerprint data, it's never stored on Apple servers, and it's never backed up to iCloud or anywhere else. Only Touch ID uses it, and it can't be used to match against other fingerprint databases.

I'm a little bit surprised that the closing remark of his blog post was "even if you remove all the bad causes, the good causes far outweigh the bad and will cause inequality to further increase."

I guess if one so brazenly believes that to be true, then it must naturally follow that PG would support further inequality.

So it is not that he is against economic inequality per se. He is simply sure (perhaps falsely) of its causes, and believes that if those causes are the majority drivers, then the benefits outweigh the cost.

If he were to be proven wrong about the breakdown of these causes... his opinion might shift.

When I read the article my first thought was... So go to war. Don't be proud that you bootstrapped and they got funded. Go to war.

Go to the VC community and raise a ton. You have proof of a strong product and yet you are not capitalizing on first mover advantage. You are asking these guys to copy you and trump you.

Go to war. Raise. Build. Grow. Expand. Offer more things free to limit competitor entry points. Offer even better metrics. Go to war.

Good luck.

When will this statement "your customer pays in bitcoin and you will receive dollars in your bank account" become "you the customer pay in bitcoin and you will accept a charge in dollars through your bank account"

Eta innovation on the consumer side?

but in some respects, it's more than a VC funded startup. Not the concept, but the main stakeholder and one of the key providers of the data needed to make it truly competitive...

Telenav. TNAV ticker. Sinking to new lows recently.

Zaarly... Taskrabbit... can anyone get this notion of "bid for the right TO service" done properly? or are we all just reduced to having to FIND our contractor, on our own.....

Great.... Now what? You've advertised the integration of an API on HN. Now what?

negative skew & fat tails vs. fixed income stream.

the question this begs is more like.. what is the category which is not yet claimed in this field. It looks crowded in this frame, and many of these companies are reaching the $10-$20b stage (airbnb, uber, etc).

So the natural question is what is unexplored.

Its possible to be both white and Jewish (in re to your comment on VCs).

Persistence is key, and I agree... The stats show a strong foundation and the right family values make a big difference.

There's always going to be a battle between VC money/specialists and Much-much-bigger money/generalists (ala hedge funds, asset managers, private arms of big banks or corporations). Some of these 'big money' folks actually don't need as high IRR as a VC, or can pitch to their own management the type of synergies or 'track record' they are building by paying a premium now.

Marc's "heads up and watch out" falls short in one key respect: it doesn't give any color. It doesn't let the newbie startup CEO understand what bed he might actually get stuck with before it's too late. It doesn't provide any detail about what to really look for or the types of terms and conditions that get discussed 'in more detail' when the offer and final paperwork start getting hashed out.

And from that perspective, it is a bit of a disservice to a newbie because if such a CEO starts to immediately take Marc's words at full value (and it's hard not to, given the legend that he is), that creates a negative bias and an air of skepticism if that newbie CEO is approached in the future by big money and overly large valuations.....

and that, would be a clear negative to the startups, and a clear positive to the VCs.