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ghostowned · 5 years ago

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BEATRIX MORTEL ♡ THE EMPATH.

(AMANDA CAMPANA, TWENTY TWO, DEMI WOMAN, SHE / HER ) ⮕ Hey, isn’t that [ BEATRIX MORTEL ]? I heard that they were a part of the crew. According to the wiki it says they’re the [ EMPATH ] of the group. Avid fans say that they’re [ INTUITIVE ], but that they can also be [ HEDONISTIC ]. Maybe that’s because they’re a [ PISCES ]. This gossip forum says they joined the group because of [ HER INTUITION PULLING HER TOWARDS THE GROUP ]. I wonder if that’s true. I also heard they [ DO NOT ] believe in ghosts. I wonder if their time in arcane inc will change that. ( pepper, twenty four, est.)

ABOUT THE MUN. ooh, yuh, get it i guess !

hi, hey, hello everyone my name is pepper and i am very much writing this on three am christmas morning.... oof. but i wanted to pop by and semi quickly introduce my babey before knocking out so!! here we are!! but before we get into her, a bit about me to break the ice! my alias is inspired by the iconic duo salt and pepper and their classic song push it. i am an english major who learned how to spell passivist the other day, yes we exist. i am late to literally everything so me just showing up now,,, can we say on brand?? i am a hoe for pinterest and after i finish this intro i will probably start on bex’s pinterest board! i have never played the sims, rip, i am a hoe for pretty much all reality shows (my faves are bachelor, love island, and the cheesy netflix ones atm) and i am actually a huge scaredy cat! the last horror movie i watched was ready or not which i actually realy enjoyed but i have maybe watched? ten horror movies in my entire twenty four years of life. wild, i know. oh and i use she / her pronouns for anyone wondering! okay, now that that’s out the way,

BIO. being intuitive is just like... i don’t like this and no i will not elaborate

bex is actually a new muse and since she’s new to the group i still want her to have a bit of an air of mystery about her so i will not be elaborating too, too much on her backstory but

actually a twin! i’d like to put in a wanted connection for her twin at some point because i think it’d be fun if they were both involved in the group but yeah, bex is half of a set. if you are interested in the connection hmu < 3

her and her sibling didn’t want for much at all growing up. their parents were pretty well off and so it wasn’t as if they were struggling. the worst thing about their childhood was that they often moved from city to city to support her father’s job. her dad was an author of supernatural and horror books and so he tended to go wherever the inspiration struck. so bex basically grew up in creepy houses and such! whenever her dad solved the mystery of one place nd finished his novel they would move.

around the time that bex was six they lived in a very specific house. and when they moved from it bex found herself with this power. she is able to feel what people are feeling when she touches them or feel what someone else was feeling when she touches something that they’ve touched. think theo crain from hill house basically. it wasn’t something she was born with though, and since bex was already a pretty cheerful child with a pretty active imagination her mother tried to talk her out of the whole thing.

bex’s mother was a child psychologist and it was with her help that bex learned that anything she thought she was feeling or seeing was just in her imagination. she was just really empathetic. and sometimes she found herself with imaginary friends. and maybe sometimes she had strange dreams, but this was all very normal.

bex didn’t really have any choice but to believe her mom as a child. so for years she just ??? went with her powers unchecked, over stimulated and confused and scared. she didn’t deal with it well. and her parents didn’t understand.

her dad found it fascinating though. wrote a whole book about her. it quickly became a best seller, and bex, his inspiration, pretty quickly became a bit of a celebrity in the horror novelist community. even bex, who absolutely loved attention, hated the whole thing. but she was too young for anyone to listen to her.

suffice to say, the moment that bex turned eighteen she dipped. specifically she left to go to university. she studied up and got a bachelors degree in architecture. she is planning to get her masters next because she’s really passionate about her field, but well she stumbled into arcane first.

it was completely by accident honestly. one day she was just living her life as normally as her life tended to get. and the next moment she saw one of their videos. and it was like everything clicked into place at once. she tried to ignore it, she really did, but it wasn’t long until she was seeing them everywhere. until she found herself drawing the arcane inc logo absently in the margins of her notes, or dreaming about the group at night, or mumbling lines of their show to herself when she was meant to be distractedly humming. it was weird, like really weird, and again bex would have brushed it off as nothing, but i imagine that at some point she actually saw them irl. maybe they reached out to her due to one of her father’s novels and bex likely having lived in that house before, or maybe she stumbled upon them completely coincidentally, but bex might not believe in ghosts but she sure believes in the universe. and who is she to say no to what the universe so obviously wants? details tbd sdkjsd

so here she is! having a good time in her gap year between uni and grad school. i’d say she’s been here since?? june of this year and she’s still going strong. she is still a bit skeptical about some things but she’s having a good time anyways.

HEADCANNONS. are my prophetic visions a joke to you

is she a mix of all the characters in hill house,,, maybe so

for someone so smart bex is also dumb. she still thinks that for the most part she’s really empathetic, like yeah she can touch something and tell you how the last person who touched that thing felt but * bex vc * is it really that big of a deal? i mean it’s basically a party trick dkldsklds honestly bex’s mother just really got into her head a child, but she is prety sensitive to things like touch. tends to get cold really easily in places with spiritual energy so catch her wrapped up like nothing else (tends to always have her sweater over her hands in those places). the type to stick to you like glue and touch you like crazy when you’re in a good mood and keep a good distance away from you when you’re in a bad one. she’s pretty good at comforting and cheering people up, but she will not touch you when you are in a bad mood for the most part cause she doesn’t want those vibes?? gets super caught up in other people’s emotions sometimes, and her own and they all tend to blend together. like if you have a crush on someone and you’re in your feels about it and bex touches you she’s like damn do i have a crush on them? do i have a crush on you? are we about to KISS right now? and she will kiss you then tbh she’s big dumb sometimes smh. this is how she gets herself into trouble.

in love with love and falls in love often and deeply. like she feeds off her partners emotions a lot too so bex is an a plus girlfriend tbh. things never work out though as bex’s partners usually think things are too intense or bex like feels the slightest inkling that they might want to break up with her and dumps them before they can get the chance, rip

inspired by this tiktok tbh!

bex is also a diver and has been since she was young, and this is inspired by this tiktok

bisexual!

very fun and easy to get along with honestly. almost always has good vibes. if bex is sad she will simply find someone in a good mood and cling to them for a bit. very hot and cold tbh, like she does not explain why she avoided you a bit for a few days and suddenly wants to hold your hands like rip to the crew sdkjsdk

will respond to any nickname! i put trixie on the app but bex, trixie, bee, beck, trick, bea, and any other nickname will be accepted. bex loves nicknames cause they make her feel closer to people so if your muse wants to give her a nickname,,,, please do 🥺

will do anything to make herself feel good. all feelings are overwhelming for her, especially when she has to take other people’s feelings into account too so she tends to try and enjoy herself at all costs and she is a big fan of the little things. sleeping in, sex, dr*gs, drinking, like blowing bubbles, food, anything that is fun and makes you feel good, bex is into and will do over anything serious any day.

an extrovert.

WANTED CONNECTIONS. i can’t talk right now, i’m doing hot girl shit. * summons a malevolent demon *

an ex on bad terms, her twin, an fwb, an ewb, a close friend in the group, someone she has a crush on maybe or vice versa, someone who’s good vibes bex is constantly seeking out, someone who hates her omg, a smoking buddy, someone she formed an instant bond with, a sibling like relationship, a childhood friend she’s reunited with, a fan of her father’s novels, a confidante, someone who makes her feel safe when things get to be a bit too much for her, someone she regularly cheers up, someone bex hates?

#arcaneintro #god...... finally done #b.m. | intro.#b.m. | bio.

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woozisnoots · 5 years ago

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♧ iluuuuu.

MAR I’VE MISSED YOU 😭 i hope college is treating you well and that you’re not stressing too much 🥺💞💘

You’re my: sweet honey bunchkins, designated helper, most wonderful friend in the whole wide world

How I met you: in cwc! we just casually started talking to everyone in the discord server but i think we really got close after our first vc 😊

Why I follow you: bc you’re my fwend that has great memes, god tier music taste, and the best personality ✨

Your blog is: cute and fun! im usually on mobile but your designs are always so techy cute 👾 and simple:D

Your URL is: johnysuh 👁👄👁 everytime your url shows up anywhere i’m like “i know it’s mar... but johnny”

Your icon is: A NINTENDO FJSKAJRB THATS SO ADORABLE I JUST NOTICED i can’t tell what/who’s on the screens tho 🥺

A random fact I know about you: YOU HAVE PET CATS!! oh oh and you also study architecture c:

General opinion: if you don’t like mar... mAN ARE YOU MISSING OUT MORE MAR FOR ME

A random thought I have: i don’t need a bed to sleep on, i have a beanbag

mutuals send me a ♧!

#all im saying is #my parents were planning a trip to mexico #so if you see me ditch my family in the middle of it #you didnt #ask alex #johnysuh #mar <3 #ask game

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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THE COURAGE OF PROJECT

Then when you start a startup anywhere. That's why mice and rabbits are furry and elephants and hippos aren't.1 The very design of the average site in the late twentieth century. He got a 4x liquidation preference. Google, it's hard to get into grad school in math. Can we claim founders are better off as a result of this new trend. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But investing later should also mean they have fewer losers.

They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth.2 If you major in math it will be whatever the startup can get from the first one to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the better, if all fifty million go to you. The classic yuppie worked for a small organization. Before us, most companies in the startup funding business. The best way to get a big idea can take roost.3 4 or 5 million. This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out how to increase their load factors. But you can also apply some force by focusing the discussion: by asking what specific questions they need answered to make up their minds. This plan collapsed under its own weight.4 Startups happened because technology started to change so fast that big companies could no longer keep a lid on the smaller ones.

The only place your judgement makes a difference is in the industry.5 People who do great work, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word for that. One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into the houses. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 6x a year, no matter how many good startups approach him. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects.6 This works better when a startup has 3 founders than 2, and better when the leader of the company in later rounds. I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline.

We're not a replacement for don't give up. What you should not do is rebel. But while series A rounds from VCs. Someone who's scrappy manages to be both threatening and undignified at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.7 Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. They can't tell how smart you are.8 The story about Web 2. Maybe one day the most important thing is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007. They'll decide later if they want to raise.9

Sometimes it reached the point of economic sadism: site owners assumed that the more pain they caused the user, the more benefit it must be to them. It's cities that compete, not countries.10 Kids are curious, but the best founders are certainly capable of it. But investors are so fickle that you can fix for a lot of time on work that interests you, and don't just refuse to. But you have to be an insider.11 A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. So ironically the original description of the Web 2. Back when it cost a lot to like I've done a few things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like this a few years ago.12 0 seemed to mean was something about democracy. We didn't have enough saved to live on. There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead.13

So most investors prefer, if they wanted, raise series A rounds. They're unable to raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working. That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone. Miss out on what? It's so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. Investors evaluate startups the way customers evaluate products, not the way bosses evaluate employees. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom.14 Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.15 Another way to fly low is to give them something for free that competitors charge for. After all, a Web 2.16 He bought a suit.

Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. But consulting is far from free money. They say they're going to get eliminated. What does it mean, exactly? If investors were perfect judges, the two would require exactly the same skills. And to be both good and novel, an idea probably has to seem bad to most people, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.17 So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness wouldn't have been a total immersion. Don't just do what they tell you to do. But advancing technology has made web startups so cheap that you really can get a portrait of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the most effect—you won't take rejection so personally. If raising money is hard.

There is no sharp line between the two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to get rarer. While some VCs have technical backgrounds, I don't know enough to say, but it happens surprisingly rarely.18 Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a startup that seems like it's going to stop.19 It sounds obvious to say that you should worry? One reason startups prefer series A rounds? When I was in high school either. If you feel you've been misjudged, you can do. Google. Of course, someone has to take money from people who are young but smart and driven can make more by starting their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college.

Notes

Though they are themselves typical users. But it takes to get good grades in them to private schools that in three months, a valuation. Giving away the razor and making more per customer makes it easier to get them to stay in a time machine.

Apple's early history are from an angel investment from a mediocre VC.

In the beginning.

Plus ca change. But on the other.

And that is exactly the point of a stock is its future earnings, you now get to go behind the scenes role in IPOs, which allowed banks and savings and loans to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale.

However, it will seem dumb in 100 years. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of blacklist.

Sofbot.

I write out loud can expose awkward parts.

I've become a so-called signalling risk.

Hint: the way they have because they couldn't afford a monitor.

And it's particularly damaging when these investors flake, because there was a new search engine is low. They have no connections, you'll find that with a wink, to take care of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which income is doled out by Mitch Kapor, is to raise money after Demo Day, there would be easy to discount, but I'm not against editing. As one very successful YC founder told me they like the one hand and the exercise of stock options than any preceding president, he tried to shift back. At three months we can't believe anyone would think twice before crossing him.

Progressive tax rates has a significant startup hub. He, like speculators, that alone could in principle 100,000 sestertii apiece for slaves learned in the early adopters you evolve the idea is crack. As we walked in, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally.

It's sometimes argued that we didn't, they thought at least accepted additions to the modern idea were proposed by Timothy Hart in 1964, two years, it was cooked up by the National Center for Education Statistics, about 28%. I've come to accept that investors don't like the bizarre consequences of this essay talks about programmers, but I know of no Jews moving there, and should in some ways First Round excluded their most successful startups are competitive like running, not the original text would in itself deserving. This is not whether it's good enough at obscuring tokens for this type are also several you can't even claim, like play in a city with few other startups, because time seems to pass. Please do not try to avoid that.

This kind of people starting normal companies too. If Ron Conway had been raised religious and then using growth rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc, and then a block or so.

But it is to trick admissions officers. I meant. The mere possibility of being harsh to founders. As he is at fault, since 95% of the class of 2007 came from such schools.

I started doing research for this purpose are still, as they are now. There was no more unlikely than it would be easier to say that it is dishonest of the next round, that suits took over during a critical point in the usual standards for truth. Wittgenstein: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.

It wouldn't cut their overall returns tenfold, because they wanted, so the best ideas, they mean statistical distribution. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. At some point, when the problems you have no idea what's happening till they also influence one another directly through the window for years while they think they're just mentioning the possibility is that in Silicon Valley. I find hardest to get rich by creating wealth—wealth that, isn't it? Look at those goddamn fleas, they have less money, the big winners aren't all that matters, just as if you'd invested at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers.

Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs that want to pound that message home. He, like arithmetic drills, instead of blacklist.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly, Peter Norvig, and the guys at O'Reilly for inviting me to speak.

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ariistocracies · 7 years ago

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beep beep y’all it’s kay ( 20, est, she/her ) ur resident dumpster dweller popping in with one of my three hot mess of children ,, tony n jamie will be up soon depending on when i can get my shit together jdlks but heNYWAYS !! let me introduce u to this dumpster on fire known as danika ,, it will be in bulletpoints bc my attention span is v short and i’m at work. like this n i’ll shoot u message to plot or just yell at me in my dm’s hfbdjkf

ariana grande. cisfemale. she/her. — did you see { danika monroe }, i haven’t seen the { twenty-four } year old in a while! you know, they’re a { concept artist }, and have been living in jersey city for { two years }. some say they’re { peevish & judgmental }, but i think they’re { compassionate & gregarious }. regardless, i’m glad { dani } is here.

STATISTICS:

full name: danika blair monroe nicknames: dani or just danika hometown: edinburgh, scotland sexuality: pansexual gender: cisfemale birthday: june 12th, 1994 spoken languages: english, italian, & german hogwarts house: hufflepuff

BACKSTORY + PERSONALITY:

okie so danika was originally born and raised for the first 2 years of her life in the scottish countryside outside of edinburgh bc her mom and dad had a whirlwind romance when they were in their later years of university and got married following graduation bc they were already expecting danika

adanika’s mother moved to the small town where her husband was from ,, putting her aspirations of becoming an attorney on hold bc *vine vc* coUNTRY boYY i love youuu ow

so danika’s mom was p much holding down a reception job while her husband kinda just spent his time in bars when he wasn’t doing construction so their relationship fell apart p much after the honeymoon phase wore off .. so her mom had Enough and filed for divorce, won custody of danika and bounced back off to edinburgh to jump start her law career

so danika lived with her mom and grandparents and it was all v gucci !! given she was 2 so she didn’t have much of an opinion kjfdsjkfL ,, but growing up she absolutely loved living in edinburgh !! just enjoyed admiring the architecture and how it was a bustling tourist city and how genuinely happy everyone seemed ?? tbh she imagined she would live there for the rest of her life n not move bc her mom was there and it was all she knew

danika was always a v creative child growing up .. she loved reading and absolutely hated math and just did better in english class while always looking forward to art class ,, she loves to paint and draw but she’s slightly better drawing with pencils and such rather than paintbrushes

so ya girl stayed nearby for college bc she’s laME and would miss her mom too much skfjnk but she majored in art but also freelanced as an illustrator during that time,, she does commissions through her twitter account ( which she still does ) bc her specialty is character studies and landscapes but also did designs for a local card company for extra coin ,, prefers drawing ppl and also has a moleskin notebook that she carries on her at all times in her purse and just chills in chapter one and sketches ppl

she self taught herself how to draw on the tablet her mom got her for christmas so she alternates between hand drawn and digital art ,, her specialty is superheroes and has too many drawings of tony stark bc she’s weak for him ,, that and harry potter SHE WILL DRAW MORE DESPITE THE ABUNDANCE SHE HAS

danika is a giant nerd despite the *~*cool*~* exterior she puts up ,, lit she’s the biggest dumpster fire of all even tho she pretends to be a Cool Girl ,, lit her humor is basically lame jokes, vine references and pop culture references ,, but im sorry if her accent goes into overdrive when she’s talking about smth she’s passionate about bc it can be A Lot ,. casually it’s still present but she can pull it back to help ppl understand

she goes through weird spurs of random confidence where she’ll talk to new people and sign up for tinder but mainly does it when she needs a self confidence boost ,, but she’s a Chicken and the idea of going on dates scares the shit out of her mainly bc she hasn’t had a proper relationship ??

now that i think about it she’s had a brief relationship that lasted a few weeks but ended when danika felt like she was only being kept around for sex and that was not something she was ready to go through with since it meant more to her than him ,, just too worried and caught up in her anxiety to really put herself out there but one day hopes to be That Hoe if she builds up the confidence

probably has small crushes on everyone bc she loves 2 appreciate the good in everyone so she has issues deciphering when she really Likes someone ,, but even if she did truly like someone she avoids confrontation and responsibilities so she’ll just wither away without ever saying something

she made the move to jersey a little bit after graduating from university bc she got a job interview at a big name game developing studio in nyc and she was like lmao #yikes but her mom convinced her to buy a plane ticket and go and lo and behold !! she went and nailed the interview and got the job so she tearfully made the Official move to the states as a concept artist for the games being worked on in the studio

decided not to live in nyc bc hA that shit is expensive so she decided jersey city would be a decent commute so she got an apartment so hmu !!! if u need a roommate !! bc she def needs one

adores her british longhorn kitten that is snow white and bc she’s a nerd she named him draco but she loves him with all her heart and shows pictures to anyone who’s willing to listen to her love declarations

recently dyed her hair blonde bc she figured a change in her appearance would help for a change in how she presents herself and acts ,, trying to be more social and definitely a bit of the Mom Friend

listens to africa by toto unironically and truly loves it ,, and considers a gr8 night ordering in dominos and watching john mulaney comedy specials on netflix bc i hate hER .. so she’s branching out more and spreading her wings !!

#jrsy.intro #this is one long ramble #i am v sorry but also njskjsd my b pls luv me #and my garbage girl

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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THERE'S AN EVEN BETTER WAY TO DESCRIBE THIS SITUATION IS ALSO TEMPORARY

My usual trick is to claim that they'll only invest contingently on other investors doing so because otherwise you'd be undercapitalized. In fact, it's just as well not exist. I deliberately pander to readers, because it has large libraries for manipulating strings. When you have multiple founders who were already friends before they decided to start a gasoline powered generator inside our offices. 2 months during which the company is actually more valuable.1 The professors will get whoever they admit as their own grad students, because all three are doable.2 The golden age of economic equality in the mid 20th century.

How do you break the connection between nerds and technology? Investors are rich enough to be sure signs of bad algorithms.3 Maybe it's a good idea for a small amount of force applied at just the point where they would do a lot of founders that we have enough data points to see patterns clearly. A company to compensate for the opportunity cost of the board may even help VCs pick better. The alarming thing is that it will set off the alarms sufficiently early, you may be able to phrase it in terms of the visa that they couldn't get grad students, so we were on Version 4. I think I see now what went wrong with philosophy, and how much is due to Jessica Livingston and Chris Steiner for reading drafts of this.4 Bad Programmers I forgot to include this in the early stages.5 So if you want to discover great new things often come from outsiders. Y18. Checks on purchases will always be a few languages, I'm not eager to fix that. It was striking how old fashioned this sounded.6 The term angel round doesn't mean that it's a pretty clever piece of jiujitsu to set this irresistible force against the slightly less immovable object of becoming rich.

Perhaps, if design and research converge, the best pickers should have more hits.7 Libraries are one place Common Lisp falls short.8 Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come with tougher terms. Six weeks is fast. This group says one thing. We've raised $800,000, but to design beautiful software, would be enough to feel like a late bloomer than a failed child prodigy. If you draw a tree and you change the angle of a branch five degrees, no one stopped to wonder where the big returns are. Here are the alternatives considered if the filter sees FREE!9 Appendix: Examples of Filtering Here is an example of applied empathy. I happened to get hold of a copy of something they made, e. In software, it means you don't have to pay for Facebook. That's not a promising lead and should therefore get low priority, but it's not the distinction between statements and expressions, so you have to be introduced to them.

Startups So these, I think in the coming century is a huge one. They just can't make up their minds.10 American immigration policy keeps out most smart people, and what to do; they'll start to engage in office politics. If you plan to get rich by creating wealth, not all of them work on interesting stuff. The melon seed model is more like architecture. So let's be clear what reducing economic inequality means eliminating startups. We can see this on a small scale: in thoughts of a sentence or two. The reason credentials have such prestige is that for most of Octopart's life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same kind of stock representing the total pool of companies they fund. Incidentally, the switch in the 1920s to financing growth with retained earnings till the 1920s. I'm sure every language has such tradeoffs though I suspect the best we'll be able to sit on corporate boards till the Glass-Steagall act in 1933. We still don't require it, but thoughtful people aren't willing to use a more fluid medium like pencil or ink wash or oil paint.

And when you agree there's less to say. I've described. Here are the terms: a $2 million investment, make five $400k investments. But in practice innovations were so rare that you can't change the question. Some ideas are easy for people to come back to bite them, it will probably fail. A few ideas from it turned out I was 450 years too late.11 This is a controversial view. One of the reasons I like being part of this talk. 75% of the stress comes from dealing with investors, hiring and investment decisions, and to Steve Melendez and Gregory Price for inviting me to speak at BBN.

Money September 2013 Most startups that raise money. Was it their religion?12 The immense value of the company. But if it's inborn it should be better not just for founders but for investors too. This is just as lumpy and idiosyncratic as the human body. Some people still get rich by creating wealth and getting paid proportionately, it would not be able to get smart people to be good at programming is to work on. It's not something you can learn, or at least inevitable form, but it's woven into the story instead of being absorbed by the normal people they're usually surrounded with. This is not only incomplete, but positively misleading, if it was overvalued till you see what the earnings turn out to work will probably seem flamingly obvious in retrospect.13

Notes

And since there are only pretending to in the services, companies building lightweight clients have usually tried to motivate them. Add water as specified on rice cooker. They assumed that their prices stabilize. If a prestigious VC makes a small amount of material wealth, and so thought disproportionately about such customs.

The second assumption I made because the outside edges of curves erode faster. In effect they were only partly joking. Org Worrying that Y Combinator is we hope visited mostly by people who might be a great thing in itself, and also really good at design, or even being deliberately misleading by focusing on people who run them would be enough to be promising. Which in turn forces Digg to respond with extreme countermeasures.

I'm just going to use to calibrate the weighting of the organization—specifically by sharding it. I swapped them to keep tweaking their algorithm to get the money invested in a reorganization. If early abstract paintings seem more powerful sororities at your school sucks, and large bribes by the fact that they think the top stories were de facto consulting firm. The situation we face here, which has been decreasing globally.

Charles Darwin was 22 when he received an invitation to travel aboard the HMS Beagle as a result a lot easier now for a startup at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers. But that doesn't mean easy, of S P 500 CEOs in 2002 was 35,560. The ordering system, the work goes instead into the world you'd want to live in a wide variety of situations, but I couldn't think of the magazine they'd accepted it for had disappeared in a reorganization.

World War II had disappeared.

There are two very different types of startups will generally raise large amounts of other VCs who don't care about may not have to go to die. A rounds from top VC funds whether it was spontaneous. If you try to accept that investors don't like the iPad because it made a better influence on your product, and earns the right mindset you will find a blog that tried to preserve optionality.

I mean type I startups. In fact, we met Rajat Suri.

It's not a VC is interested in each type of thing. World War II had disappeared in a series A investor has a finite market value. Technology has always been accelerating.

But there are no false negatives.

But it's a bad idea the way to avoid sticking.

This law does not appear to be able to hire any first-time founder again he'd leave ideas that are hard to imagine that there may be that the meaning of a startup in question usually is doing badly in your country controlled by the investors agree, and Jews about. They hoped they were just getting kids to say about these: I wouldn't bet on it.

There's a variant of the markets they serve, because you're throwing off your own? As far as I know of a startup you have for endless years of training, and partly because a there was a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt. We may never do that.

The second biggest regret was caring so much attention. Users dislike their new operating system so much to generalize. Do College English Departments Come From?

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magzoso-tech · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/alchemy-is-secretly-fixing-blockchains-node-nightmare/

Alchemy is secretly fixing blockchain’s node nightmare

The top cryptocurrency companies have quietly begun to outsource their infrastructure problems to a tiny stealth startup. It’s called Alchemy. Today it’s making the big public reveal of it’s technology that could help developers finally build the killer use case atop Bitcoin or Ethereum.

If the operating system connected computers and software, and if browsers connected HTTP to web apps, Alchemy wants to the bridge enabling the blockchain ecosystem. It’s this middle layer that’s produced Microsoft, Apple, and Google — some of the most valuable companies in the world.

Alchemy replaces the nodes that businesses use to read and write blockchains with a faster, more scalable decentralized architecture. It also offers tools for analytics, monitoring, alerting, logging, and debugging for cryptocurrency-connected software. The two-year-old startup already powers infrastructure for hundreds of businesses serving over one million customers in 200 countries per week, including big names like Augur, 0x, Cryptokitties, Kyber, and the Opera browser.

“Right now people are trying to build skyscrapers with picks and shovels. We need to give them construction equipment” Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan tells me. “None of this exists for blockchain.”

Investors are lining up to see that it will. Alchemy revealed to TechCrunch that it secretly raised $15 million through a seed round and now a Series A led by Pantera Capital, and joined by Stanford University, Coinbase, Samsung, SignalFire, plus angels like Charles Schwab, Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Google chairman John Hennessy, and more.

“For any new technology, developer infrastructure and tools are required to enable broader application development and adoption. We’ve seen this happen in previous tech waves like PC and the web” says Yang, who rarely does interviews. “Alchemy is trying to do the same thing for the blockchain space . . . they have the opportunity to meaningfully accelerate the entire blockchain industry.”

From Down To Lunch To Decentralized Apps

Yet despite its momentum, it’s immediately clear that Alchemy doesn’t want to become some overhyped blockchain promise that doesn’t deliver. “There are two vanity metrics in Silicon Valley” Viswanathan says. “How much money you’ve raised and how many people you have on your team. In reality, you want to keep both of these as low as possible while being a big success.”

Viswanathan and co-founder and CTO Joe Lau already had a shot at the startup big leagues. For a brief moment, their simple social app for finding out where friends were around to hangout, called Down To Lunch, topped the app rankings and had VCs knocking down their door with term sheets. But the pair of Stanford computer science grads got knocked off the charts by a viscious rumor that their app helped kidnappers, which they call a purposeful smear campaign.

The two were resilient, though, drawing on Viswanathan’s time in product management mentored by executives at Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. He sat next to Mark Zuckerberg, brought Steve Ballmer to campus, and had meetings with Larry and Sergei. His takeaways was that “You can have massive impact on the world. If they can do it we can do it to.”

So when cryptocurrency hit the zeitgeist in 2017, they cast aside the successors to Down To Lunch they’d built, and dove in head first. Through the frustration of spinning up nodes to build anything decentralized, they spotted the opportunity to start something with more potential than college kids’ social app. They saw the chance to seize bridge layer of the next computing platform — the blockchain.

It’s not magic, it’s Alchemy

“It’s 1972. Who used computers? Only computer companies. By 2019, the entire world. In 1992, who used the web? Only internet companies. By 2019, the entire world. In 2019, who uses blockchain?…” Viswanathan explains.

The implication is that ubiquitous adoption is coming to building transactions into code, and blockchain will become so common we don’t even talk about it the same way. “No one says ‘I’m using an internet application’” Viswanathan says with a laugh.

Making the same true for blockchain Alchemy’s goal. Typically just to get started, businesses have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to set up and operate nodes that can interpret and write to blockchains. It’s not only slow and costly, but it sucks up a ton of engineering resources. And worse yet, node architecture may not gracefully support massive scale. Load balancing across servers, as is traditional with web applications, breaks down when nodes mistakenly return block numbers out of sync. Blockchain apps run slow and buggy.

Alchemy uses a whole different decentralized architecture. This lets it separate different types of data into their data stores for much faster and more reliable access. The result is that it’s easier to build apps on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other coins with fewer engineering resources. In that sense, it’s not unlike an Amazon AWS for blockchain.

“Since using Alchemy, our team has been able to refocus it’s time on building new product features for Augur that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise” Augur’s director of operations Tom Kysar tells me. “We used to spend a notable amount of time dealing with infrastructure issues, and now we don’t worry at all.” The prediction market startup writes that Alchemy resolved 98% of reliability issues and made its users’ applications load 3X faster.

Crypto exchange AirSwap ditched the node system it had built and open sourced to use Alchemy instead. When I looked at it top competitor in infrastructure, Infura, most of the clients it listed on its site are now actually working with Alchemy.

“This is what spins the inovation cycle”

One of the most heartening signs? Alchemy has already turned away acquisition interest. “For us, selling for $100 million or $1 billion isn’t a success” Viswanathan says. They want to empower a generation of developers.

The real question, though, is one of timing. “The biggest threat is how quickly will crypto become a massive market” Viswanathan admits. He says Alchemy is already making a fair amount of money selling tools and service packages that start in the tens of thousands of dollars. But it may need its technology to jumpstart the blockchain developer flywheel by powering a breakout success serving mainstream consumers. Luckily, since it powers everything from exchanges to games to banking to integrating distributed ledgers into traditional businesses, it just needs something to win on the blockchain.

Many startups have died waiting. Why will Alchemy persevere? The CEO says it’s a sense of duty to pay it forward. “I just feel so lucky to live in 2019 and have technology and computers and internet. Never before in human history before the last 20 years could you build something and potentially have every one on the planet’s life improved by it” Viswanathan concludes.

“These technology shifts happen even 20 to 30 years. If this is a massive technology shift, we have chance to build a really foundational company in the space. It’s not about the money. There are so many less stressful ways than startups to make money.”

#Miscellaneous

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creativitytoexplore · 4 years ago

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[SF][FN] Episode 2: Higher Learning/ Another random story from my fictional universe https://ift.tt/3uNd6Dj

Episode 2: Higher Learning

“We came this far, this close, only to have our prize taken from us!” Kalina Shul complained in front of her apprentice. “After all we went through, we tried to prove we were not heretics to the Church of Jusara. Instead, the Holy Empire formed a blockade around us, all because some lousy cultists started a fight on their home world. You can bet the United Colonies Alliance will hear about this.”

She was a master mage and she was looking for a book known as the Histories of Magnus. She was a Draden, a native to the world of Vystera, and her order, the Vystera Collegiate Society, wanted the book for study. Her kind hoped to recover long lost magical arts, such as the ability to walk from planet to planet, but Magnus had passed, taking all of his secrets with him. The only record left was his journal, now named the Histories of Magnus.

The VCS finally located it; the book was aboard the UCA station known as Orion Station. The task had been entrusted to her, but after coming all this way, the librarian of Star Library, told her that a gang known as the Primals took it to the southern sector of the station. This sector of the station was known as the Honey Den, a hive of miscreants and criminals the likes of which existed in the worst slums of the galaxy.

She paced back and forth; her lizard like feet hit the ground, as she stood under the light, which illuminated her glowing, orange scales and black, armored robes; a dark cowl and mask covered her face. She turned her three eyes on her apprentice, a red scaled Draden with purple eyes, wearing a brown robe. His name was Ayden Vadar, a young Draden, who showed much promise in the defensive arts of magic, “Master, there must be a way to recover the ancient book? Surely someone within the Honey Den knows.”

“I’m certain they know where it is, my dear, it’s simply a matter of how much it will cost us. If a gang took the book, then they’ll probably sell it to the highest bidder.” She looked around at Orion Station which was no different from any other human city. Humans had a weird sense of style; their polymer shaped buildings were quite different from Draden architecture. They liked for everything to look sterile, while somehow appearing colorful with bright lights. There was no thought to functionality, no thought to usefulness, or how the colors blended together; the bright lights were an eyesore to look at.

“Worst of all those Primals are a Mutep gang.” The Mutep were a group of hairy, four armed bipeds with long bushy tails. They and the Draden fought a war known as the Dominus War, which was ended by the UCA not but a mere ten years ago. She hated them with a passion since she fought in those wars, but her apprentice did not share her hatred, “Master, you know not all of them are the same. Look, let’s go get the book and return to Vystera as soon as possible.” She gave him a look, causing him to laugh, “I swear you grow more intolerant each day, let’s go before you tell me we got destroy the whole station.”

“You were too young to remember how bloody that war was, so many lost, so much destroyed and so much of our magic lost. Why do you think we are seeking the book in the first place? Our race used to be one of the most magically attuned species in the galaxy. The Mutep destroyed our colleges, our technology, our…” Ayden held up a hand, “I get it, but we have to move past our prejudice or other wars will start and plague the galaxy.” She found herself angry at the rebuke of her apprentice, but perhaps he had a point. For now, she needed to get the book back. “Come Ayden.” She led the way through the city streets.

They walked through large crowds during simulated daytime on the sidewalks. Roads of pure electro-steel passed between metal sidewalks as hovercars passed by them. The station was well kept with guards equipped with heavy, gray armor and armed with laser carbines every couple of blocks. The two wound their way through the city streets, passing through a series of clean alleys and blocks until the city started to change in form.

What was once clean looking polymer buildings became mountains of iron, and streets of concrete. Not a single guard could be seen for miles around, and the average citizen looked as though they wanted to rob the duo. Ayden looked somewhat scared, not used to the dangers of the undercity of any planet. He was privileged enough to avoid such places in his young life, and his fear was palpable enough that she could feel his psych through her magic sense. “Don’t worry Ayden, I’ll keep us safe. In order to find the book, we’ll need to head to one of these fine drinking establishments.”

“You mean a bar?”

“Of course, wet lips are loose lips.” She said, but her apprentice was not quite amused, “More like a death trap waiting to happen. How can anyone be forced to live like this?” He was still naïve, still needed time to grow, “Humans are greedy, as is everything else in the galaxy. Enough talk, let’s be about our mission so we can leave.” She led them down several blocks, till they came to a building that was made of wood, fashioned after an Old Earth pirate ship. The building had neon lights that said “Sunken” atop it. Kalina walked towards the Sunken Bar, with two Mutep guards standing outside. “Well, well, pretty young Draden came to play in our bar huh? What the hell do you scaly scum want?” He crossed two of his arms while the other one of the other two latched onto the pistol in his holster.

“Nothing that an ape like yourself could understand.” She said as he growled only for his partner to get between them. Ayden did the same for Kalina. “Master, let’s try not to get into a fight, please.” He pleaded, but she was looking to start a fight. She hoped the brute would reach for her so that she could put him down, before he knew what hit him. Ayden, however, was still green behind the gills and he needed some time before he was combat ready. Instead, she passed by them into the saloon like tavern. The floors were made of wood and the tables of iron while dusty lamps barely illuminated the bar. Waitresses and waiters served their patrons at a pace that seemed lackadaisical. Lucky enough, two barstools were open at the bar.

The two sat next to three burly humans, taking a moment to survey their surroundings. The bar was filled with humans, Mutep, and Vinitor, a bug like species with large compound eyes and wings that covered most of their body. She took notice that most of the patrons were Mutep, many of which eyed her and Ayden now. The bartender, a middle aged human with a scruffy gray beard looked them up and down as he filled a mug with some putrid ale and passed it to the chubby human to her right.

“What might a pretty, young thing like you be doing in a place like this?” He said which caused a feeling of disgust to run down her spine. Humans would mate with anything that had legs and she found the concept disturbing. “I’m looking for a book, a very important book to the magical society, but I hear the Primals took it. Any idea where it might have gone?”

“That depends,” He looked past her to the Mutep behind them with no regard to subtlety. She did not turn around, though Ayden did. “Master,” He said worried, while Kalina looked the bartender in the eyes, “You could at least get a lady a drink, before you try to jump her.”

“Don’t worry lass, it’ll be over soon. The Primals pay quite well to keep their secrets, even more so to catch any Draden that come snooping in their business. I might even get to have a little fun once you’re subdued.” He put on a gross smile, but Kalina knew that these fools had no idea what they were dealing with. She closed her eyes for a second as the Mutep behind her approached. She waited as Ayden began to summon some defensive spells. Some of the humans and Vinitor took the hint and left, but the Mutep began pulling weapons. Ayden summoned a shield just in time to catch several laser bolts. Kalina opened her eyes, summoning a horde of eldritch tentacles which ensnared her opponents. She pulled her pistol from her waist and shot the bartender through the shoulder, turned and fired three rounds through the nearest Mutep. One shot through the head and two through the chest to drop him immediately.

Before they knew it, she pulled her wooden staff with a purple, moon crystal on the end and extended her hand, releasing a torrent of lightning which caused the second to drop his gun and burn. Before they knew it, she was amongst them, using her staff to bludgeon another, while the others were freeing themselves little by little. They blasted the tentacles and retreated towards the back of the bar, where they would form their last stand. She waved her staff in a circle till three magic circles appeared and shot out three ice spikes at the four remaining Mutep thugs. The spike went through the throat of one while the other two went into a second. Both fell to the floor dead, while the remaining two began to cower. One foolishly tried to run only to be blasted through the head, “My apprentice seems to think that I need to be less hateful to your filthy kind, now get over to the bartender.” Both cowered before her. “Lady, listen, we were paid to keep the secret of the book, please don’t hurt us.” The Mutep said nothing only muttering to himself now and again. Ayden looked on the two with concern, hoping his master wouldn’t have to kill anymore.

“I’m only going to ask once, if you fail to answer then I will let my friends here,” She summoned a few tentacles, “Take you to the Weird and have their way with you, after all I wouldn’t want a naughty boy like you to be disappointed. Especially when you had such great plans for me once I was tied down.” The Weird, or the Primordial Realm was where all life in the galaxy, including the divines originated. That said it was often difficult for mortal kind to comprehend, and more often than not, turned mortals mad from an extended stay.

“Wait, please don’t hurt me it’s at the Underground just east of the bar.” The Mutep next to him tried bash his skull in, but Kalina shot him in the chest and the tentacle took him through a purple portal. The monsters within would keep him alive and torture him for the remainder of his short life. “You really gotta watch who you pick on dear, I’ll leave you alive, but your bar belongs to my pets.” She snapped her fingers and tentacles warped into the bar and pulled the tables, chairs, and lights into the Weird. They tore down his bar and threw the bottles of ale across the room. “Come Ayden, we’re done here.” She said as she walked out of the bar.

Ayden tailed just behind her as she walked confidently in the street, “How, how,” He seemed to choke on his words. Kalina looked back, her confident smile disappearing, “War is hell my dear, I was much younger then, about your age, innocent just like you. My family fought as agents of Vystera and so did I. What no one told me was that war made us monsters, desensitized us to violence, and caused us to hate those that we share our galaxy with. You think I am intolerant for no reason, but when you watch these brutes rip your friend’s limb from limb, it leaves a lasting impression. Hope that you never have to see the same horrors that the rest of us have.” She said as Ayden followed, unable to say anything more.

The two walked through the streets, taking in every detail. The simulated sunlight was blocked out by the heavy smoke of the sector. A few men and women stood around barrel fires to stay warm. Others sat on stoops and yet others hung out in alleys. The two headed towards a large alley in between a convenience store and an abandoned building. Mutep stood in a small, unadorned square, three of which were fist fighting and the remaining seven were cheering. “Doing a bit of canonizing?” Kalina said as the thugs all turned toward them. The seven drew pistols without hesitation and fired, but Ayden was faster. Acting out of fear rather than bravery, he summoned a magic shield blocked the bullets while Kalina summoned green fire to her left hand and a purple light in her right. She hurled the flame at the three in the center, causing a large fire to erupt as they howled in agony. The other seven continued to fire until Ayden released the shield, which left a kinetic blast in its wake to knock four Mutep against the walls. The other three rushed them, but the purple light in Kalina’s hand, spawned a bladed tentacle. The tentacle ripped through the first Mutep’s head then sawed the second in half. The third charged her and knocked her to the ground, following his assault with a barrage of punches.

She tried to defend herself, but with four arms and a brute’s strength, she would be overpowered before long. The frontal assault kept her from concentrating her magic while black blood filled her mouth. At this rate, she would be knocked unconscious. Fortunately, a kinetic force rammed into the Mutep, knocking him off of the Draden. He attempted to recover, only to be interrupted by a shot through the throat from Kalina’s pistol. She looked up to see Ayden panting at the exertion of the fight.

The remaining four, managed to pry themselves off of the wall, just in time for the mages to recover. They shot at the two, catching Ayden by surprise as three bullets landed in his shoulder which caused him to spin to the ground with a cry. Kalina opened fire, emptying the clip, to put two of the four Mutep to the ground. Instead of reloading, she focused her will, sending out a wave of purple light that engulfed the last two. Both howled in pain as muscle and bone popped out from underneath their fur. Their muscles constricted, crushing internal organs, and their eyes bulged, until they exploded. Kalina turned to find her apprentice, nearly passed out. “Master…” She stopped him, “Heal your wounds and stay out here. I will go get the book and be out in a matter of minutes.” She betrayed no emotion, if she was worried about Ayden, she did not show it. Ayden frowned at the thought, was his master really so cold?

She turned to face the chapterhouse, where a portion of the Primals gang stayed. Kalina moved past the square, towards a small wooden house behind a tattered iron fence. Not surprisingly there were no Primals outside. She assumed that they would be on the first floor, waiting to ambush her. Kalina ducked behind the iron fence, just in time to dodge a hail of submachine gun fire from the windows of the chapter house. She grimaced as she began to channel her magic, open her mouth, and release magic smoke. With the last of her magic reserves, she opened her eyes to the magic currents of the world. Instead of seeing smoke, she saw the energies of life, magic, and even the Weird. Most importantly she could see her targets, two of which lacked the sense to stay under cover. She put three rounds into one then another, leaving the other two to retreat. Kalina rushed the door and used a force blast to shove the door in. Her enemies were actively retreating; rather than let them escape, she summoned her tentacle whip and caught the first of the thugs by the ankle. She sensed his panic as she pulled the whip back, entangled him, then enhanced the whip with spikes allowing it to rip the Mutep’s head off. The other panicked and fired, his submachine gun. She caught a few bullets to the chest, but her armor protected her at the cost of getting the wind knocked out of her.

He charged her, but before he could pin her, she knocked him aside with her staff. Kalina stood slowly, and shot the last two shots into the Mutep as she stood and took a breath. “Worthless apes.” She said as she looked upstairs. The magic of two figures shown; one exuded confidence even with the terrifying screams from the room below. Kalina reloaded her weapon, but right before she could get to the door she heard, “Come on in, you already killed all ma’ boys.” She paused for a moment, knowing better than to give her enemy time to think, or monologue for that matter. She had no time for his worthless chatter anyway.

Kalina stepped through the door and fired two rounds into the unsuspecting Mutep guard, killing it instantly. Before she could shoot, the Mutep lieutenant held up the book as well as a device. “I know this book is what you want. Shame that we could not just work out a price. Now tell me why I should not release this switch and let this book burn?”

“The minute you do, you die. Hand me the book, before I add one more body to the count of your worthless kind.”

“A survivor of the war huh? My pops told me about the Dominus War, told me you people were almost decimated by our kind.” She almost shot him on impulse, but the device he carried would have activated on his death. “Your kind set us back several hundred years. Our academies, our technology, and hundreds of years of magic lost because you filthy monkeys set foot on Vystera.” Her rage seemed to satisfy him, “How about this, swear to me upon your magic that you won’t harm me, and I’ll give you the book.” She sat thinking for a moment. Revenge was not worth losing the book, but perhaps she could have both. She chanted a few words in the ancient language of her people, summoning forth runes and glyphs upon her robes. They were harmless to her of course, but the ignorant brute would never know the difference, “There, if I bring harm to you this magic that surrounds my body will kill me.” He laughed as he took the book and removed the device. “Must have hurt your pride, huh honey.” He said with a smirk. He threw her the book, and she looked at it with awe. At last, some of their long-lost magic would be recovered. “Now get out of my sight little witch.” He smiled too pleased with himself.

“Just one more thing,” She said as he gave her an annoyed look, “What are you gonna,” She raised her pistol and shot, splattering his brains all over the window behind him. Finally she let out a smile and returned to Ayden. The sooner she was off this station the better. She took Ayden and together they left the station and headed back to her ship.

“Lady Shul, did you manage to recover the book?” The librarian asked after hearing about the carnage left in the Honey Den.

“I did, but the Mutep burned it before I could get it.”

“A shame, such great wisdom lost, well my lady I wish you luck in your journeys. Should you ever need any wisdom from literature, stop by our library again.”

She cut off the feed and lifted the book onto the table. An idiot human had no place keeping a treasure such as this, she smiled, knowing it would be in the right hands. She stood within the cramped ship quarters and turned to the left room. Her lizard-like feet padded on the soft carpet as she opened the sliding door to find Ayden laying on a small bed. “We got the book, was it worth all the corpses we left behind.”

“Ayden, you may not believe me, but yes it was. Our civilization will gain back a piece of what we lost.”

“And what if we did more than that?”

“We’ll worry about that when the time comes, for now, rest easy.”

“Master, we only breed hate when we kill them. Worse could happen, wars, bloodshed, and,”

“And that is enough, Ayden, you know little of what you speak. You aren’t aware of the horrors of war, you lost nothing from the evils that those creatures caused. We fought so long, so hard, just so that we could be a shell of our former selves. The UCA stopped the war, but we still lost, all of the sacrifices were for nothing.”

“We gained peace.”

“We gained nothing but loss and hate, now take your rest Ayden.” She said frustrated. She left his room and entered the room on the right for some much needed rest. She sat cross legged and meditated, letting herself get lost in the currents of the magic of the universe. She felt the chaos of the galaxy, an ever present tension on the verge of eternal wars. What awaited her in her future journeys, only time would tell?

submitted by /u/Afro_Knight9577 [link] [comments]

#June 05 #2021 at 02:18AM

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atomiceaglereview-blog · 7 years ago

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These 6 Women’s “Work Uniforms” Will Make Your Mornings Easier

Dressing for the office in the morning takes time and energy, which is why the concept of a “work uniform”–wearing a variation of the same outfit every single day–has become so popular. Barack Obama, for instance, put on the same blue or gray suit every morning while he was in office to cut down on the number of unimportant decisions he needed to make. Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose closet famously consists of dozens of the same gray T-shirt, allowing him to eliminate any sartorial choices so he can focus all his energies on Facebook.

But it’s not quite that simple for women. For starters, it’s not as easy for women to throw on a T-shirt and jeans for work every day. In many industries, women still struggle to be treated as equal to their male counterparts. Wearing polished, professional clothing even in the midst of a casual work environment is an important way to project competence. Case in point: Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer have never shown up to a board meeting in a hoodie and T-shirt. They’re known for elegant shift dresses and well-chosen separates.

Women are also faced with more options when it comes to workwear. Men generally have two choices: formal, in which case they wear a suit, or casual, in which case they wear jeans. (In fact, many men feel so limited by their workwear that they resort to using colorful socks as a way to express themselves.) Women, on the other hand, can pick from a wide spectrum of choices, ranging from masculine to feminine, modest to risqué, muted to colorful, the list goes on.

I’ve spent the last few weeks testing a range of work uniforms that can help women simplify their morning routine throughout the year. Each outfit on this list is designed to be appropriate for different industries and office cultures. They also span a range of price points. This can be used as a template to help you build a work uniform that is perfect for your particular situation.

YOUR FIRST WORK UNIFORM: ARITZIA

Appropriate for: Building your first professional wardrobe

Style Inspiration: Emma Watson

Canadian brand Aritzia targets the 18 to 30 market. Its Babaton line is specifically designed to go between professional and casual settings, which is ideal for women just starting out in the workplace, looking to build their first work uniform. I would recommend getting a couple of blouses and pants, plus a dress, and going through them in a regular rotation. The beauty of these outfits is that they don’t look overly starchy or formal, so they can easily transition into evening or weekend activities, like a casual dinner or brunch with friends.

A great basic is the Cian ruffled-sleeve blouse ($78), which is made of breezy, fluid polyester fabric that is easy to machine wash and doesn’t stain easily. Aritzia is known for its wide array of trousers in interesting silhouettes. I tried the Dexter trousers ($145) which are baggy and comfortable, but also look polished because they are made from a Japanese crepe material that is matte on the outside, but silky against your skin. When the fall comes, you can add trench coat: I tried the Lawson ($245), but Aritzia offers a wide range.

The brand also has a wide range of dresses that are perfect for the summer. I found the Whitlaw wrap dress ($135) which is made out of crisp cotton poplin, totally work appropriate, but also great for picnics or parties.

BEST FOR TECH LADY BOSSES: ARGENT

Appropriate for: Tech companies from startups to giants

Style Inspiration: Angela Ahrendts

Let’s face it. You need a blazer year round because your office air conditioning is over-active in the summer. Argent, a year-old startup that creates modern, edgy workwear, has you covered. It has created a smart blazer, full of ingenious hidden features, that is meant to be worn throughout the year.

The Smart Cuff blazer ($330), which is one of Argent’s best-selling products, is a perfect foundational blazer in your work uniform. I wore it for two weeks in a particularly chilly coworking space this summer. It features a rib cuff that allows you to pull back your sleeves when you’re working. It also has an invisible layer of tape on the back of your neck that is reflective, so that if you’re biking or even walking at night, cars will see you. It has a mesh pocket on the inside for your phone, so you can open the blazer and take a peek without having to fully take out your device. It also has a special compartment for your office key card, so you can easily get into and out of your building just by tapping the side of your blazer.

Try pairing the blazer with Argent’s Hi-Tech ponte dress ($275), which is a work-appropriate little black dress. During the colder months, it looks great with contrast colored tights. It comes with pockets, which I found came in very handy when I was testing it out. It comes with UVB 30 protection and despite being black, tends to reduce the absorption of heat. And to top it all off, it comes in a very flattering profile: It cinches in at the waist, then flares out at the hem, and comes with three-way stretch. I wore the dress and the blazer repeatedly for two weeks and didn’t feel like I needed to change things up in any way.

BEST FOR STARCHIER INDUSTRIES: MM.LAFLEUR

Appropriate for: Law, consulting, government

Style Inspiration: Kamala Harris, Christine Lagarde

While the overall trend in offices has gone more casual, there are still industries where more formal dress is still required. If you’re heading into the courtroom, for instance, or to meet legislators on Capitol Hill, you’ll need a closet full of shift dresses.

MM.LaFleur, a women’s workwear startup, was designed specifically for busy women who spend their lives in professional clothing. The brand tries to take the effort out of the shopping process through its “bento box” concept, which allows you to provide a couple of details about your lifestyle and body type so that a personal stylist can pick out several outfits for you. You can send back the ones you don’t like. The brand now offers a much wider selection of sizes that go from 0 to 22.

For a simple work uniform, I would recommend an elegant blouse and trouser set, plus a shift dress. I tested the Foster Pant ($195), which ingeniously includes a concealed button at the hem that allows you to adjust their length. They serve as crops in the summer, and regular trousers in the winter. They look slim and proper, but they are made from a comfortable fabric that doesn’t stretch out, so you don’t end up with a terrible bulge at the knee half way through the day. I paired it with the Lin Top ($190), a crepe blouse that has a bow on it. It has a high, modest neckline, but the architectural drape makes it interesting.

For the shift, I tried the Sarah Dress ($195), which is very simple and versatile, but have interesting structured sleeves. It’s made from a polyester blend material that holds its shape throughout long days of wear, but also doesn’t feel too hot when you’re buzzing around in the summer and pairs nicely with a sweater or blazer in the colder months. One great thing about all of these garments is that they are machine washable, unlike much other workwear that often needs to be dry cleaned. I packed all of them for a work trip and they didn’t wrinkle or require ironing.

BEST FOR CREATIVE PROFESSIONS: EILEEN FISHER

Appropriate for: Architects, designers, creative directors

Style inspiration: Rei Kawakubo, Grace Coddington

Eileen Fisher has nailed the work uniform. The brand has created “The System” which is a set of eight garments that come in high-quality fabrics and simple silhouettes. Each piece, which comes in black or white, can be paired with any other part of the system, for an endless combination of looks.

I tried the System Silk Long Shell ($218) in black along with the System Washable Stretch Crepe Slim Pant ($168) also in black. Together, the pieces felt breezy and comfortable, but thanks to the drape of the silk, the outfit still felt polished. Part of the reason the pieces can be worn every day is that they are so basic. Since they don’t stand out, your clothes just fade into the background.

For some variety, I also tried the System Tank Dress ($198). This simple jersey dress worked well with heels or flats, but was also incredibly versatile. I could wear it to interviews or to a PTA meeting. The sheer simplicity of these clothes means you can wear them anywhere.

INVESTMENT PIECES: SENZA TEMPO

Appropriate for: Killer pieces for when you’re going for an interview, giving a talk, presenting findings to the board.

Style Inspiration: Amal Clooney

If you’re more established in your career, you might be looking for couple of luxurious but versatile pieces for your wardrobe that will make you feel confident when you need to bring your A-game. A Ted talk, for instance, or an important VC pitch.

The startup Senza Tempo was founded specifically to fill this need. The brand has launched a very curated collection of classic pieces. The clothes are pricey, catering to the luxury market and they are all made with the highest-quality fabrics. Each piece is lined in silk, for instance, because of its temperature regulating qualities.

The Frances black sleeveless top ($450) that pairs with the Sophiapencil skirt ($450) are a good place to start. Together, the pieces look like a tailored dress and serves an an alternative to a suit. The outfit is extremely simple but very elegant. But they can also be worn as separates; the black top even looks good with jeans, for more casual events. The garments are made from virgin Italian wool that is stretchy, so it hugs the body. I wore this outfit on a warm day and it didn’t feel hot at all, since the silk layer underneath wicks away sweat.

BEST IN CLASS: LES LUNES

Appropriate for: Almost anything. A casual office, a board meeting, chasing after your child in the playground after work.

Style Inspiration: Oprah Winfrey

San Francisco and Paris-based startup Les Lunes launched with one objective: to create the most comfortable workwear imaginable. Several years ago, the brand’s founders discovered bamboo, a soft, stretchy eco-friendly material that is now commonly used in sleepwear and underwear. They put this material in the hands of a team of Parisian designers to see if they could transform it into clothing that could be worn to work.

They’ve succeeded. They’ve created a line of jumpsuits, dresses, and separates that look polished thanks to thoughtful touches, like ruching, draping, and lace. The fabric is temperature regulating, making it appropriate throughout the year. If you were to put together one work uniform that you would wear every day, for the entire year, I would suggest going with Les Lunes.

One of my favorite pieces was the sleeveless Casino Jumpsuit ($220) that comes with a belt. The piece seriously felt like a pair of pajamas, but never looked slouchy or informal. It comes with a belt that provides a nice waistline. The Mont-Louis Dress ($245) is a wrap dress that has lace detailing at the neckline and hem. Again, it is extremely comfortable, but always looks very put together. Both are great foundational pieces for your wardrobe and can be worn on rotation.

To add a bit of variety to these pieces, I paired them with the Fontainebleau Jacket ($232), which is also entirely made of bamboo. It drapes nicely over trousers and dresses, and comes with a long belt that you tie at your waist. Pairing the jacket with the outfits totally changes the look, adding some variety on cooler days when you need an extra layer.

Welcome to DigDeals for more great women't dresses.

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topicprinter · 7 years ago

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Hey /r/Entrepreneur! Rich Clominson from Failory, the website where we weekly interview failed startup owners, here.I have just published a new interview with Jan, CTO of Flux, a failed modular multi-messaging client. His startup raised a small angel round of 70K € and invested another 15K €. A combination of many issues led to their failure. Read now the story of "The €85,000 Failed Modular Multi-Messaging Client"!Hi Jan! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?Hi! I am the founder and CTO of Flux, which was a modular multi-messaging client. I studied a bit of physics and philosophy before, but I am mainly a self-taught full stack developer. Right now, I am in the middle of open sourcing all software that we built and using it as a basis for consulting and freelancing for companies that need a messaging platform. I am really grateful to all our investors that allowed me to do this and I am confident that somehow something new and bigger will evolve out of this unique situation. What was Flux about? How did you come up with the idea?The main idea is quite old and evolved out of discussions with friends at university. The main pain point we had at that time was that Facebook just entered the German market and we experienced firsthand what it means to have all your messages and friends stuck in the data silo of studiVZ, which was the German copycat that was used before Facebook. The basis of all product iterations was always that we tried to build something that lets you own your data but still take part in mainstream social media with normal non-nerdy friends. First prototypes were before diaspora but similar federated social networks. We quickly learned that support for all data types (images, events etc.) was too much, so we focused on the most important one: messages. The second learning that led to the product idea was that replacing the status quo was impossible so we focused on building a professional messaging product that used existing messaging channels like Facebook and email. How did you build Flux?We did never enter a growth phase and failed already in private beta. But we had a few thousands of users on the waiting list. We mainly got them through giving talks and public pitches as well as exposure from our accelerator StartupBootcampBerlin. Why did Flux fail?A combination of many issues, probably any one of them would have been enough for a failure, so I am still somewhat proud of what we achieved. This is my overview in no specific order:Looking for investment too early/ at all: The product we tried to build was just not that interesting to investors, I see why with my knowledge now, but at the time we thought it was just about not trying hard enough. In retrospect, it was stupid to look for bigger investors at all, at least in Berlin. Had we just tried to sell consulting, services and custom solutions and building the product along the way instead of the wasted VC time we would have gotten much further. The wrong impression I had was based on reading mainly US-based blogs as well as listening too much to people from the Berlin startup world that gave advice on how they thought or wished things would be instead of the actual experience of success in the current world.Bad cofounder fit: Me and my business cofounder were extremely opposite characters and at times there was a great synergy but more and more often this lead to a lot of friction. Also, co-founders should probably know each other for more than a year before, but we just met for the venture. Lastly, I highly overestimated the available funding in Berlin for this extremely early stage and kind of product and so assumed that a business person who is good with people had more to do than was the case. I naively thought he could just go and sell a prototype to a VC and then build up the office and hire the people as well as do finance and contracts when in reality all we needed was people to work on the product until we could show traction.Over-engineering: I am responsible for over-engineering a few aspects of flux. I changed a lot since then, to not make the same mistakes again. But reading about extreme programming and MVP is one thing but I don’t think I was able to really “feel” what it means without having gone through the situation. The following are the main over-engineering mistakes:Overestimating the convergence/ availability of REST APIs: I thought all companies will publish a REST API with converging concepts for paging, endpoint structure, authentication, references and pretty open usage restrictions. Therefore, we built a DSL for connecting and consuming REST endpoints. In Erlang. We could just have built the first connectors manually and then at a much later stage still develop a DSL and automate the process if it would have made sense then. This was also a big problem because investors asked us about ‘secret sauce’ all the time, so the technology for connector building seemed really important to us. When in reality the problem was we wanted to impress investors in the first place.Over/Under engineering Client Model: I did not know about observables and Rx, maybe they did not even exist then, I’m not sure. The point is the same however: the view model for flux became very complex and depended on multiple asynchronous processes and a locking system to generate it consistently grew hard to manage. Today I would not have half the headaches from then because of RxJS or similar tools.Too early adoption of micro-services with wrong service boundaries: I tried to use whatever developer resources I could get my hands on and allowed them to use languages they thought were great as long as I also found them interesting and fitting. This lead to a mixture of Erlang, Go, Ruby and JavaScript that became extremely hard to support especially as developers with different knowledge joined and left. In retrospect, I should just have completely bought into the node.js wave, but at the time node.js was nowhere near the solid platform it is today and as we over-estimated the short-term funding and growth possibilities: we just thought that investing in reliable and scalable services would pay of sooner than it would have and that the language zoo would be no problem as the team grew bigger.Technical idealism at the wrong place: I am and always was a CouchDB fanboy. But at the time the concept of CouchApp was also on the horizon and I was so much into the vision of distributed, independent and self-contained web applications, that I tried to make the whole architecture work in such a future. This future never happened and I could have spent a lot of the time working on actual product features with immediate impact.Bad luck on timing: When we started, Twitter’s API was still hugely unregulated and Facebook and Google had an XMPP API for messaging and saw it mainly as a relatively unimportant extra for their main products. But then messaging was the new big thing and they changed to a more closed and even more walled garden strategy. This was before business messaging accounts were on their focus, so we did not have the old API but the new APIs (e.g. Facebooks pages messaging) were not available yet. Needless to say, this was a small disaster for a startup with very limited resources. Luckily, we supported emails as a channel from day one so we could focus on email use cases. Maybe email support would have been on the over-engineering list too, if it did not allow us to build new iterations in this difficult time. Good email support is a huge pain to build, but once you have it, it’s so powerful, that I do not regret a single sleepless night building it.Focusing on consumers instead of businesses for too long: Building a product for consumers instead of businesses requires a very different mindset. After it became clear consumers and prosumers would not be a big enough market it took us too long to start focusing on businesses, mainly due to the different cultures.What finally killed us: Contract Negotiations with a big German business When we finally managed to make the switch we were already very low on runtime. It was clear we could just try this time. One of our investors gave us one of their lawyers but the contracts were just an endless rabbit hole. When we finally found a somewhat acceptable basis, the big company had a restructuring and the contact person changed, we had zero runtime left and instead of being able to start the cooperation we had a new contract version in the mail that gave them complete exclusivity on so much of the project that we could never have used the software with a different client. That was the end. Which were your investments? Did you achieve some revenue? Did you lose any money?We raised a small angel round of ~ 70K € and burned through ~ 70K € of private savings for living costs for me and my co-founder. After giving up, just keeping alive the company entity and getting everything to a happy ending cost me another 15K. Our first business deal never happened and we never had revenue, so all this money could be seen as ‘lost’. On the other hand, the learnings and time we had were incredible so for me at least it was totally worth it. What did you learn?In addition to all the learnings from mistakes I already talked about: I learned a lot about my weaknesses and people. Lastly, I hugely improved as a developer, architect, and CTO. This personal development is hard for me to put into words, it’s just too much, and it is hard to tell what is a result of growing up and what is directly connected to the startup experiences. Just so much: I am not naturally good at implanting my vision into other people and also, I am not good at letting go and accepting half-baked solutions with long-term risks when there is not enough time. What's your advice for someone who is just starting?I don’t want to give advice; the world is full of un- or semi- successful entrepreneurs happily giving advice to anyone and even those who were successful are full of survivorship bias and most advice is bullshit anyways. If someone has a question I am always happy to answer as honest as I possibly can. Which book would you recommend?I think books about entrepreneurship or technology are overrated. I read abstracts about all important concepts and go into slightly more depth for things I find relevant or interesting, but reading or writing a whole book instead of “doing” just feels fundamentally wrong. Where can we go to learn more?I am not publishing much at the moment, but if there is any news, I will most likely post it on Twitter. Original interview posted at https://failory.com/interview/flux

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

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tortuga-aak · 8 years ago

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Lyft is now worth $11 billion — its founder reveals how he went from sleeping on a couch and eating frozen Trader Joe's meals to running a giant startup

Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Mike Blake/Reuters

John Zimmer is the cofounder and president of the ride-hailing service Lyft.

Lyft was founded in 2012 and has faced a fierce competitor in Uber since the beginning.

In the past year, Uber has come under fire for a series of missteps while Lyft has maintained its "nice guy" image.

Lyft is valued at $7.5 billion and covers 94% of the US population.

For more than five years, Uber and Lyft have been locked in a battle to become the ultimate ride-hailing service. Uber has been the leader with a war chest of billions of dollars from investors. But it has come under fire for how it treats drivers and its employees.

Then there's Lyft, which is also worth billions. One of its biggest advantages seems to be its "nice guy" reputation. But it can be hard for nice guys not to finish last.

"We had a competitor that was trying to put us out of business with capital," Lyft's cofounder and president, John Zimmer, told Business Insider's podcast, "Success! How I Did It." "There was a point three years ago where they had 30 times the amount of capital as us and were trying to use it to give incentives to passengers and drivers such that people weren't using our service. And so it was hard."

On this episode, Zimmer tells us how he got rich by not caring about money, plus how he survived early startup years by living on a couch in an 'apartfice' and eating microwave meals from Trader Joe's.

Listen to the full interview on "Success! How I Did It" here:

Check out previous episodes with:

Life coach Tony Robbins

Hearst Magazines CCO Joanna Coles

Former CIA Director John Brennan

And a "Master Class" episode of advice from our guests

The following is a transcript of the podcast, which has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Alyson Shontell: You've been thinking about ride sharing since you were in college. Back then, you came up with a business that sounds a lot like Lyft, but it had a ridiculous name.

John Zimmer: Yeah, I had started writing a business plan with a horrible name.

Shontell: What was it?

Zimmer: It was called "The Waddle." It's really, really bad.

Shontell: The Waddle? Oh, my God, that's amazing.

Zimmer: It's horrible.

Shontell: I'd love to see you pitch a VC with that name.

Zimmer: Yeah, luckily I never did.

Early life

John Zimmer

Shontell: So you're from Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the US. I imagine that shaped your ambition in some way, but what was growing up like?

Zimmer: As a kid I was surrounded by a lot of people who valued material objects, and it wasn't important to my parents, to my family. But there were people who would get excited about the car that they got when they were 16, and it was a ridiculous car, or about a watch. And those things never mattered to me.

But it was really interesting to grow up in that environment and almost fight those feelings that were kind of being impressioned on kids as important. And so I had to figure out for myself how to define success differently than a lot of the other members of the community, who were more in material objects. And that took me on a journey over many years.

As a kid, I got the most joy when I was with other people, part of a strong community, making people happy, and so one of my first jobs was in a hotel as a phone operator. At the Hyatt Regency in town I asked the general manager if I could work there.

Shontell: And you were under age, right?

Zimmer: Yes.

He said, "No." And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, you're too young." And I said, "OK, well, can we talk to your lawyers and figure this out?" Because it was like a legal concern. And he was shocked that I was really pushing. We ended up figuring it out and he said, "Fine, kid, you can answer the phone."

He gave me this really baggy suit because I was really small, and you had to wear this Hyatt suit, and so I sat out of sight behind the front desk and answered calls from guests in the hotel and people calling from outside as well. That was another chapter in my love for hospitality and delighting people through great service, and I ended up going to study at Cornell hotel school.

Shontell: But then you took a class that changed what you wanted to do, right?

Zimmer: Yeah, so my senior year, I took a city-planning class in the School of Architecture, Art, and Planning, and the class was called Green Cities, and I had this amazing professor. Some of the themes were geography, resources that existed in that geography, and how they moved over time, and he ended the lecture saying what was a really important turning point in world history:

"Population density is rising rapidly as more and more people move toward cities, resources are becoming limited in those cities, and the infrastructures that we built were built decades before there were so many people living here, and, simply, if we don't fix those infrastructures, we're going to have major economic, environmental, and social problems. And if you don't make this class the most important thing you do this semester, I don't want to teach you."

Shontell: Wow.

Zimmer: And then he just bailed.

Shontell: Like, I'm out, mic drop.

Zimmer: Yeah, a mic-drop moment.

And then his eighth lecture was on transportation history, and he talked about the evolution in the United States from canals to railroads to highways. And he had these zoomed-out images of those infrastructures — canal lines, railroad lines, highway lines. And I start thinking, "What would be next?" What would be that next infrastructure that's going to be built? Because when individuals were building the canals, they weren't thinking, "In 100 years no one's going to care about this and we're going to have something totally different."

And so I was trying to figure out, "What are we missing? We have so many roads. We have 250 million cars. How are we going to completely change our infrastructure?" And after thinking about it through the lecture, I couldn't figure out what the next physical infrastructure would be; I couldn't understand how we were going to kind of tear up these roads and change how each of these major US cities would look.

If you think about Manhattan or LA, the majority of those cities are paved over with infrastructure for cars. And then it struck me: As a hospitality student, what if we consider the transportation system like a hotel? So I call this "transportation hotel," and I ask, "What is the occupancy in transportation hotel?" And so I started looking at the car itself, and I found out that the car is utilized 4% of the time, it sits idle 96 percent of the time, and therefore we built a lot of infrastructure like parking for that 96% of the time that we're not using it.

If you do it on a seats basis, it's 1% of the seats are used at any given time. So transportation hotel is horribly run. A hotel with that low occupancy would be done the second it started. I wanted to figure out, "How could you increase occupancy?" Which in turn would reduce costs for people, because owning and operating a car is the second-highest household expense in the United States. It's a symbol of, and a reality of, economic mobility in our country, because public transportation is fantastic, but it's not available for everyone across the country. I wanted to figure out how to bring down the cost by increasing the occupancy and provide better service, because in hospitality, occupancy and service are the two main criteria.

Shontell: So this really gets you thinking, but you don't go and start Lyft right away. You went into Lehman Brothers. What happened there?

Zimmer: I wanted to understand finance; I wanted to understand why people got so excited about finance. It didn't make sense to me, but I also wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I felt that getting some financial background would be valuable.

And then the goal was to take whatever money I was earning for the two-year analyst program and save it and not spend it. And so I went to Manhattan and worked at Lehman Brothers from 2006 to 2008, which was a very interesting time to be there.

In 2007, I was on Facebook one night, and Logan Green, my cofounder, who I didn't know at the time, posted on a mutual friend's Facebook page that he was launching a website called Zimride. And what I came to realize is that he named Zimride after a trip he took to Zimbabwe, where he saw people sharing rides out of necessity, which happens in many developing countries. He'd built it himself and was obsessed with providing an alternative to car ownership. I reached out to our mutual friend and I said, "How well do you know Logan, and why the hell did he call his company Zimride?"

Shontell: It was like it was meant for you.

Zimmer: It was bizarre — and way better than my "Waddle" name for sure.

Shontell: And Waddle was going to be a car service?

Zimmer: It was going to be a carpooling network, a carpooling community, and that's what Logan was building, and he was tying it to Facebook so that people could establish trust online. And so I reached out to the mutual friend, Logan flew to New York, and we met each other. This was 10 years ago, and we started working together.

Finding a cofounder

John Zimmer

Shontell: How does that happen? You find someone who eventually becomes your cofounder, who you've never met. You live on opposite coasts. This is like long-distance dating to the extreme. Plus, you've got this other full-time and, I would assume, demanding job at Lehman.

Zimmer: Yeah, I wasn't sleeping much.

I was really excited. I'd always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I always wanted to solve something that would have a positive impact on people's lives, would bring people together in the real world. I was running on adrenaline, I guess, for my second year at Lehman, and in the first year at Lehman, it was probably their best year ever. And the second year ended with them going bankrupt three months after I left.

But I just was way more passionate about working on Zimride and felt like that was really important to be doing, and so I decided I was going to leave after my two-year analyst program. I was told that I was crazy to leave a sure thing like Lehman Brothers for a silly carpool startup. And again, Lehman wasn't around three months later. And then I used Zimride to carpool across the country to meet Logan, and we both moved to Silicon Valley.

Shontell: Wow. And you guys just hit it off and you're, like, "I could do this with you — this could be great."

Zimmer: Yeah, I mean, at that point it was a side project, and so it felt like a school project where there was a lot of interest, passion, and we had a big vision, but we didn't know what it was going to be, and so we just wanted to see it work. We wanted to see if we could flip a student population at a university. We were mostly focused on college campuses and making the majority carpool to get home for spring break. That was the main challenge, and that's what we were trying to solve. So we moved to Palo Alto and Menlo Park. For the first three years we didn't take a salary.

Shontell: Three years, no salary?

Zimmer: Yeah. I think, at least.

Shontell: Good thing you saved a lot of money.

Zimmer: Yeah, it was helpful that I had saved some money.

And we basically lived in an apartment that was also our office, we called it the "apartfice." We lived off a lot of Trader Joe's microwavable meals. I slept on the couch for at least six months before upgrading to my best friend's parents' house, which was a major upgrade, got a full bed. And then not until my now wife came out and said, "This is ridiculous — we need a little bit of space," and then moved out of that situation.

Turning Zimride into Lyft

Business Insider

Shontell: So talk about what Zimride was and how it started and just what was the concept behind it. Because that eventually became Lyft, right?

Zimmer: Yeah.

Zimride was long-distance carpooling. So you're coming home from — in my case, upstate New York — and you want to go to New York City, so that's about a four-hour drive. You're in your dorm hall. There's one other person, who you don't know, who is also going the same way as you. You guys should be paired up, save the cost of the gas, and split the ride. And some people didn't have access to a car, and so they also wanted a ride. And so we allowed people to basically sell those empty seats in their car. So for $20 or $30, you could sell three seats, let's say, make $60 on your ride home, and you'd actually be making some money rather than losing money on all the costs associated with driving.

We got it to thousands of users and had 150 universities and companies paying us for a closed carpooling network. And then, in 2012, Logan and I looked at ourselves and said, "How are we doing? It's five years in, we had this dream of starting a business, we've done that." We had raised a couple of million dollars, which was fantastic. We had this great team of about 20 people. But the bigger vision, which we've always had, was providing a full alternative to car ownership. Our actual mission is to improve people's lives with the world's best transportation and, in doing so, to change our cities so that they are designed around people instead of cars. And we were just scratching the surface. We really didn't feel like we were doing enough.

And so we said, "What if we were starting Zimride over today? What would it look like?" And when we started Zimride in 2007, smartphones didn't really exist. And one of the biggest problems we had with Zimride was that the frequency of use was a couple of times a year because there were these long-distance trips, and so we said, "Well, what if we could increase the frequency of use? Use a smartphone?" At the time, Uber existed, but they were just doing this for black cars and limos, and to us that was uninteresting.

Shontell: Right, they were kind of for the 1%, that was their thing.

Zimmer: Yeah, they were for that Greenwich population that I was trying to think differently than.

And so I thought, well, getting rides for people who are working at banks — that's definitely not what I want to work on. But providing a full alternative to car ownership and allowing people to use their existing car to make money, that was really exciting. And so within three weeks we launched what we were about to call Zimride Instant, and luckily called Lyft, and that was the beginning of Lyft, in the middle of 2012.

Shontell: So three weeks from concept to a live app. Is that what you guys did?

Zimmer: Yeah — we had two incredible engineers who built the app in three weeks.

Shontell: An intern named it, right?

Zimmer: Yeah, Harrison — he's still here. He's on the design team and he helped come up with the name Lyft as well as the logo.

And so it was a pretty exciting three weeks that we went from start to actually having a ride with drivers that we did background checks for and driving-record checks of, and we'd met in person and kind of talked to them about the culture we wanted to create with Lyft, and then it's been crazy since then.

Healthy competition

REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui

Shontell: So you launched this and you mentioned you had seen Uber was out there. Do you remember the first time you saw Uber and it resonated?

Zimmer: Not really. Again, the image, the tagline at the time, "Everyone's private driver," that didn't really resonate with me. That's not something we wanted to create. Lyft's tagline was "Your friend with a car" and the goal was to provide an alternative to car ownership. And so we felt like it was very, very different.

Shontell: Eventually, Uber did launch UberX, which is kind of exactly what you guys were doing at Lyft. Was that a hard moment? I'm sure it's frustrating sometimes for you whenever people talk about Lyft; Uber is not far from a next sentence. What is the competition of Uber been like? Do you think that having a worthy opponent has made Lyft even more successful or how have you viewed that from the beginning?

Zimmer: Yeah, absolutely. If we consider ourselves still entrepreneurs who are learning, having a formidable competitor has been great training and has brought Logan, myself, and the team closer together and rallied around our values, and I think what sometimes people miss when they're in an area like Silicon Valley or building a business is like, you can get really caught up in winning.

Winning is awesome. We're incredibly competitive, we expect to win, we like winning. But why is really, really important. We want to win because we believe that the set of values that we hold and the way we envision our cities designed around people is so important to the future of our society, where my kids will live, that that's why we want to win, because we're not certain if someone else helps build cities of the future, that they're going to be built in a way conducive to human interaction.

And so that's what drives us and we've only gotten more and more firm in our set of beliefs and in the necessity in our belief to win to make sure that happens.

Overcoming barriers

John Sciulli/Getty Images for Lyft

Shontell: There are a lot of things that I'm sure were extremely hard in getting Lyft off the ground. First off, the business model itself. You have multiple customers. You've got the drivers you have to keep happy and you have the customers you need to keep happy. So that's one challenge. How did you learn to balance that and figure that out?

Zimmer: Yeah, well, it's very related.

In hospitality, if you use the Lyft example, drivers are critical to everything. If we don't take care of drivers, then passengers don't get taken care of. And so by treating drivers better than any other company, we're going to create the best experience for our passenger. So in that case it's connected, and we always thought of it as really simple. We should be nice to drivers. We should do our best to take care of drivers because that's also going to be great for passengers. So for us, that was always straightforward.

Shontell: But it's easier said than done, because customers want cheaper prices and drivers obviously want to make more money. So how did you figure out the pricing structure that would work? As you're putting this together, how has it changed and evolved, and what have you learned? Because it is very hard to keep two separate entities happy.

Zimmer: Yeah, that's right. That's definitely fair.

It's a balancing act, so this is a marketplace with two sides. We had to kind of try our way into it. In the early days, a product like this didn't exist, so we had to look at alternatives. From the passenger perspective, they're thinking about, "Well, what is my other alternative?" Often at the time, it was a taxi or a cab alternative because the first use case people were using Lyft for was a night out or "I'm going to have a drink — I don't want to drive"-type situation.

Longer term, with things like Lyft Line and where prices are now, I think it can take over more use cases than just that first one, but it's really just through trial and understanding what passengers are willing to pay and how we can get drivers as much of that as possible while moving the business toward profitability.

Shontell: Another challenge has been regulators. It's a very messy business.

It sounds like a great idea in theory, like, "I'm going to just fill cars that aren't being used with people who want to use them at any given moment." It's obviously why consumers would want it. But regulators were resistant for a while and at times sent you cease-and-desists. And it's been extremely challenging in every city you've launched in; it's different. A lot of people who would just be, like, "Well, it's not possible, it's not doable, there are too many things in the way."

Why did you keep going anyways, and how did you get it done?

Zimmer: We kept going because we really believed in our mission, and, when I think about all the moments that were the hardest, like how close we were to failure along the way, it was really this, like, we really believe in the need for making our cities better and designed around people.

We received cease-and-desists within, I think, two months of launching, and our first thought was, "Oh, let's go talk to them and let's explain what we're doing." We'd already done the legal analysis, which made us believe that we were in the clear because this was different than anything that had been done before, but we weren't unaware of the fact that this was very new, culturally, to be riding in other people's cars.

And so we sat down with the regulators, in this case the California Public Utilities Commission, and said, "What are you most concerned about? Why did you send us a cease-and-desist? Is it public safety or is it to protect against existing industries?" And they said, "It's safety, of course." And we said, "Great," and we had this document prepared that walked through all of the safety things that we did, including a criminal-background check, a driving-record check, a million-dollar insurance liability policy to cover each driver. And then we said, "And here's what you require of the entities you regulate." They regulate the black cars and limos in California.

And almost everything was more significant than what they were requiring. For example, they require $750,000, I think to this day, instead of a million dollars for black cars and limos. They do not require a criminal-background check for black cars and limos, which is shocking. And so that led to about a year of back-and-forth to the point where they did create the new category and regulated using that kind of model for safety.

Shontell: And was that one of those near-death moments? Did you guys ever think, like, "Wow, he told us to still stop"? Like, "There's just no way forward." How close were you to throwing in the towel?

Zimmer: There were moments where we were close, and that would have really, I think, prevented the whole industry from growing in the United States.

But again, we felt like we were on the right side of history here, we felt like safety was the most important thing, and that we were being responsible around that. And so we fought through it. But sure, we doubted ourselves throughout. I don't know that we would have thrown in the towel unless they were to lock us up or something, or if there was a moment where there was, like, a decision point. And it was a vote at the CPUC, the public utilities commission.

I remember we went to the commission meeting where they voted on whether or not to pass these positive regulations for this new industry. And we had invited the driver community and passenger community and the room was filled. And I believe it was a unanimous decision. I'm not 100% sure, but after the vote, a lot of people stood up and cheered, and the commissioner said that has never happened before and it was a really exciting moment because we weren't certain of that outcome.

Growing Lyft

Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images

Shontell: That's a huge win. And now you all are in how many cities?

Zimmer: We cover 94% of the US population — meaning 94% of the US population can get a ride. Well over 300 cities.

Shontell: And how did you devise a playbook for launching in each city? When Lyft is going to go into a new market, what do you do?

Zimmer: Yeah, so, it's changed over the years.

In the early days, we had a launch team that would drop down and recruit driver mentors, which were drivers who had the highest ratings, and then the mentors would train the next set of drivers, and it was a way for us to pass on those set of cultural values we had and the hospitality from driver to driver. And it's evolved such that we can now have 94% coverage and in our top 20 markets, we have local teams, general managers, and they manage an expanding region.

Shontell: You've scaled tremendously. If you had to give a couple of tips for how you scale and how you create mass consumer interest, what do you think were the biggest things?

Zimmer: It's been really helpful to be close to our product, so one, Logan and I drive. That's really important.

Shontell: You actually do Lyft driving? You pick people up?

Zimmer: Every New Year's I drive. It's one of the times where drivers are making a sacrifice from being with their family and helping people who have had a lot to drink get safe rides, and so it's been important to me that I do that every year, and also more recently have committed to driving every month. That's really, really important.

So be close to the experience, and to the people who are driving your business. And, then, obviously, using it daily on the passenger side has been really helpful. Those are some of the main things.

It's a tough balance between "expand quickly" and "don't expand too quickly." And so sometimes some of the best decisions we made were to say no. So whether that was international expansion or we learned sometimes we expanded too quickly in the US and sometimes we had to redo it in a better way. But it's finding that right balance of speed.

Shontell: You've raised a lot of money for Lyft. Definitely over $2 billion — valuation of $7.5 billion since last I checked. So as someone who's raised a billion-dollar round, what are your tips for fundraising and navigating VCs. Was it ever hard to do in the fundraising process of Lyft?

Zimmer: It was absolutely hard to do. We had a competitor that was trying to put us out of business with capital, and that was larger than us and a lot of investors were asking.

Shontell: And how were they doing that?

Zimmer: There was a point three years ago where they had 30 times the amount of capital as us.

Shontell: That's insane.

Zimmer: And we're trying to use it to give incentives to passengers and drivers such that people weren't using our service. And so it was hard.

But honestly, the best advice I can give to other entrepreneurs is to work on what you're passionate about. If you're working on something just to win or working on something just to make money, in all those tough moments, like raising a round when your competitor is trying to put you out of business with 30 times the amount of capital, it's not going to be a genuine pitch. It's going to be hard to overcome those moments.

But when you care about the work so much, investors can see that. And we had to articulate how we were going to get to where we are today and we found enough people that believed us.

How to win in business as a nice guy

John Zimmer

Shontell: You guys have grown the company tremendously. It's been not that long, 2012 to now — five years you guys have been in business. But everybody says Lyft and Uber in not-too-distant sentences. You've always had a competitive environment. I know you and Travis have had your moments as well. And the personalities of the brands are just completely different, it seems. You walk into your office and it's a very happy, pleasant place, and everyone seems nice and genuine. How can you win in business and be nice? Do you think that that hurt you ever?

Zimmer: It's strange that it's become a thing, because treating people well is great for business.

It is complementary to doing well in business. But there's been this story told of founders who are just not nice to people and that's what it takes to get ahead. And that's just not true.

Shontell: I mean all the way back to Steve Jobs: He's a good example of someone who was cursing out people in some rooms and then also changing the world.

Zimmer: Yeah. I never met Steve Jobs, and I've heard both sides of that story.

What I do know is that most businesses require other people to help you get where you need to go. Whether that's our employees — we call them team members — whether that's in our case the drivers or customers, passengers using the service, great service, great hospitality, treating people well, having a good set of values. That is great for business, and we are out to prove that, along with the mission we have to make our cities better.

Shontell: And if someone is just graduating from Cornell now and wants to create the next billion-dollar, multi-unicorn company, what's your advice to them?

Zimmer: I wouldn't focus on the billion dollars or the term "unicorn." I would focus on why.

Why do you want to do this? What do you actually want to do? What are you passionate about? What do you think needs to be better in the world?

There are a lot of things that need improvement and that can be in the business arena, that can be in other arenas, but certainly in the business arena; there are big opportunities and we've got to focus our business success and metrics around the impact they're having in the real world. And so I would push the next set of entrepreneurs to do that.

Shontell: Isn't it a little bit ironic that you started out by saying what you didn't like about Greenwich was the materialism and now you could probably go buy the biggest house in Greenwich if you wanted to?

Zimmer: But I don't want to.

Shontell: Well, there you go.

Thanks. Congrats on all of your success with Lyft. And hopefully this inspires other people to create the next big thing.

Zimmer: Thanks.

NOW WATCH: A CEO spent $6 million to close the gender pay gap at his company

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silviae279469-blog · 8 years ago

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jeremyau · 8 years ago

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The AppDynamics Story — From Idea to $3.7B ...the Journey Continues

Founder & Chairman at AppDynamics. Startup investor. Advisor/Mentor to founders.

Today is a big day for all of us at AppDynamics. Today, Cisco announced intent to acquire AppDynamics for $3.7 Billion, so that together we can create a combined portfolio for unprecedented application, business and infrastructure analytics.

What a journey! Nine years ago today, in January of 2008, I was a young software engineer with a dream and determination to start my company. I spent my days making the rounds on Sandhill Road in Silicon Valley, trying to generate interest from venture capitalists. On nights and weekends, I sat on my couch in San Francisco and wrote code.

In the nine years since, AppDynamics grew from that initial dream to a successful technology company that today is a strategic software vendor for the world’s largest enterprises.

First and foremost, I want to sincerely thank all of the incredible AppDynamics employees — past and present — who were indispensable in getting us to where we are today. I am a firm believer that our successes in life are never individual journeys. I am honored and humbled to have worked with such talented and committed individuals. Your belief in our mission, your passion, your creativity and your hard work have made all of the difference. You are “AppDynamos,” indeed.

In this journey of the last nine years, building the company as Founder & CEO for first eight years, and as Founder & Chairman for last one year, I learned a lot. However, one of the most important things I learned is that you have to have a big dream, a big goal, and a big vision; BUT, you have got to implement it “one milestone at a time.” There will be stumbles — but you get up and keep going until you reach that next milestone.

The beginning

Every startup begins with a vision — a burning desire to solve some problem. In 2008, I was fully convinced that software would transform the world for the better and change everything we do. But I was equally convinced that if the whole world was going to run on software, someone had to make sure all of that software worked really well, all the time! I knew from my previous work experience that existing solutions weren’t cutting it. My burning desire to solve that problem became the genesis of AppDynamics.

From a personal perspective, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I grew up in a small town in India, and on weekends I’d help my Dad with his small business. I loved it. My other passion was software, and so I went to college (IIT Delhi) to get my degree in Computer Science. As a software engineer, I’ve always felt like software was like “magic clay” and I could use that magic clay to sculpt solutions to so many different problems. I wanted to build companies that would leverage the power of software to make a difference in the world. I brought that dream to Silicon Valley as a 21-year-old fresh out of college and AppDynamics for me was the beginning of fulfilling that personal dream.

Getting funded

Once you have an idea and a vision, the first milestone for any startup is to secure funding. Only one in 25-30 software startups gets institutional venture funding, so as an engineer turned first-time entrepreneur, it was a bit of a challenge in the beginning. I pitched about 20 VCs and got many rejections. I quit my job, continuing to pitch VCs during the day, while coding during nights and weekends. After a few months, I had refined my story significantly and was able to get the company off the ground with $5.5M of Series A funding in April 2008.

Building the initial team

Suddenly I had $5.5M in the bank and one employee: me. I needed a team! For the founding team, you need some very special traits. You need people who are not only very talented in what they do, but who also love the uncertainty and pace of an early startup. The first call I made was to my good friend and one of the most creative and passionate engineers I knew — Bhaskar Sunkara. I was fortunate that Bhaskar agreed to come onboard as our first founding team member. Over time he became my close partner in leading and building our products at AppDynamics and today he leads our product organization as CTO and Head of Product.

It took us another three to four months to assemble a full team of founding engineers, all with those special traits. It wasn’t easy, but by being patient and selective in our hiring, we were able to assemble a winning team.

Finding product/market fit

It’s one of the earliest and the hardest tests for any startup — finding the initial product/market fit (that is, a good market for the product you are planning to sell). Eight out of 10 startups fail at this stage.

There were times at AppDynamics when we didn’t think we would make it. The economy was awful. It was 2009 — one of the worst times to raise any additional venture capital. I knew that if we launched our product and hired sales teams before we were 100℅ sure we had identified a strong product/market fit, we might run out of cash and fold.

It took us 15 months and few key pivots to find our product/market fit and ship a good v1 product, a product we knew we could sell a lot. The key was talking to many potential customers, re-thinking our assumptions, iterating and redesigning until we got to that point. Our first paying customer was a company called Yap (now part of Amazon) in October 2009.

The Launch

Soon, we had a handful of paying customers and a very healthy pipeline of interested prospects. It was time to take the next step — investing in sales and marketing. So the next major milestone was to launch the company out of stealth. We hired our first few marketing and sales employees and publicly launched AppDynamics in February 2010. The shop was open for business.

We soon launched a free version of our product AppDynamics Lite. Because of our highly differentiated product, its ease-of-use and our large number of free trials, demand skyrocketed. Now we were in the “hyper-growth” phase and ready for the next step.

Scaling Sales to a competitive advantage

In 2011, I met Dev Ittycheria (now our Board member and CEO of MongoDB) for breakfast. He asked me to articulate the primary competitive advantages that were fueling our rapid growth. I listed out all the massive advantages we had in our product (the core architecture of our transaction tracing, the self-learning instrumentation, the ease-of-use, etc). He then encouraged me to think about what could be possible if we could build an enterprise sales force that was every bit of a competitive advantage as was our product.

That inspired me to make that the next big company milestone. I resolved to learn everything I could about the art of enterprise software sales. We invested heavily in bringing some of the best enterprise software sales management into the company and over time built a highly skilled and methodical enterprise sales force. Meeting that milestone was key to our continued hyper growth for many years to come.

Customer Success 2.0

As we were rapidly scaling up sales to the world’s largest enterprises, I realized we needed to re-think the traditional customer support and delivery models that most enterprise software companies employed. Simple fact was, most large enterprises were unhappy with their software vendors, as illustrated by Net Promoter Scores (NPS) — a common measure of how satisfied your customers are — averaging around 20. (Contrast that with leading consumer tech companies like Amazon, Google and Apple, all of whom typically boast NPS scores of around 70!)

At AppDynamics, we wanted our next milestone to set a new standard — build a customer support and delivery model, which we called Customer Success 2.0, that would delight enterprise customers in the same way leading consumer tech companies delight their customers. The key elements of that were about having a strong process to hold ourselves accountable for delivering the business value we promised during the sales cycle, and to directly align our teams’ incentives with the success of the customers — both things very different than traditional approaches.

Establishing the culture for a long-lasting business

The next big milestone for us was to make sure we established a very strong cultural foundation, one that we could build on for years or even decades. Also, I realized that for this to be a long-term success, I had to personally own it and drive it. We defined our core cultural values in 2012 — relentless focus on customer success across the organization; open, data-driven and disruptive thinking; constant innovation and pushing the boundaries; collaboration and working together as one team; winning and consistently producing big results. I firmly believe that because our employees live these values on a daily basis, we are where we are today.

From single product to a platform

Our market for our first product, Java APM, was big. And we had only captured a fraction of it. But I realized that to sustain rapid growth for a long time and to become a long-term strategic partner to the IT teams in large enterprises, we had to evolve from one product to a broad platform. We set expansion of our product to a broad platform — the application intelligence platform — as our next major company milestone.

Most startups are challenged when trying to expand the product portfolio. Many times the core product teams find it tough to master the necessary adjacent technology areas. And often the sales teams find it harder to sell follow-on products.

Early on, we stumbled. But once we adopted a "Startups within a Startup" model — bringing the same very small startup mindset to new products as we brought to our first product — we were successful.

In a couple of years, we had multiple very strong products (APM for .NET/ PHP/ Python/ Node.js, Real User Monitoring for Mobile & Browser, Database Monitoring, Server Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring, Application Analytics and others) as part of our comprehensive platform.

Continued rapid growth

As we established ourselves as a strategic platform for the enterprise, built the right cultural foundation in the company including a relentless focus on customer success, and instituted a world-class sales force, we continued to grow rapidly and meet many other milestones as part of that growth journey. That included triple-digit sales growth for many years in a row, multiple rounds of financing (and a "unicorn" status, for what it's worth), and our global expansion.

After eight intense years of running the company from the driver's seat as Founder and CEO, about a year ago I handed over day-to-day operations of the company, and now I focus on helping with our vision and strategy.

Today’s milestone, and the many milestones ahead

All of the above led us to where we are today. My congratulations and sincere thank you to all of my journey mates in getting us here. However, the journey continues — and I couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity ahead as AppDynamics continues to achieve many more big milestones over the coming years, joined together on a bigger journey with Cisco.

#entrepreneurship #entrepreneur #startup #startups

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years ago

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6 YEARS TO GO PUBLIC, YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO BUILD EVERYTHING THEY NEED

To me the exercises at the end of the scale there are so many universities competing to attract students that the mere establishment of a discipline requires little more than the whole company was before. So what's the real reason there aren't more Googles? When we got real funding near the end of the spectrum from a coding job at a big company, so they only do a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest. As big companies' oligopolies became less secure, they were less able to pass costs on to customers and thus less willing to overpay for labor. They wanted yellow. Those were also the centuries during which schools were first established. The students don't. Though actually there is something druglike about them, in the first semester of freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker. We made software for building online stores. A rounds.

In the old days the only limit on the inefficiency of companies, short of actual bankruptcy, was the inefficiency of companies, short of actual bankruptcy, was the inefficiency of their competitors. Because the early problems are so much about abstractions now that we were established as a media company, or portal, or whatever we were, search could safely be allowed to wither and drop off, like an umbilical cord. Imagine if people in 1700 saw their lives the way we'd see them. I think the reason I made such a mystery of business was that I wrote it. The median startup coming out of later stage investors? The good news is, there's also a good chance the person at the next table would know some of the most valuable things you could do. VCs have been getting a lot faster. If the trade didn't increase the value of your initial, mistaken idea. So you end up with a very fine implementation of your initial idea is worth.

For decades there were just those two types of startup ideas. In theory a liberal education is not supposed to supply job training.1 At the mention of ugly source code, people will of course think of Perl. Well, they're not transferrable. Whether or not this is a bit of a fib. Essays should do the opposite.2 Each company in the supply chain focuses on what they know best. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to. Studio art and creative writing courses are wildcards. So if you want to eliminate that you're up against a blank wall.

Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be worth something. Why risk it? An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. They're usually individuals, like angels. It's not just that they promise no immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of papers! But though I can't predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. As a rule, the only thing that can kill a good startup is the startup itself. Though actually there is something druglike about them, in the sense of getting a quick yes or no. The low cost of starting a startup means the particles they're attracting are getting lighter. You have half as big a share of something worth more than the desire to do it.

In his famous essay You and Your Research which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what. Julian thought we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be your best work will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens. I chose not to publish, often because I disagree with it. White than from an academic philosopher. The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. Formal logic has some subject matter. I'm told it derives ultimately from Marvin Minsky, in the first year. As we retraced his walk to school on Google Street View, he said, by then I was interested in maths.

I know the house would probably have something to read.3 Instead of making one $2 million investment, make five $400k investments. A lot of my friends are CS professors now, so I have the inside story about admissions. But only about 10% of the time. When I was 13 I realized, more from internal evidence than any outside source, that the ideas we were being fed on TV were crap, and I predict that will be true of startups in general. But if it were put to use. The amount of cutting is about average. Knowing that risk is on average proportionate to reward, investors like risky strategies, while founders, who don't have a sales guy running the company? It's obvious why you want exposure to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably not doing anything new, and if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers. The super-angels by driving up valuations. The reason Aristotle didn't get anywhere in the Metaphysics was partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were useless.

They didn't talk Wall Street's language when they did, the founders should be. Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions. An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Both changes drove salaries toward market price. Along with giant national corporations, we got giant national labor unions. Version 1 of the national economy consisted of a few big successes, and that this company is going to solve this problem, but it happens surprisingly rarely. In math and the sciences, you can ask it of even the most unobservant people, and when they're feeling ambitious, plain theory.

Notes

And that is exactly the opposite: when we say it's ipso facto right to do this are companies smart enough to absorb that. Build them a check. They're so selective that they consisted of 50 pairs that each summed to 101 100 1,2003.

But those too are acceptable or at such a baleful stare as they do on the East Coast VCs.

But let someone else start those startups. E-Mail. As well as good ones, and more pervasive though. I count you in a couple years.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #color #founders #papers #amount #spectrum #matter #Notes #startup #Though

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years ago

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I'VE BEEN PONDERING ABILITY

I'm not too worried yet. But hackers can't watch themselves at work. So if you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. And I wasn't alone. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: After Altamira, all is decadence. But what if the problem isn't given?1 The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. But the less you identify work with employment, the easier it becomes to start a startup. They're hostages of the platform.2 Do you need a lot of startup founders are often technical people who are mistaken, you can't simply tell the truth.3 But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better speaker than me, but a famous speaker.

There were a lot of people are going to want these.4 But any application can be interesting if it poses novel technical challenges. Chance meetings let your acquaintance drift in the same place they come from different sources. Most people have had the experience of working hard on some problem, not being able to solve it, giving up and going to bed, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work. They don't work for startups in general, but they pay attention. Several friends mentioned hackers' ability to concentrate—their ability, as one put it, to tune out everything outside their own heads. In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't go by the awards he's won or the jobs he's had, because in design, as in many fields, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve. Immigration policy is one area where a competitor could do better.

One of the most successful startup founders turn out to be surprisingly long, Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. For cases like that there's a more drastic solution that definitely works: to set up local VC funds by supplying the money themselves and recruiting people from existing firms to run them, only organic growth can produce angel investors.5 Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas. One is that a lot of nasty little ones. Sun. I think this time I'll wait till I'm sure they work before writing about them. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not.6 But people will do any amount of time knows not to default to skepticism, no matter how inexperienced you seem or how unpromising your idea sounds at first, because they've all seen inexperienced founders with unpromising sounding ideas who a few years unless the university chooses to grant them tenure.7

Immigration policies that let in all smart people, you'd immediately get more than half the world's top talent, for free. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it doing fake work.8 With hackers, at least, exclusively for work. I don't know if it's possible to make yourself into a great hacker how good he is, he's almost certain to reply, I don't know.9 Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability.10 In the mid to late 1980s, all the hackers I know seem to have made that deal, though perhaps none of them had any choice in the matter. I'm trying other strategies now, but I don't believe it.11 The tendency to clump means it's more like the square of the environment. What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. So are talks useless?12

Startup founder is not the power of their brand, but the fact that hackers, despite their reputation for social obliviousness, sometimes put a good deal of effort into seeming smart. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was even better than we'd hoped. That's not hard for engineers to grasp. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on the same projects. But you can.13 When Steve Jobs started using that phrase, Apple was already an established company. For Larry Page the most important tool to a hacker like having one's brain in a blender.14 But the importance of the new model is not just that line but the whole program around it.15

Notes

Free money to spend, see what the earnings turn out to coincide with mathematicians' judgements. Common Lisp, which are a different attitude to the code you write has a title. The banks now had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and the editor written in C and C, and his son Robert were each in turn means the slowdown that comes from bumping up against the limits of one's family, that they don't want to sell your company right now.

Median may be common in the US since the mid 20th century. And so to the hour Google was in a bug. Giant tax loopholes are definitely not a nice-looking little box with a few years.

Obviously signalling risk.

I'm saying you should seek outside advice, and we ran into Yuri Sagalov. 2%.

The Mac number is a self fulfilling prophecy. In fact, for the entire period since the mid twentieth century. But it can buy. Even Samuel Johnson said no man but a razor is much more analytical style of thinking, but they start to identify them with you to stop, but conversations with VCs suggest it's roughly correct for startups is very hard to make people use common sense when interpreting it.

Us seem naive, or Microsoft could not process it. He had equity. Oddly enough, maybe you don't want to wait for the linguist and presumably teacher Daphnis, but economically that's how we gauge their progress, but the programmers, but one way to put it would have disapproved if executives got too much to maintain your target growth rate early on?

I know of this article used the term copyright colony was first used by Myles Peterson. When he wanted to go to college, but it is less than the actual lawsuits rarely happen. If this happens it will become less common for founders to overhire is not just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's not the distribution of income, which I deliberately pander to readers, because companies don't want to be very popular but apparently unimportant, like architecture and filmmaking, but those are probably especially valuable. It also set off an extensive and often useful discussion on the group's accumulated knowledge.

Miyazaki, Ichisada Conrad Schirokauer trans. If anyone wanted to make the police treat people more equitably. But on the basis of intelligence or wisdom. It turns out to coincide with mathematicians' judgements.

Comments at the mercy of investors are just not super thoughtful for the same thing—trying to sell the bad VCs fail by choosing startups run by people like Jessica is not such a large pizza and found an open source project, but conversations with other people's.

Without distractions it's too obvious to us an old copy from the rest have mostly raised money at all. Companies didn't start to feel like a wave. I wrote a hilarious but also like an undervalued stock in that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some central tap. By this I mean forum in the evolution of the political pressure against Airbnb than hotel companies.

I've said into something that flows from some central tap. At Princeton, 36% of the 800 highest paid executives at 300 big corporations. It didn't work out a preliminary answer on the valuation of zero. We couldn't talk meaningfully about revenues without including the numbers we have.

It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it.

People were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion. Note to nerds: or possibly a winner.

The reason we quote statistics about the meaning of the organization—specifically increased demand for unskilled workers, and mostly in Perl. If they were going to drunken parties.

We fixed both problems immediately. Monroeville Mall was at the mercy of investors want to be like a body cavity search by someone else. That's the difference.

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