>> Can anyone explain to me where does this obsession with VC funding and huge growth come from? I feel like if you grow your company by more then 50% YOY you will end up with a totally different company culture, and you might end up hating your own company.
Startups need an exit strategy.
Employees want to work 5-10 years max and end up with millions to retire peacefully while working in an intense environment which serves as the story of their accomplishment for the lifetime.
Then they plan to follow their other life goals like going on a world tour with the family or watch their kids growing up or creating their own small lifestyle business. It can be anything.
The key realization is that most employees do not want to work for you just because they have found themselves in such place.
When I was new in the industry, I put a lot of blood/sweat into building a company. Today, I can't force myself to put the same amount of efforts even if I want to.
The idea is to raise money fast, hire experienced people for ancillary services and develop the application in a way so that it is able to hold up till IPO. Defer all costs (application maintenance, vendor lockins, IP infringement risks) for post IPO. Create the Hype around the product which gets you eyeballs, subscriptions, MAU and other metrics which translates into the valuation. Once you've caught market attention, the solution can always get more love post IPO.
The market pressure to produce returns post IPO results in the broad application of the company's IP, resources, and talent. This might spin up new industries.
Once the employees have cashed their equity, it's up to them to stay (if they are enjoying the position) or leave (if they've other life goals).
A lifestyle business, won't be able to achieve this for each of their employees. Even very few startups achieve this for most of their employees.
>> Employees want to work 5-10 years max and end up with millions to retire peacefully while working in an intense environment which serves as the story of their accomplishment for the lifetime.
Nopes, founders want millions by (ideally) using technology to disrupt a market and gaining from the windfall.
VC want millions/billions by betting money on such founders.
They both agree to buy talent by promising employees a share of the windfall.
Employees don't start out thinking "hey I want millions, let me join this unknown company".
They usually start out "I need a good, well paying job where I do interesting work."
>> Employees want to work 5-10 years max and end up with millions to retire peacefully while working in an intense environment
This sounds like either it is an extremely unrealistic expectation or it's extremely unfair.
I know lots of smart people who worked for at least 10 years in very intense startup environments and got essentially nothing out of it. Often, they have to fallback on a life of contract work for huge boring corporations.
> I know lots of smart people who worked for at least 10 years in very intense startup environments and got essentially nothing out of it. Often, they have to fallback on a life of contract work for huge boring corporations.
Yes, it's not guaranteed by anything.
I also know of cases where founder alone ended up with billions and early employees got nothing.
I just see those startups as poorly executed who decided to kill their army after victory way home.
We should strive for execution where at least your comrades also win.
"We should strive for execution where at least your comrades also win." --> this won my heart!
It is not a zero-sum game. You win when your comrades win. The glory is not in taking it all but taking pride in what you have created and can potentially create and expand on over and over again. :)
It's the ideal the whole industry segment is founded on. Just like every other ideal, it's attainable only by the extremely lucky. Everybody else has to deal with the externalities.
Strip the ideal away and people will leave in droves. Without a differentiator, startups are just like everything else.
One thing that I've learned though is that you should try to work for rich people who believe that we're in a meritocracy.
When these people see talent, they tend to think that it's much more valuable than it actually is.
If those people are rich enough, they can surround themselves with talent, and notice that while talented people are a small fraction of population, in absolute numbers it is still a large number of people who need to somehow pay their bills.
Then it's time to play the game of "compete against each other, and the worst 10% gets fired". Suddenly the talent becomes cheaper, and stops talking about work-life balance.
All the dreams you mentioned can be achieved earning anything over $100k per year in a company with good work-life balance located in a place with reasonable cost of living.
In Silicon Valley, pay is high, so is the cost of living, reverse in other places. If your situation differs, you've got it good (unless you're in a bad job in a high cost of living place)
I was working on an app which serves roughly 400*10^6 API requests/day.
One cool property of our app is that it's rarely updated and mostly read.
And the goal is to achieve the lowest possible latency at the edge.
It scales beautiful, I am not sure which other architecture can help us keep this afloat with only 4 developers working on it.
So, we have a DynamoDB table which is replicated to multiple regions using DynamoDB streams and Lambda.
For us, Lambda means achieving a lot without many developers and system administrators but I understand that not all problems yield gracefully to this pattern.
It seems using Cloudflare Workers to trigger our Lambda function instead of API gateway could prove to be cheaper.
Would it be possible to read the data through the Cloudflare cache? If so your data and API would be replicated not just around the world but actually within the majority of the worlds ISPs. Based on our experiences with 1.1.1.1, Cloudflare is within 20ms roundtrip of most people on earth.
Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge.
If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance.
If the institutions have to stay relevant, they'll have to make sure the grades are correlated to successful people in some way even if it means handing out grade A to any student!
>> Grade inflation refers to the phenomena of getting an "A" despite having what used to be a "B" or "C" level of knowledge.
> If an institution gives grade A based on some objective criteria and students getting the grade C turn out to be successful business people then methodology of the institution will be considered flawed by the vast majority. Soon, the institution will lose its relevance.
What you describe is grade inflation.
Grades aren't meant to be predictors of career success, they're meant to be indicators of past academic performance. My understanding is that once upon a time, a "C" grade meant your work was average or typical, which was perfectly respectable. An "A" or "B" mean your academic work was above the norm or outstanding. People could get C's and go on to have successful, non-academic careers (such as in business) with little comment.
With grade inflation, when "average" is an A or B, it's much harder to distinguish the truly academically talented based on their grades, since they're grouped into the same category as average performers.
> Grades aren't meant to be predictors of career success, they're meant to be indicators of past academic performance.
Isn't it both? If we had figured out the perfect academic program for all time, then it could be just a reflection of performance compared to all prior students in the program. Since we haven't, we update the programs and that might mean some aspects become easier and some harder. Or maybe overall easier, if career demands have generally gone down (which, imo, is a much more interesting discussion than whether an 'A' is really an 'A').
That's not what happens. If A meant success at X, like running a mile in X time meant you could outrun a bear, no matter the percentage of people, it would be great.
What's happened is parents pressured schools to get their kids A's to get into college, then colleges set the minimum bar at A+ instead of A, then at A+ and a random selection of thousands of students, all with A+'s. We are at the point where a single A- will drop you 50 slots in class rank. This is like judging the difference between Olympic sprinters instead of seeing the real spread among students.
That's why I think the universities should be holding high school exams. More generally, students/pupils should be judged by the institutions they're about to enter, rather than the ones they're leaving.
Grading guidelines differ. Where I went, C was considered a good grade - more or less defined as the average among the students who didn't fail. Even an E means you got at least 40% of the points on the test.
I and my wife discuss programming matters in front of our kids.
And my kids listen to the discussions and want to be part of it.
Then I start teaching the basics, they are a bit more willing to hear.
Here the incentive for them is to be part of the club where interesting things are happening.
We laugh at coding jokes which kids don't appear to understand which leaves them confused.
So, it seems they are aware they lack some understanding because of which they are unable to understand us.
The same idea has worked for math, playing musical instruments like keyboard/ukelele, physical exercises like skipping ropes or air pushups.
If I simply give them a computer or ukelele, they won't be interested as they don't know how to hold a ukulele or have no one to tell them how to hold it right and how to fuse a chord progression with the strumming pattern. These things are not obvious by just watching or hits and trials on a guitar/ukelele.
Thanks for an idea. As part of developing a rough-quantitative feel for physical properties, I like associating measures with real-life adult-world examples. Eg, a Newton-meter torque is reopening a 2L plastic soda bottle.[1] But my mindset was 'make the associations transparent and low-barrier', and do 'number->example, to allow easily exploring the measure space"'. But what if there was more mystery, struggle, challenge, tease? An adaptively tuned barrier.
Instead of 'touching a thermometer scale at some temperature instantly yields a video about making chocolate', or a video clip of a tv news weather report, what if instead a video had temperatures bleeped/blurred out, and required an act of effort - "give me the temperature, d*mnit! it should be around here somewhere...". Then maybe related videos (of similar temperature or topic) aren't just more surfing, but payoff? An unlocking. "Ohhh, change the temperature of that step and you get a different kind of chocolate!"
Maybe a little animated critter that watches videos with you, and cheers for temperatures, or jumps on them, and sometimes makes it so you cant hear/see them, unless you shush the critter, or move it.
Anyway, random brainstorming - I'm exploring maybe doing a temperature education app. Thanks for your comment.
1. I go to a store where workers are paid bare minimum, they give me odd looks and make me feel as if I stole their bread or smth.
2. I go to premium stores, where I pay more but they treat me better.
So, I go to premium stores even though I am aware I am losing more money, because in Maslow hierarchy of needs - I am at the top where I want to be treated better not save more money.
Cost of negative interaction is much much greater for me.
I randomly have flashbacks of negative experiences but I forget all positive or neutral experiences.
Based on Exchange theory of Price, #2 price is justified.
Now, if you remove the workers in option #2, the interaction goes from negative to neutral and I'll prefer #1.
Oddly, I've found somewhat the opposite - I usually shop at a grocery store in a lower income area, not because it was cheaper but because it was more convenient. That store closed recently and I've started going to a grocery store in a more affluent area. I've had no difference in how I've been treated by employees at the store (I always try to be polite to them, it costs me nothing to say please and thank you) But the people in the more affluent store? I DREAD going to the store because of them. My other half is a bit of a punk, she has bright blue hair, multiple piercings, and visible tattoos. We constantly get glares at, have had multiple "can I speak to your manager" types make disparaging comments at us, and constantly have problems with people just being, for want of a better term, colossal pricks. One even going so far as to hit my partner with their cart and call her a "fucking bitch" to her face... If they treat us like this I feel bad for the employees of the store.
Multiple times we've debated going out of our way to go to a store where we don't have to deal with these type of people. Not to save money, just so we can be treated with some modicum of respect by other shoppers. I've never liked grocery shopping but the people in more affluent areas just make the entire experience something I dread.
The other day I dropped in on a local scuba store that I've patronised as a customer and/or instructor for nearly 30 years. They've changed hands recently, and had a few new folk behind the counter. I waited for over 5 minutes, unacknowledged, literally 3 feet away, while two of these bozos had a private conversation. Then, when they eventually dragged themselves out of their customer service torpor - it got worse! And not for the first time. So I walked out, and finally decided to never go there again - and to start bagging them (instead of recommending them) whenever I could.
Scuba stores have traditionally survived on markups from equipment sales. Everything else is a loss leader. But now, people can get a wider range, of better equipment, delivered faster, at half the price - via the internet! Yet STILL, bozos like those guys can not be bothered to service someone who's made the effort to walk in the door!
It makes me wonder how many small businesses go under because of good ol' garden variety hopeless customer service, rather than anything else.
Costco is a great exception to this rule. Its not a 'premium' store, but they pay their employees so well, that they have the 'cream of the crop' employees, and it really does make a difference. In our area, we have a grocery chain (WinCo) that is similar (discount prices, large warehouse feel). They pay very well, profit sharing, etc, and have some of the most helpful, knowledgeable, and fastest employees.
I and my wife discuss programming matters in front of our kids.
And my kids listen to the discussions and want to be part of it.
Then I start teaching the basics, they are a bit more willing to hear.
Here the incentive for them is to be part of the club where interesting things are happening.
We laugh at coding jokes which kids don't appear to understand which leaves them confused.
So, it seems they are aware they lack some understanding because of which they are unable to understand us.
The same idea has worked for math, playing musical instruments like keyboard/ukelele, physical exercises like skipping ropes or air pushups.
If I simply give them a computer or ukelele, they won't be interested as they don't know how to hold a ukulele or have no one to tell them how to hold it right and how to fuse a chord progression with the strumming pattern. These things are not obvious by just watching or hits and trials on a guitar/ukelele.
Startups need an exit strategy.
Employees want to work 5-10 years max and end up with millions to retire peacefully while working in an intense environment which serves as the story of their accomplishment for the lifetime.
Then they plan to follow their other life goals like going on a world tour with the family or watch their kids growing up or creating their own small lifestyle business. It can be anything.
The key realization is that most employees do not want to work for you just because they have found themselves in such place.
When I was new in the industry, I put a lot of blood/sweat into building a company. Today, I can't force myself to put the same amount of efforts even if I want to.
The idea is to raise money fast, hire experienced people for ancillary services and develop the application in a way so that it is able to hold up till IPO. Defer all costs (application maintenance, vendor lockins, IP infringement risks) for post IPO. Create the Hype around the product which gets you eyeballs, subscriptions, MAU and other metrics which translates into the valuation. Once you've caught market attention, the solution can always get more love post IPO.
The market pressure to produce returns post IPO results in the broad application of the company's IP, resources, and talent. This might spin up new industries.
Once the employees have cashed their equity, it's up to them to stay (if they are enjoying the position) or leave (if they've other life goals).
A lifestyle business, won't be able to achieve this for each of their employees. Even very few startups achieve this for most of their employees.