I also encourage you to think carefully about your physical location. Think about proximity to tech jobs, family, quality of life, etc. After 10 years, chances are you may have acquired a spouse, in-laws, mortgage, kids, and friends. It becomes much much harder to move to a new location for career opportunities. So choose while you still have freedom of motion!
This can be easily attacked with two scammers executing a MITM attack. One calls the bank to impersonate you and steal your money, the other calls you to get your app code.
You need to watch your CAC Payback Period very very very closely. This is the thing that kills otherwise successful SaaS companies... they are profitable long-term but bankrupt short-term, and end up needing to scrape up funding with terrible terms to bridge that gap.
All customers will cost you something on the front end, even if it's just time. That time is money. How long does it take to earn enough profit to pay that back? Higher margin and lower operation cost --> faster payback period --> ability to onboard customers faster.
Stated differently: if 10M new customers walked through your door tomorrow, could you onboard and retain them immediately? Probably not. Determine your new customer flow rate and gear your sales + advertising activities to hit that rate. Then you can add more business capacity and continue to scale.
One more thought: as you scale, how can you lower your employee cost? People talk about remote hiring, and that's an option, but there's also another shortcut: mission. People will take less money for the same work if they're excited about the mission. Mission IS compensation. What makes a good mission? Maybe you're focused on minority-owned small businesses. Maybe you're offering a chance for developers from non-traditional backgrounds to grow. Maybe you employ ex-cons. Maybe you're trying to launch a rocket to Mars. Whatever it is, find the GENUINE thing that makes your story super unique and use that to attract good employees for less cash.
Not manipulation but a recognition of reality. Mission is worth something to people. Different amounts for different people, but not zero .
Why do game developers get paid less, on average, than someone doing boring business software? Because people want to make games. You have to pay someone more to do boring work. "I build games" is part of the compensation package just as much as a paycheck or healthcare benefits.
As a startup you can't always choose your cash flow. But you can choose your mission. All else being equal, you should choose an exciting mission that attracts better talent.
Thanks. There are some really interesting points in your message. I'll be talking and writing about our values and mission in the coming weeks and observing the feedback - actually, we already have some but not sure how to stand out among the noise.
I have always thought the best solution is strong encryption, plus weak encryption.
Every user has their data encrypted with a unique, zero-knowledge, weak key. Then it's encrypted again by the service provider with a strong key.
When the government shows up with a warrant, they get the strong key. But the weak key is known only to the user, not the service provider. So now the government has to go spend CPU time to brute force the weak key.
Economics enforces good behavior. Governments with lots of resources can afford to break into any single user's data. But they can't afford to break into EVERYONE'S data and go fishing. It's the same as hiring detective to do a stakeout... you can follow anyone but you can't follow everyone.
There's a funny/sad story about the first person in the UK to be jailed for not giving up his password under new at the time laws in the UK. He was a person crossing the channel with mental health problems. He was stopped and he had some este model rocktry rockets. He was found to have a couple of micrograms of an explosive on him that could have come out of the search dogs fur. He refused to give up his passwords and so he was jailed. He did give up one password to a truecrypt volume, but it had another encrypted truecrypt volume inside it. He was jailed for a year for that.
You can do whatever you want when you are the only player on encrypting data. The problem is interoperability and I imagine "backdoor" that cops want as a way to decrypt tls (which is quite doable, with reasonable safety in mind, to each request you add symmetric key used in data encryption, encrypted with supercop-public-key, distributed on daily bases).
"You don't seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help."
There are more than a few studies behind it. Is that "scientific"? Remember that viral story about the guy who made the min salary in his company $70K? What did he base that number on, do you think?
Separately, if someone said that your take is "complete anti-scientific hogwash only poor people would repeat," would you think their opinion valid?
… maybe cite them? While I could see a study that says being vastly wealthy doesn't lead to happiness, the kinda wealth gap being discussed here is "cannot easily afford a home" ($70k/y; max $1.7k/mo affordable) and "can trivially afford a home" ($500k/y–$700k/y; max $17.5k/mo affordable). (For reference, homes in my area are currently ~$4.8k/mo.)
And a 2021 follow-up that addresses criticisms of the original (TLDR: if you were already happy, you get more happy > 75K. If you were unhappy, you don't get more happy > 75K.)
There are plenty of studies showing a diminishing return in happiness / general satisfaction after a certain income threshold. You can look themselves up yourself.
I'm very similar. I have excellent oral health... brush 2x/day, don't floss. Two interesting datapoints:
1. I changed jobs a few times, and for various reasons I neglected to see a dentist for 10 years. When I finally went back, had perfect oral health and no cavities. My hygienist still remembers me because this event was so far outside her experience + expectations.
2. My wife had "normal" tooth decay problems throughout her life, until we started dating, at which point she's had no further cavities. ;)
To answer the normal questions: I don't do anything particularly special with my diet except a general avoidance of sweetened drinks - no soda pop, no sweeteners in my coffee.
If anyone wants to swab my mouth and pay me a small licensing royalty for commercialization please get in touch. Heh.
The author wrote a piece of software she thinks does a better job of teaching reading skills. The article is just an argument that people should use her software, and complaint that because it's not phonics nobody will buy it. This article is more sales than content.
Some car dealers have installed private car washes. Come in for a free wash, any time, as long as you own the car and are displaying the dealer plate. So at least in that case they're "paying" for the advertising.
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