If one has to explain a joke then either they're bad at it, it's a bad joke or they have the wrong audience....I'll leave the conclusion as to which is it to the readers :)
The article is about making money (even from the title)..the commented upon line is insinuating that if you think the article isn't for you (ie you just randomly stumbled upon it), then you obviously are not interested in making money...sarcasm :)
Oh for sure, I grew up poor and am now on the other side. But that’s not what the author is talking about. He’s condescending to people that are making $250k/year for ”leaving millions” on the table. At $250k/year you don’t have to care about money a whole lot, and you can make that being a developer.
Well done, and thanks for sharing your insight. Small gripe, I found this line in your article's opening remarks a unnecessary - "If that doesn't ring a bell, then please ignore this and go about your life a few million poorer."
The article is actually useful, despite the annoying introduction line of `a few million poorer`. People could stop reading the article for whatever reasons.
A bit of feedback on your landing page:
Something about "hyperlocal incentivization" caught my eye and I was thoroughly confused. Then read the whole paragraph and actually laughed out loud.
The next thing I did was actually look at the products, because you'd got me in a good mood.
FWIW this sort of email triggers my immediate shutdown reactions in several ways: use of "Hey" greeting from some unknown non-friend, general (albeit here not total) avoidance of first-person pronouns[1], phony-baloney specificity in time and duration for an initial meeting.
[1] "Saw your email," "Would love to hear more"--no, avoiding "I" does not make the writer appear stronger.
"Management was basically incredibly incompetent, for a long time, and were so unfair to employees at the company that they felt this was the only option"
Why not just quit and get a new role? I don't really understand how being unionized under terrible management is desirable.
Perhaps because the employees actually care about the company they work for and want to continue working there, but also want to feel like they're producing value. A company is more than its management.
Almost every successful Google product over the last 15 years has been the result of acquiring an already-built product and marketing + distributing it well: Youtube, Nest, Waze, Doubleclick, Android.
Products that are organically created within Google (even Google Hire, created via acquihire) have a pretty awful track record.
Indeed, when you value Chrome's market share in terms of traffic acquisition, it's pretty straightforward. Especially since they designed it from the ground up to do more searches.
We were fortunate to have Geoff as one of our YC group partners in S2015 and he asked tough questions and kept us focused more so than almost any other early investor we had. Looking back, Geoff really helped us maximize our full potential - all the way from day 1 through selling our company.
I particularly like that they have a role called "Loyalty Advocate" that requires experience "working in a channel sales model." If that's not a sales gig I don't know what is.
edit: To be fair to the author that wrote the article, he nearly immediately called out that Atlassian simply had a lower-than-normal amount of money spent on sales and marketing, and made no claim that they didn't have a sales team. I suspect he didn't write the hyperbolic headline -- blame his editor.
In the 80s and 90s, the "center" of SV was Mountain View and surrounding cities, with the VCs mostly in Menlo/Palo Also.
In the last 10 years, as companies have decided to increasingly be based out of SF, the radius of SV is expanding, and a lot of that expansion is to the north + east: Richmond, Concord, Walnut Creek, San Rafael, Mill Valley - making SF the center of the action.
The radius of the Bay Area hasn't changed, “Silicon Valley” has just moved to align more with the Bay Area rather than being an overlapping region to the South. All the places you point to as “new expansion” for “the Bay Area” have always been part of the SF Bay Area which SF has always been part of.
Also, the South Bay is becoming/has become enterprise-land. As Silicon Valley startups increasingly aim towards the consumer market, it makes sense that they would locate themselves in the biggest media/consumer/tourist hub.
(Even the biggest enterprise companies can be SF-based, though – SalesForce, for example...)
I don't know if that's true. A lot of B2B SaaS companies are in San Francisco, and I can't see a lot of them moving (Okta, New Relic, Twilio all come to mind). That said there are A LOT of old school enterprise companies in the South Bay / Peninsula.
