I’m not sure this answer is as true as you imagine. You extract money via a sale to then invest it and create a revenue stream. Which you potentially already have in the original business. It’s just it was invested in your business v someone else’s.
The question of whether to sell it is a function of how much money you need in a lump sum, how precarious or stable your business is and how much cash it’s throwing off. And of course of diversification.
It’s not defacto true that you need to sell it to realise its value though
At the time we would joke a bit that acquisitions would get some new very high priced domain. We even looked at getting the .app TLD for all Heroku apps to get their own .app domain. We ended up with our acquisition "gift" as Matz, which was great to see it support Ruby and the community given how Heroku couldn't have become Heroku without the Ruby and Rails community.
When you hire a celebrity programmer like that, what exactly do they end up doing?
Do they actually have responsibilities in their role or is it more just to slap the branding on to them while they continue to do their own thing, whatever it may be? (in Matz case I would think he has more than enough full time work on Ruby itself)
Heroku/Salesforce essentially just picked up the salaries for Matz and part of his team to work on Ruby, with no other commitments as far as I'm aware.
Disclaimer - I know the founders and they're a really good crew. Super solid background in business and really care about creating a great product.
The business model for this is all based around providing pensions / pension brokering. Since all UK businesses have to transition to providing pensions over the next few years there's a huge opportunity in helping make it easy and painless and that's what the guys behind Charlie are focussed on.
Sorting out pensions is going to be a massive headache for both businesses and employees so there's a huge window for a startup to take that pain away and make it all seamless. They've got lots of companies using it already and it's very well built and well funded so I think they're in a great spot.
Will be interesting to see how they compete against Xero or perhaps integrate with them but in a pure HR/pensions play there's a lot of room to make a swoop
hey - I'm just interested how much your comment resonated with the HN crowd. Do you mind telling me how many upvotes you got for this comment bsharitt?
Super impressed to see how far David and the team have come. I remember talking with him down the road from my flat three years ago about the inkling that Zesty was then. I remember when Chris first joined him and they showed me the first screenshots of the mobile app in a bar in London before they hotfooted it off to San Francisco and now they're raising $17,000,000. A pretty amazing ride. Congrats guys.
I've been using this now for a few days and it's freakishly good at its knowledge of people. You fear that it's going to be a bit astrological but then you try it on some of the people you know and it's incredibly on point (and the advice varies a lot).
From the page, it appears what they'll be offering is basically a VPN tunnel with a routable IPv6 address. Also, it appears that they'll give you some additional control—custom firewall rules, private subnets, etc.
I can see many applications of this. For instance, I could have this set up on my home PBX server and my smartphone to allow me to make calls through the PBX from wherever I have a network connection. I wouldn't have to worry about firewall rules, IP address changes (my home connection gives me dynamic IPs), etc.—everything would just work.
There doesn't appear to be anything revolutionary about this service. There are alternative strategies for accomplishing what I described above: I could have my phone and server connect to a VPN that's set up on a VPS server I lease, or I could set up a dynamic DNS hostname for my home connection, and my phone could connect to that (either via straight SIP or [better] through a VPN). However, those take more work on my part.
Though, the more I look at their (fairly sparse) page and think about what they're offering, perhaps it is just a publicly routable IPv6 address routed over a VPN. Again, nothing revolutionary, but still very convenient.
We have a few hundred Raspberry Pis at our customers' locations, and it's a real pain to keep all the connections up. After a year of hacking on this part of the backend, we might just move to a service like this, if it really delivers on the promises.
i have a storage at home on a low-cost arm thingie, if i could easily share my webserver and files with my tablet, that would be awesome. the tablet could run a server to drop files to, too.
You pay to go on the tube. You can choose not to. That makes you a customer of the tube.
Far better surely that such a system is designed in mind that someone might choose not to use it than that they'll get whatever they're given. I'm not sure why you would be outraged by this.
Because it's public infrastructure. TFL is a government body. We also pay to to use the road in the form of taxes, it would not be nice for the government to call us a 'customer'.
If thats not a good enough example, there are plenty of government departments that require payment for their services and I think the same would apply. Like renewing a passport, I would hate to be called a customer.
The roads are free at the point of use, the tube isn't. There's also the idea that words make a difference to how the staff will "see" the passengers and thus how they will perform their jobs. Are they a nuisance to be herded around or are they the people to whom you owe your job security? It's the same in IT ,it sometimes says things about a person's attitude depending on whether they say "user" or "customer".
Good points; it just seems like things were better back when it was called "passenger". Unless I'm seeing through rose-tinted glasses organizations used to have a self-concept of providing a public service, of reliability, fairness, consistency.
It might come down to focus - as a Customer, it sounds like I am a cash cow, as a Passenger, the focus is on getting me from A-B.
The railways in the UK don't work well from the point of view of getting people from A-B, from the point of few of extracting a lot of money from Customers they work extremely well.
The tube is already very busy without people using it for frivolous journeys. At least it still costs people money (car) or physical effort (cycling) to use the roads.
There are cities with free transit systems however.
"The roads are free at the point of use, the tube isn't."
No they're not. They are partly funded by general taxation, just like the NHS. However, if you want to drive your car on the road, you can't just drive it. You have to first pay a specific 'vehicle tax' which is per vehicle, per year: https://www.gov.uk/tax-disc
I'll just copy this: Their business is not selling transportation but moving the population of London around to where they need to be. The government is the customer and the people are passengers.
It's kind of crazy to think that the platform-side doors will increase service capacity by removing the ability for people to commit suicide in front of trains.
The frequency with which there is "a passenger under a train" must have a tangible effect on tube capacity.
It's not just that - it's the delay whilst people hold the doors, get their bags/umbrellas/coats/legs stuck in them, etc. With the (over)tight scheduling of the timetable, one train being delayed by a minute can cause a knock-on for a considerable time.
I guess (though I don't use the tube, I can't verify) that the platform-side doors help control this kind of behaviour.
(There was a link going round a year or two ago about (IIRC) New York improving service reliability by reducing the flow and introducing slack into the timetable but I can't currently find it. Lots of academic research into this topic though.)
One of the side effects is that it allows people to queue in the right spot (rather than guessing and lining the platform) which helps even out the number of people trying to get in one set of doors. Adding a bit of predictability helps streamline things.
You see this behavior in the Tokyo metro system. Even better the doors are numbered so people will learn which car is closest to the exit they need. This provides a clean stream of passengers heading to the nearest exit.
I guess if you also annotate the platform with "queue here" lanes (I've a vague memory that some Jubilee stations have this?) then you can try and keep the queues from blocking people leaving the train.
There are white squares on certain Hammersmith & City and Circle and line platforms that line up with where the doors stop, people don't seem to know this though.
Platform overcrowding is also an issue, and passengers are often held back in the ticket hall or outside, because of how dangerous it would be to put more people on an open platform.
With platform-side doors, you don't need to stand behind the yellow line.
It isn't just one-unders, but the fact that the train can't safely move off when there are passengers right up against the train.
Canary Wharf station has platform-side doors but it still closes the entry at ticket hall level every now and then. One advantage for me is the line formed in front of the platform doors which allows me to wait in front of it for the next train and find a free seat every day.
I remember being blown away by the platform side doors for the shinkansen bullet train in Japan: the incredible precision with which the train doors align with the platform doors.
Not sure... one of the Tokyo stations I think. It was still an open air platform, but had doors on the edge of the platform around man-height that aligned with the train doors.
It definitely has a tangible effect. For example the National Rail going east of Liverpool Street runs equidistant to the Central (to zone 4) and District lines, and has more 'person under train' incidents. Whenever such an incident occurs, both those tube lines plus the National Rail line which runs alongside the District are swamped.
The flip side is that it's not enough to prevent suicides on your line - you'll still get unusual peak capacity issues if it happens on a neighbouring line - but at least you can keep your own trains running.
