My question is, are you guaranteed a response? I viewed this on mobile and that wasn't immediately clear.
You don't pay if you don't get a response.
Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
71–80 of 132 posts
Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
#72Whatever you do with the $20 I still find unreasonable to make you contactable via a paywall: moreover if you have no time, you have no time even if each communication will donate $20 for a good cause. For a person of the wealth of B.H. it's simpler to just give directly money and avoid to receive unwanted communications.
Bill Gates' book The Road Ahead had the idea of a paywall to fight spam, someone who really wants to get your attention could attach a $20 "stamp" to their mail, and if it's a really important mail, say from a long-lost family member, you'd refund them. If it's just spam, you can keep the money.
Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
#73Who the hell is Ben Horowitz and why would I pay money to contact him?
Surprised to see this q on HN of all places. He's a co-founder of arguably the most powerful VC in Silicon Valley.
Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
#74My question is, are you guaranteed a response? I viewed this on mobile and that wasn't immediately clear.
No, of course not. It's like a vending machine. You hit the buttons, insert the money, and hope that something comes out of it.
It's like a GOOD vending machine so it doesn't cost you anything if you don't get the goods. You only pay if you get a response!
Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
#75It may could encourage people to contact him more by giving them a form of permission: > To come to our surprising conclusion, Uri ran an experiment: Out of 10 daycare centers across Haifa, they randomly chose six and introduced a small fine for parents who showed up more than 10 minutes late in each of them. In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness level…
In the experiment you mentioned, the fine is small enough, that it doesn't produce any significant revenues. The goal is to minimize the number of people who show up late. Imagine if the day-care made the "fine" high enough that they actually want people to show up late. Ie, think credit-card interest rates and late-payment fees. In that case, regardless of whether tardiness goes up-or-down, the daycare would win eit…
> That works out to a hourly rate of $240/hour.
That is a horrible for a VC, especially for one as successful as Ben.
Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
#76Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how it is not better. Credit Cards require use of credit providers and all the overhead that entails; minimum payments included. Most of the time this does not bite us and it Just Works except for when we try to step outside of the expected transaction model as we do with say Paypal which has known and necessary pros and cons. A proper bitcoin API has the potential to allow for the transactional web every…
try Blendle.
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Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
#78Whatever you do with the $20 I still find unreasonable to make you contactable via a paywall: moreover if you have no time, you have no time even if each communication will donate $20 for a good cause. For a person of the wealth of B.H. it's simpler to just give directly money and avoid to receive unwanted communications.
Bill Gates' book The Road Ahead had the idea of a paywall to fight spam, someone who really wants to get your attention could attach a $20 "stamp" to their mail, and if it's a really important mail, say from a long-lost family member, you'd refund them. If it's just spam, you can keep the money.
That sounds like a great idea at first but if you think about it for a bit you realise it would just increase the digital divide dramatically.
Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
#79It may could encourage people to contact him more by giving them a form of permission: > To come to our surprising conclusion, Uri ran an experiment: Out of 10 daycare centers across Haifa, they randomly chose six and introduced a small fine for parents who showed up more than 10 minutes late in each of them. In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness level…
My child's daycare charges $1 a minute for being late. But there is a bit of a grace period. When we are three minutes late they don't even bother to record it.
Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the experiment you mentioned, the fine is small enough, that it doesn't produce any significant revenues. The goal is to minimize the number of people who show up late. Imagine if the day-care made the "fine" high enough that they actually want people to show up late. Ie, think credit-card interest rates and late-payment fees. In that case, regardless of whether tardiness goes up-or-down, the daycare would win eit…
> That works out to a hourly rate of $240/hour. That is a horrible for a VC, especially for one as successful as Ben.
Ten times that wouldn't be worth it, if it distracts from a single other important task. Assume $2400 / hour, six hours per day of effort on it, five days per week, 52 weeks per year. $3.7 million. It's a lot to a charity, it's not a lot versus his net worth and what he can do with his time at A16Z, against the distraction of writing emails for that effort every 5 minutes (which is why he won't continue with this long-term; he'll make a splash with it, get the headlines, do a good deed with the donated funds, and be on to the next thing, which isn't writing emails for $5/$20/$50).