> Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes. That's just a little bit of redistribution from the top 1% to the top 10%, at best. Tech startups and their new fancy apps aren't putting food on the table or paying the health care bill for the bottom 90%.
I'm starting to think we need a 10%er collition. Our taxes went up under Trump. Healthcare got worse under Obama. The billionaire class uses the 90 percent to win elections. They have stopped pandering to us.
You're not entirely wrong, but Trump did nothing but pander, and it's arguable that the Democrats biggest problem (apart from the email leaks) was Clinton not pandering enough.
I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy. E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid…
> (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid 9-digit code plus pin plus participant id) in our case, UC constantly failed hard to properly encode an essentially static excel sheet over screen share - jpeg artifacts the size of basketballs that never went away, even when given infinite time to "catch up". zoom has zero issues with screen share, but randomly drops calls, and yeah the phone + 9 digit id + p…
You can have zoom call you, making the whole “too many numbers” thing irrelevant.
Eh, the problem with the "IT department dictates all the choices because the devs are stupid" approach is that it takes ownership away from the devs, therefore leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I can't be trusted to make technology decisions for the system I know about (and the IT department knows nothing about), then why should I care about delivering the best possible product? Sorry, I've seen exactly that…
If IT is too helpless to pick Zoom vs Ubeeconference vs whatever, what’s the point in having them? Conversely, if you are a developer and you have time to be shopping for video conferencing solutions, what’s the point in having you?
“Conversely, if you are a developer and you have time to be shopping for video conferencing solutions, what’s the point in having you?”
I am often forced to spend a ton of time dealing with tools that don’t work. At my company a lot of meetings start with 10 minutes trying to make the phone conference work. So it’s good use of time to look for tools that work.
Same with Jira. IT bought it and promised to customize it but the last three years they haven’t done anything. so we are now setting it up ourselves. it’s not what we want to do but still the most efficient way to allow us to work.
I don’t know how buying decisions get made but I am pretty sure that user satisfaction is on the lower end of factors that get considered.
I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy. E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid…
The individuals in aggregate may be toddlers, but unfortunately the C-suite as individuals are often also toddlers, at least vis a vis their responsibilities. Tasked with providing IT infrastructure that works for the company, they seem to largely shirk their responsibility and choose IT infrastructure that best serves them, the needs of others be damned. CIOs will seemingly gladly choose something that provides a go…
I think being able to overcome principal-agent problem is one of the things that differentiate good C-suite from a bad one.
I really don't get why companies use slack and pay 13 a month!!! when you can have gchat for free in your 12 a month. I mean, yes, gchat lacks some features, but for the most part it works.
SoftBank invested something like $24bn in WeWork, which went to the real estate bubble plus free beer for techies. There is an astonishing amount of money out there. In the case of the Saudi investment through SoftBank, it's practically a moral imperative to relieve them of it. Enjoy it while it lasts. Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.
> Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes. That's just a little bit of redistribution from the top 1% to the top 10%, at best. Tech startups and their new fancy apps aren't putting food on the table or paying the health care bill for the bottom 90%.
SoftBank invested something like $24bn in WeWork, which went to the real estate bubble plus free beer for techies. There is an astonishing amount of money out there. In the case of the Saudi investment through SoftBank, it's practically a moral imperative to relieve them of it. Enjoy it while it lasts. Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.
coupled with monetary policies that make overvalued stocks an offer nobody can refuse.
Not exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just burning other startups' money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt. For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years back they were small and only used b…
I used to think this every time I downloaded a free mobile game. Probably 90%+ of ads in mobile games were for other free mobile games that presumably also have the same ad-supported model and the same sort of advertisers. It feels like there's a few games making heaps from IAPs and everyone else is just advertising in a pyramid toward them while also using IAPs in a way that makes their own game basically unplayable…
There are different genres, or tiers (casual, hyper casual, midcore) that vary greatly in their economic schemes. Casual and hyper casual especially have low CPIs but low LTVs as well, and ads are a very important income source for them. Midcore and up have CTI that is much higher (can be up to $10 or even higher), and of course, they have very small % of paying users as well, but they make it up in ARPPU and especially whales, and almost don't depend on ad income (but since most of their audience doesn't pay at all, they still show ads, of course).