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Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

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Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#161

Post by majewsky »

_t0du wrote: post #24
lightninglu10 wrote: post #6

Hey all, Patrick here & one of the mentors for the Mozilla Builders "fix-the-internet" incubator https://builders.mozilla.community/ . We have 3 different offerings for this Summer. All incubator style, meaning you meet weekly or biweekly with mentors and we really try to help drive you from point A to point C. 1. $75k investment in a startup. MUST be serious about wanting to build something awesome and put in the ha…

I am not an expert, but 75k seems disproportionate from the effort and time the requirements seem to be looking for. For the lofty goal of "Fix the internet", 75k seems more like "An extra few weeks of runway." What am I missing?

What salary levels are your calculations based on? For a solo founder in Germany, 75k should be enough runway for roughly 2 years, more if their business is at least ramen-profitable, less if they have more employees of course.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#162

Post by naasking »

jononor wrote: post #68
naasking wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising. Regulation always requires coordination, which is simply not possible at internet scale. Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms, and you're talking about regulation at an even larger scale against strong interests with large financial reserves. What's needed is a secure/private by default browser sandbox so these interests…

We are somehow able to regulate consumer goods (health and safety standards for example), which also is a global operation involving hundreds of thousands of actors.

> We are somehow able to regulate consumer goods (health and safety standards for example), which also is a global operation involving hundreds of thousands of actors.

Because you can enforce it at the point of sale, ie. selling X happens in a limited geographical region which can be enforced.

The "point of sale" equivalent on the internet is the browser, which is exactly where I said the privacy properties need to be enforced.

Finally, it's frankly absurd to want inefficient and expensive legal controls when cheap and automatic technological controls are perfectly feasible. Why involve the various governments at all?

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#163

Post by naasking »

Barrin92 wrote: post #89
naasking wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising. Regulation always requires coordination, which is simply not possible at internet scale. Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms, and you're talking about regulation at an even larger scale against strong interests with large financial reserves. What's needed is a secure/private by default browser sandbox so these interests…

>Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms, How are we supposed to know this given that they don't have an actual incentive to do so? Look at the allegedly "unworkable" enforcement of hate-speech legislation in say, Germany. What did Facebook do when they were faced with 4% global revenue fines? Hire some moderators and it appears to work reasonbaly well. Same goes for advertising. G…

> What did Facebook do when they were faced with 4% global revenue fines? Hire some moderators and it appears to work reasonbaly well. Same goes for advertising.

No it doesn't. Facebook is a highly visibile, monolithic entity. If you only have a few bad actors legislation works fine. This isn't the case here.

If you want a more apt analogy, the fight against privacy violations in advertising is much closer to the fight against piracy: it will never go away, no matter how many legal restrictions you put in place, unless there's a technological solution that prevents it from the get-go. There probably isn't for piracy, but there is for privacy.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#164

Post by marissajliu »

somishere wrote: post #90
lightninglu10 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is our first time running this Summer Incubator ($75k iteration), BUT we are in the middle of our Spring MVP Program. These teams each got around $8-10k. We have some really good projects from this much smaller program, including https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neutral/oagdejngkg... (Firefox extension releasing this week), https://ameelio.org/ , and more! So we're not entirely sure whether $75k is the…

Neutral looks cool. Look forward to trying it out once it's released (tho permissions on the chrome version seem a bit ominous, plus their website is broken!)

Hey it's Marissa from the Neutral team. Thanks for checking our tool out! Just want to mention that Neutral only accesses data on supported shopping sites like Amazon to perform carbon footprint calculations.

Sorry about the broken site! We're currently fixing it up along with the release of our tool on Firefox!

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#165

Post by zzo38computer »

userbinator wrote: post #112

How to "fix the internet"? Stop advocating for JS-heavy/required sites (including SPAs) whose use requires browsers that depend on a massively complex specification that can only be implemented fully by a huge organisation, and advocate the subset of HTML that would be usable from nearly any browser --- even one that any reasonably skilled developer could write him/herself --- and the highly accessible and user-frien…

"Stop advocating for JS-heavy/required sites (including SPAs) whose use requires browsers that depend on a massively complex specification that can only be implemented fully by a huge organisation, and advocate the subset of HTML that would be usable from nearly any browser --- even one that any reasonably skilled developer could write him/herself" ...... Yes, I agree. (There is occasionally a use for such things, but it should be avoided as much as possible.)

Furthermore, web browsers need to be fixed too, to give the user enough ropes to hang themself and also a few more just in case, and to block commands coming from the server.

Furthermore, web browser should be deprecated for many things. There is such thing as Telnet, SSH, NNTP, IRC, etc, that can be in use, that should be encouraged to be in use.

Furthermore, you could host stuff on your own computer if necessary.

I also like the idea (mentioned in another comment) to call much of the mess as "internet pollution". Yes, these ads, scripts, etc, wastes bandwidth, so it is "internet pollution".

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#166

Post by userbinator »

pedrogpimenta wrote: post #114
userbinator wrote: post #112

How to "fix the internet"? Stop advocating for JS-heavy/required sites (including SPAs) whose use requires browsers that depend on a massively complex specification that can only be implemented fully by a huge organisation, and advocate the subset of HTML that would be usable from nearly any browser --- even one that any reasonably skilled developer could write him/herself --- and the highly accessible and user-frien…

Nothing about that is inherently bad. It leads to bad behaviour, but in and of itself it's not bad. Also, saying that only a big corporation can provide a browser is both the nature of things and a lie. There are hugely complex programs built by "the community" (VLC to give an example). I want a better internet but I don't want to go back to the past.

There are hugely complex programs built by "the community" (VLC to give an example).

The complexity of a browser and the complexity of a media player are extremely different. To make a huge generalisation, the latter is far more maths-heavy and less interactive. I have played around with writing decoders for a few codecs, and to a first approximation, they are very similar, so it's not hard to see how something like VLC was created. Media formats are also relatively stable, it's not like a new one comes out every few months.

On the other hand, the modern browser has many different components that a very wide breadth of knowledge is necessary, and on top of that, companies like Google are paying a great many people to do what appears to simply be churning the "standards" and continuously increasing their complexity, making it harder for others to even keep up. They invented the absurd oxymoron "living standard". Their common euphemism for that is "pushing the web forward".

The great diversity of media players vs. the effective monopoly of browser(s) already shows this huge difference.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#167

Post by alexbanks »

majewsky wrote: post #161
_t0du wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an expert, but 75k seems disproportionate from the effort and time the requirements seem to be looking for. For the lofty goal of "Fix the internet", 75k seems more like "An extra few weeks of runway." What am I missing?

What salary levels are your calculations based on? For a solo founder in Germany, 75k should be enough runway for roughly 2 years, more if their business is at least ramen-profitable, less if they have more employees of course.

My salary calcs are based on A.) Primarily west-coast based American SE wages, B.) The presumption that the group already has a "team" (aka more than 1 person) assembled and a product already launched (as per the requirements of the 75k program).

Two people living on 38k a year sounds like a great way to not have legitimate talent apply.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#168

Post by alexbanks »

PudgePacket wrote: post #147
_t0du wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an expert, but 75k seems disproportionate from the effort and time the requirements seem to be looking for. For the lofty goal of "Fix the internet", 75k seems more like "An extra few weeks of runway." What am I missing?

Weeks? A startup looking for funding of this amount shouldn't be burning anywhere near that amount (tens of thousands a week!) This should be months, up to a year for 1-2 founder team.

...How?

3 people / 75k = 25k per person. At a reasonable 100k/year earning potential, that means that 75k a year is 3 months of time?

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#169

Post by majewsky »

alexbanks wrote: post #167
majewsky wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What salary levels are your calculations based on? For a solo founder in Germany, 75k should be enough runway for roughly 2 years, more if their business is at least ramen-profitable, less if they have more employees of course.

My salary calcs are based on A.) Primarily west-coast based American SE wages, B.) The presumption that the group already has a "team" (aka more than 1 person) assembled and a product already launched (as per the requirements of the 75k program). Two people living on 38k a year sounds like a great way to not have legitimate talent apply.

38k a year is in the range of my actual gross salary as a mid-level software developer in Germany, although it should be noted that I work 70% part-time. It would certainly be enough to cover an entry-level developer or a founder who's willing to take a smaller pay in exchange for the freedom of working on their own project. And that's before we consider startups located in Eastern Europe where cost of living is lower, but you can still find competent developers there.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#170

Post by alexbanks »

majewsky wrote: post #169
alexbanks wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My salary calcs are based on A.) Primarily west-coast based American SE wages, B.) The presumption that the group already has a "team" (aka more than 1 person) assembled and a product already launched (as per the requirements of the 75k program). Two people living on 38k a year sounds like a great way to not have legitimate talent apply.

38k a year is in the range of my actual gross salary as a mid-level software developer in Germany, although it should be noted that I work 70% part-time. It would certainly be enough to cover an entry-level developer or a founder who's willing to take a smaller pay in exchange for the freedom of working on their own project. And that's before we consider startups located in Eastern Europe where cost of living is lowe…

And that may be true, I am just pointing out that trying to "Fix the internet" by pandering to mid level developers seems like wasted effort.
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