101–110 of 196 posts
*that's my shameless amazon referral link to the book (muahahah!)
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thanks. I would have failed the "winning" team. From my perspective, they made nothing from their two hours. The money was made by the 3 minutes in class which was not part of their 2 hour earning time.
As long as they either don't open the envelope until just before the presentation, I'm pretty sure they fit within the rules of the competition.
Look at it this way: if you can do things like that, you could just as easily form a "company" and spend the whole assignment period accumulating liquid but non-monetary assets in whatever manner you see fit. Then, at the last minute, open the envelope and buy the company from yourselves with the $5. Liquidate the company and pocket the value of the assets.
Would that be a valid solution to the assignment? If not, why would arranging a deal before starting the "timer" be any more valid? The agreement is still an asset, just a somewhat less liquid one.
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Well I understand what you're saying here, but you're over-thinking the problem (like an engineer). The point of the exercise was to get the students excited about entrepreneurialism. The real world (read Wall Street) has plenty of constraints and people are always gaming the system to make a buck. So in this sense, it's a valid exercise. Edit: In terms of "gaming the system" I'd like to think of this as leveraging o…
Yes, because the lesson I really want people who are thinking of working on Wall Street to learn is that they should be trying to cheat the system.
On another note, Breaking rules isn't what caused the recent wall street collapse it was a lack of looking ahead at consequences of actions.
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Your argument seems to lean a bit too strongly on unsupported accusations of fraud: Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. What, you're saying that a team of college students, on a college campus , which presumably has a fully stocked stationery store within five minutes' walk, can't throw up some hand-scrawled signs in less than (say) 15 minutes for under fi…
You make valid points. My problem is less the specifics of the individual teams' solutions -- I don't dispute they were very clever and creative solutions -- but rather the impression that the greatest reward went to those who went furthest outside of the rules. Team 1 were arguably entirely within the rules and made $200, Team 2 went a little outside (unless they were handed the envelope at 6pm) and made a little mo…
And there's your insight. If what you want is money, and lots of it, finding creative ways to game the system is how it's done.
I am not lauding that, just pointing it out.
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Thanks for the synopsis. I'm curious, though, what makes the solutions 'immoral' or dishonest? They seem perfectly legitimate to me.
Agreed.. I'm surprised by the comments here where many seem to think that some ways of making money are more fair than others. I would have expected the Hacker News crowd to really admire the winning team's 'hack'. But anyway, as long as it's not illegal , I don't see what the problem is. The instructor didn't say how (or even whether) to spend the seed money. Another way to look at it -- a good idea and good executi…
Hackers have historically had very strong ideas of morality that extend way beyond illegal vs. legal. This is why some hackers advocate doing certain things they consider moral but illegal, and abhor other things that they consider immoral but legal.
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Your argument seems to lean a bit too strongly on unsupported accusations of fraud: Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. What, you're saying that a team of college students, on a college campus , which presumably has a fully stocked stationery store within five minutes' walk, can't throw up some hand-scrawled signs in less than (say) 15 minutes for under fi…
"And I don't seem to recall anything in the "constraints" about not being allowed to beg or borrow anything, nor any rules about not being allowed to use stuff you already own." What if "stuff you already own" includes a bank account with 2 million bucks in it? I also thought the solution was a bit dishonest, but then the whole thing should not be taken that serious from the start. The reservations solution seems eve…
The first scenario is one a lot of Jiffy Lube-type garages and auto parts stores like Pep Boys do all the time (although typically with more than just tire pressure, e.g. transmission fluid).
The latter -- asking for donations and letting people pay what they want -- is something the Boy Scouts in my hometown used to do all the time. Free air for your tires, free coffee by the side of the Interstate ... I saw them doing free brake light replacement once. In theory they'd do it for free if someone really couldn't afford it, but in practice people pay what they think the service is worth (or whatever of that they happen to have on hand), so it's a sort of self-defined "sliding scale."
I don't see any misrepresentation there so I don't see how it's inherently dishonest.
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Your argument seems to lean a bit too strongly on unsupported accusations of fraud: Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. What, you're saying that a team of college students, on a college campus , which presumably has a fully stocked stationery store within five minutes' walk, can't throw up some hand-scrawled signs in less than (say) 15 minutes for under fi…
"And I don't seem to recall anything in the "constraints" about not being allowed to beg or borrow anything, nor any rules about not being allowed to use stuff you already own." What if "stuff you already own" includes a bank account with 2 million bucks in it? I also thought the solution was a bit dishonest, but then the whole thing should not be taken that serious from the start. The reservations solution seems eve…
You can easily be in a similar situation in real life. You can get a mortgage on your house, or sell your car, or pawn family heirloom, etc. You can extend your runway (and hopefully increase the possibility or size of success), while ensuring deeper fall if you do fall.
So back to the class, if one group did spend invest their $100 along with the initial $5 seed funding, they'd have to earn more than the other groups to have a comparable return.
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See, the problem here is that she hands out two artificial constraints, and then praises the teams who ignore the constraints. 1. Used a device to measure the tire pressure and materials to build the booth and signs. Did they cost less than $5? Maybe. Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. 2. Well done on finding something you can acquire for free and then se…
"Total time used to make $650: a week" You could use the "idle time" for other stuff.
They executed the advertising opportunity, now they have nothing. The other two, issues with their business practices aside, have set up businesses that could continue to operate, grow and scale.
To me that deserves more recognition than a flash-in-the-pan idea.
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She teaches a class at Stanford and offers each team $5 of 'funding' in an envelope. She tells them that once they open the envelope, they have 2 hours to make as much money as they can. She cites three teams' approaches: 1) First team opens a free stand that offers to check peoples bike tire pressure for free, then charges $1 to inflate if necessary. This team changes midstream to accepting donations instead of char…
See, the problem here is that she hands out two artificial constraints, and then praises the teams who ignore the constraints. 1. Used a device to measure the tire pressure and materials to build the booth and signs. Did they cost less than $5? Maybe. Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. 2. Well done on finding something you can acquire for free and then se…
The constraint here is (your current resources + $5 + 2 hours), not just the $5 and 2 hours. And the point is to get profitable. It's an entrepreneurship puzzle, not programming puzzle.
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Thanks for the synopsis. I'm curious, though, what makes the solutions 'immoral' or dishonest? They seem perfectly legitimate to me.
There are two levels --- the first is within the context of a class assignment, and the second is as a business operation. 1) The bike tire pressure check isn't bad, but seems to be cheating on the class solution by using outside materials. Once one can 'presume' a pressure gauge and a pump, why not presume further specialized equipment or further outside funding? As a business proposition I was happy with it when th…
Well, that moral principle is not going to generalize well.
But let's resist the urge to play moral philosopher and consider the facts: Would the restaurants want to stop you from doing this?
I don't think it's obvious. If I pick up half a dozen extra reservations and then try to sell them, I don't really add to the workload of the greeter, unless I pick up substantially more than end up being used. (Obviously, if you try to get 100 reservations, sell five, and return the other 95, the restaurant is going to stop you. So, don't do that!)
What you're essentially doing is allowing people to buy a better position in line. That seems perfectly rational: An upcoming reservation, like a stock option, is a commodity, so one can put a price on it, right? And it's worth noting that restaurants do this all the time [1]:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318827
...it's called "bribing the maitre'd", and they don't advertise it, even though -- if it weren't for other considerations -- it's a good thing for the restaurant. A person who is willing to pay cash money to get in to your restaurant faster is probably someone with (a) more money to spend, so they're likely to order wine and dessert and all the good stuff that pads the profit margin, or (b) a big fan of your restaurant, such that they'll pay extra to come to your restaurant instead of the less-busy restaurant down the street, or (c) about to become a big fan of your restaurant, because they can always get a seat there right away; it's just a matter of a few bucks!
So the real mystery is why restaurants don't do this themselves. I suspect that the answer is social signaling: A restaurant doesn't want to be the entity that makes the majority of its customers feel poor. For every person whom you allow to publicly buy their way to the front of the line, you send a message to an entire line-full of other people that they're just too cheap or too poor to do the same thing. The point of a restaurant is to allow people to feel rich at a fixed rate, not to force them to feel poor at variable rates. So before long your restaurant will have a reputation as "that obnoxious place which caters to snooty rich people who want to show off all their money". Unless that's your business plan, that isn't a good idea.
(It is this, not the fear of breaking some non-existent law against overtipping maitre'ds, that keeps the practice of bribing maitre'ds below the radar. It's okay to spend money for better service; it's impolite for either party to call attention to it.)
The solution that these entrepreneurs have come up with is to create two queues: The queue run by the restaurant, and a separate queue containing the reservations owned by the entrepreneurs, which they will sell for a fee. The genius of this is that there's a strict limit to how many rich people can buy their way ahead of you: The entrepreneurs only have so many spots ahead of yours. Then the entrepreneurs can fix the fee to enter their queue, which will help prevent unsightly bidding wars from breaking out in front of the restaurant. And, because the whole scheme is run by a third party, the restaurant doesn't have to adjudicate disputes, or explain all this to everyone who shows up, or spoil their reputation as scrupulously fair egalitarians who would be shocked -- shocked! -- by the offering of a bribe.
So my guess is that restaurants might be okay with this, if it's done right. (i.e. The right number of "buyable" reservations vs the usual ones, the right fixed rate, no intimidation of customers, and of course no counterfeit reservations. I believe it is the latter two problems that have given rise to laws against ticket scalping.)
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[1] How great is it that when trying to google this article the first thing I find is the HN link?