31–35 of 35 posts
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Do you really want to deal with the legal and compliance hurdles of handling credit cards/debit cards/etc. right out of the gate? (Assuming that isn't what your new company is about).
Every hole in the wall restaurant and convenience store somehow manages to do it... are they so much better at all that??
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I think there are a few common themes, from my perspective: 1. Be popular "for the people": as in, you're used by and contributed to by a passionate community. (Wikipedia, vim/emacs, pretty much any gnu project) Commercial interest is tangential or very indirectly related to the service. 2. Alternatively to (1), be a valuable and costly-to-replicate component of many large, for-profit companies doing their normal bus…
Super thoughtful, thanks. Notably these are all social or legal rather than technical in nature and that does seem to be a viable way to tackle this. There are a number of ventures that have stayed relatively consistent over time (like hundreds of years) by staying small and focused [0]. I hope that postgres and linux will be on that list in 1000 years. Still, pretty curious about if we might be able to enforce it at…
A 501c3 can be a parent company for a for-profit company (e.g. Mozilla-Co is owned by the Mozilla-Foundation), so it's still possible to operate a "normal" company within the IP-ownership structure of a a 501c3.
Edit: it's worth noting that family-owned businesses with a trust component have also done really well in the last 100 years. (see the NYT, which is governed by the Sulzberger family [126 years], and many others on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_family_bus...)
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Do you really want to deal with the legal and compliance hurdles of handling credit cards/debit cards/etc. right out of the gate? (Assuming that isn't what your new company is about).
No, I do not. However, I've heard (too) many stories like "our payments/ads/infra vendor banned us out of the blue for suspicion/politics/obscure-AI-decision" to ignore this. It could be fine for a start-up that is inherently risky, intended to fail early and risks Other-People's-Money (TM), but not always.
I get the spirit of this article. But one of the key things to consider is the operational overhead of maintaining infra for auxiliary services far outweighs the value it provides. There are a few things like payments, notification, monitoring(logs/metrics etc) startups shouldn't build from scratch/self host anymore, unless they plan to take on the incumbents in those fields.
Just give me a dockercompose.yml. That’s all I need. A positive example for this is mailcow [1]: all you need to do is pulling the repo, editing the mailcow.conf and running “docker compose up”. Logging is preconfigured, and the watchdog just works. It’s dead simple and provides secure defaults. It’s ready for production in very little time. That’s what I would love to see from more projects. I hope supabase will fol…
we have the docker-compose in our main repo: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/docker
with instructions/docs here: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/hosting/docker
Hope that helps!
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No, I do not. However, I've heard (too) many stories like "our payments/ads/infra vendor banned us out of the blue for suspicion/politics/obscure-AI-decision" to ignore this. It could be fine for a start-up that is inherently risky, intended to fail early and risks Other-People's-Money (TM), but not always.
Unless your business deals exclusively in cash and/or cryptocurrency, I don't think you can really avoid that. Even if you are dealing with a credit card company directly, that company could ban you out of the blue for suspician/politics/obscure-AI-decision.
But yes, the fact that essentially all payments are bottlenecked through two vendors with no legal supervision is quite troubling.
Maybe we should form a co-operative of payment recipients? It doesn't need to operate anything, but rather be a "suicide pact" that will extoll a high price from payment processors if they try to unfairly ban a business. Some sort of a smart contract could guarantee fair enforcement.