411–420 of 520 posts
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Is “child raiser” rather than “parent” a stylistic choice or is there some meaning that I’m missing.
Stylistic choice, no deeper meaning. I know people who are the sole child-raiser after separating from the child's other parent, and people who are parents but they work full-time and their partner looks after the child.
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I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?
> I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. My grandfather founded a construction company that became quite successful and remained privately owned by him. When it was time for him to retire, he sold the company to the employees who turned it into a worker cooperative. They have since seen wild success and many dozens of people have made some incredible am…
I appreciate all that publicly-traded companies have contributed to society, but rarely is "going public" ever not the first sign of an objectively downward trend of the company trajectory.
i keep thinking about this google arc. I was there for nearly a decade (at this point i've almost been gone for longer than I was there) and from the outside, the company is almost unrecognizable. it is definitely not the company that it was pre 2010. from my lowly IC5 (when I left) position, it felt like something happened in 2014 or so that really put the company on a different track. eric had already left and the…
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I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?
I think Valve does have a reputation for having this type of model. They've famously expressed an intention to not go public or sell the company to anyone else. This is also what leads to them being a fairly small and selective company that can afford to cherry-pick employees, and that also has an allegedly more employee-friendly culture than others. Just like the recollection in the original post, they might have th…
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I wonder if there's a way to prevent the growth at all costs that is demanded by the financial markets. Maybe become profitable and pay off the VCs then don't go public? Then you can resist the pressure for growth quarter by quarter, and remain the 'right size' that your internal culture demands. Did Valve corporation do something like that?
> pay off the VCs then don't go public? The massive return on investment that VCs aim for comes from the public market valuing the VCs shares of the company much higher than what the VCs paid for it when they invested. How do you replicate that without going public?
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I must be thinking of Google Maps then. Or maybe Docs?
Google Earth was an acquisition (formerly Keyhole), maybe that's what you were thinking of.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39054947
I’d be glad to hear your perspective or thoughts in this thread or as a reply to my post re: Google Earth/Keyhole.
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I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success? There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.
> There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are... * EA/Origin * Epic * Ubisoft EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential tre…
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No, because child care (aka day care) is temporary and optional. A person who is raising a child has taken responsibility for them through their childhood—metaphorically “raising” them up into adulthood.
There are plenty of “child raisers” who provide more care than a daycare and less than a parent. And since we’re being technically correct, raising a child is always optional (even for the parent).
I wouldn’t consider a parent who opts out of raising their child to be a child raiser.
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> yet they[Valve] crank out new and innovative "products" every 4 years. So much so that they were essentially doing 90% of what Meta is trying to do now with 100x less people and budget. Innovative products every 4 years? Lol, if Facebook waited that long at any point in time it'd have died. Comparing Valve to Meta head-to-head is simply ridiculous. I'm not even sure which specific products you had in mind. Did you…
> Even if you believe Meta is directly competing with Valve, it's embarrassing for Valve, as someone in their position should be undisputed in their niche and have the market in deadlock. Meta can tap a billion people to play social games.
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The mistake Google has done here is that it deploys and launches and uses to garner attention projects under it's name. There is little to no, this is an experimental project by x team. It is this is a Google product. If everything is a product and you don't support most or expect most to die, then you damage the collective product that is the Google brand. And as a result how your employees feel and are treated abou…
> There is little to no “this is an experimental project by x team” They communicated quite clearly when products were in beta. For example, they communicated clearly that Gmail was in Beta until 2009 (launched in 2004). What’s less clear is what makes a beta, when a tremendously successful product remains in beta for so long. Another product that came out of beta in 2009 was… drumrolls… Google Reader[1]. [1] https:/…