Number 4 is ethical quicksand. Please don’t build a machine that guesses personality traits based on personal data. It won’t end well.
In the past when people created arbitrary unquantifiable categories and then proceeded to put people in them based off of unempirical/irrational voodoo it was called superstition (ex. Astrology). Involve a computer in your rituals and now it's AI.
Or worse, phrenology, which sounds very funny today but at the time people were applying it as if it were actually scientific.
Better things don't pay, at all. The most betterest things you can do as a developer - make infrastructure that makes other developers more efficient, or invent protocols or fundamentals to build ecosystems and industries on - often you get nothing for it. Because you made it open source, because you wanted it to be useful. But to try to make it proprietary would have been to make it useless. Theres a reason probably…
Why do we have such an emphasis on making our tools open source? How much does the license matter? Would it be feasible to release source code for inspection while simultaneously retaining exclusive rights to operate the software? Would that garner a negative response from the developer community?
This is like a source available license and we’re trending to that. elastic, redis, I believe mongo, are all making versions of this that allow the source to be public and even used for commercial purposes, but not for commercial purposes that compete with the company.
I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no amount of grousing or changing from internal users will change that. Solutions that sell upwards in an org (yammer for example) are very much the exception.
> I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no amount of grousing or changing from internal users will change that. It's possible to "sell" directly to users, but you have to have a particular pricing structure: free to individuals. This is what…
Dropbox ultimately failed at B2B, and Box/Azure/Apple/Amazon/Google/ and others have taken their spot way before Dropbox opened up a B2B product.
It's kind of disappointing that the pioneer "RFA" projects are all "more of the same" SV. I don't see anything audacious , like "build a chip that competes with Nvidia" or "build a pharmaceutical model that improves over what we have", or "find a way to do high quality journalism without a paywall". For that matter, I don't see any inkling that any of these ideas have anything in particular to do with their self-styl…
It may also be a case of different strategies for different channels. If I were a VC, I might prefer to solicit these kinds of solid, boring business ideas in an RFA and source moonshot ideas through my personal network. If I looked for moonshots from my open application process, I would probably end up wading through a lot of applications that would be time-consuming to vet.
That's what I would do as a VC, too, but then I wouldn't premise the advertisement of the open application for my accelerator on something misleading.
What if those originally submitting the data could share in the profits?
I'll shoot you in the leg but I'll give you back 10% of your hospital bills out of the 20% kickback I get from the hospital.
I'm thinking more along the lines of get shot in the leg and we'll cover everything and pay you out even more, but even your proposed scenario still seems better than the current situation of getting shot in the leg with nothing to show for it.
What is getting built for specifically the 1% (or .1%, etc.)? The only service I can think of is Magic. Additionally, what markets are underserved? This is an area I'm interested in but don't know much about (except from my own anecdotal experience like the fact that comparing costs of healthcare from different practitioners being prohibitively difficult)
> What is getting built for specifically the 1% Should clarify that by "specifically for" I'd mean that the 1% have all the money and thus practically all the decision making power. An example of the distinction would be that though everybody engages with AdTech software the software is built for the 1% to make them money. The 1% isn't a demographic that's targeted by some SaaS in this case, it's a way of naming the…
It's a service where you can hire an on-demand personal assistant for $30/hour, https://getmagic.com/. I never saw the appeal.
The thesis seems to “build enterprise software” because those people have a budget. I enjoy reading people’s startup ideas. But this is a pretty uninspired list - (“Better Google Groups”, “Better Zendesk”, etc) There are thousands of solutions to these problems out there. Not sure what makes them more ripe for a startup then bill splitting or pizza.
It’s also incredibly hard to sell to enterprises as a startup. Building a better mousetrap is not all it takes, which explains why these solutions are still widely used despite their deficiencies. People are building better solutions all the time that go nowhere.