The post on why medium.com could have been profitable as a lifestyle business but since it took VC money, it should resort to spamming users with recommendations etc
And you can never be sure what questions will be asked from you during an interview, especially, since the only thing job description says is "Rockstar frontend Engineer"
Yes. In today's search engines, I cannot give you a blacklist and say filter out these results. If I am looking for tutorials, I cannot say no video results. If I am looking for market research, I cannot filter out news websites from the links. For personalization, I cannot give google any suggestions on what I absolutely do not want to be included etc.
Government runs hospitals in every town but only poor people use them(though they put up with bribes here). Rich and middle class typically use private health care as its generally better. Private health care in cities is excellent even by western standards. In towns, its decent. Poor also turn to private hospitals when time is important or when government doctors fail. One thing government does well is giving vaccines to new born and infants.
Also, many times, you just walk up to a pharmacy and ask the pharmacist for a medicine instead of talking to the doctor. Saves money and time
For some of us in Bay area, we pay $5000 in rent, utilities, day care etc. I, by and large can't optimize on these things. I can only optimize on groceries, restaurant eating, vacation/weekend outings and few things like that. So, I hope these personal finance apps remove rent, utilities, day care etc from their analysis.
Also, one feature I would pay for is this. When I am entering a Walmart or Target or Whole Foods, it should warn me that I spent 'x' amount on groceries last week and that I should keep my spending below $y to stay within budget. Somehow, I see this feature missing in all apps I see so far.
W.r.t askwhale.com, seems like it is a mashup of Quora/Reddit and video based Q&A. Given that there is greater friction in video compared to text based Q&A sites, who would be interested in contributing this?
I find it quiet surprising that none of these startup classes teach how to do market research and market sizing. Yet when a new batch of startups demo every six weeks, the first thing they talk of is, size of opportunity. Market opportunity is one of the things to consider before deciding on a problem to work on. Please consider adding this info to your classes.
Also, None of them teach how Sam or any YC partner or any VC would approach or start thinking whether a startup is worth investing in or not. That would be hugely beneficial to some of us as it will help us in channeling our thoughts.
Lets say you have an ecommerce firm. When a user is browsing an item(diapers?), at a mimimum he/she expects to see images, description, reviews, cost, tax, delivery dates, promotions, related items. In addition to what you see on frontend, in the backend, there may be jobs run for analytics, revenue reconciliation, warehouse management optimization, carrier management, fraud checks, item data setup and a host of other activities. Each of these tasks has its own complex business logic and typically has its own team. Each team runs a service, possibly in the form of a REST API call. You can call them microservices.
I believe Quora and Facebook tried it in various forms though there you could reach out just about anybody. I assume 21.co will do same thing going forward.
An easy way is to walk up to a QA or engineer, tell him "We are reviewing some sessions by customer and we keep getting this error". can you please help me replay customer sessions? This is an executive escalation?
There is bigger question here. How many people are still make money from selling compiler/language tools? Like, write a static analyzer, or php optimizer or sell a Swift library for linux application or a language-X to language-Y transpiler. So, far, I have found this industry to be opaque, unlike web industry! And if they make money, how much?
Btw, there was YC company which sold PHP server optimizations. Anyone knows the name?