It amazes me too. But we have to remember that although there was no product innovation, there was business model innovation for that niche market. Online subscriptions for razors were not a thing.
Atlassian has just launched Stride as a cheaper alternative. I'm planning to test it out soon to see if it hits the mark for your second requirement too.
Great post, Artlav! Great to hear from you after Exosphere in Chile last year. Eager for the next part of the project and hopefully you get some funds for your always interesting ideas.
Hi guys, author here. The initial interest is being used to start conversations with immigration departments from small states around the world. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Netherlands already use a points-based system to grant visas for skilled workers. The idea is to create a standard international certification that would allow skilled migrants to move freely around countries that accept it, just like they do with TOEFL for the English language requirement.
Really? What if some of these immigrants create more successful startups (like many have done before), generating x new jobs and even some "Netflix"s, paying really high salaries?
It's a complicated topic but there were real world "experiments": In 2004 in Europe:
"By allowing anyone in the eight relatively poor new members of the EU to come and work freely, Britain, Ireland and Sweden are putting these claims to the test. All seventy-five million people in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are now free to move to Britain and work. Since wages in Poland are typically only a fifth of those in Britain, Poles have a big incentive to come and work here. If opponents of immigration are right, Britain should now be deluged with East Europeans and unemployment should be soaring.... But it isn’t. In fact, only 427,000 East Europeans have so far applied to work in Britain (many of whom were already in the country illegally) – and most stay only briefly: net migration from eastern Europe was only 48,000 in 2004.5 Unemployment remains at thirty-year lows, tax receipts are up and jobs that British people no longer want to do are being filled."
The text could include more info on vesting schedules and some examples. It's surprising how many professionals still never heard of vesting schedules when joining a startup (specially outside the US), and as influential as YC is, I bet a good explanation there would be very helpful. "Vesting or no company at all :)"
I know, but... "I just think those pointless discussions of languageA vs LanguageB are infinite loops and languageA + LanguageB would make both sides evolve faster and the whole community would gain in the end."
Missing the "shut-the-fuck-up.sh" for sending an email to everyone with the subject "Urgent" when the office is too noisy and the "send-feedback-to-my-body.sh" to order lunch 12pm from a premium random selection :)
Really nice to see it. Me and my co-worker had this feeling of needing something like OTTO when first using vagrant... I remember saying that it should definitely be a product. We ended up writing a python script for our user case that makes life really easy for new developers joining us.
Honestly, I think you will be more successful if you spend your time and energy looking for employers that could sponsor your visa to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc...
I'm from a very remote part of Brazil and I used www.seek.com.au to get a programming job in Australia in 2008.. The company ran some remote tests with me and paid for all the relocation costs. You should try this.
Also you can try to get a permanent visa even before you try to move there. You can use the Immigration Points Calculator (https://www.wannamigrate.com/tools/) to know if you have the basic requirements for these same countries.
In 2008, I was hired to work on a tech startup from Australia, while I was living in Brazil. After I went through an initial quiz and a few interviews, they were willing to give me a shot by giving me (and paying for) a small project to code. Only after succeeding at it, they hired me, sponsored my visa and paid for all the relocation costs. In your case, I really think this approach would be a good bet in cases that the YC company is willing to sponsor the visa from the potential employee, so giving him a paid project before even flying him, might be a good filter.
For the retry part, I prefer to use a database table + cron task to do it... storing failed attempts and making x new attempts in predefined date and times, not having it permanently on a celery queue.