HN user
"Sales" is a very broad topic. What aspect of sales are you looking to get better at? The initial prospecting and sourcing of qualified leads? Turning leads into opportunities and proposals? Closing opportunities? Or something else such as preventing churn?
I may be overly cynical of US government policies and procedures, but I read this as someone tried to use AWS or similar without permission.
They don't want to do this, because they don't want to become a "stamp of approval" for companies coming out of YC.
Specifically, if a company comes out of YC and is looking to raise further funding down the road, it becomes an important data point if YC decided to continue investing with them or not. By not participating in future rounds as a policy, they avoid this potential issue.
Why would an HR person or a CFO EVER give up 1) expert benefits consulting 2) protection against the ACA 3) access to long-standing carrier relationships that allow for renewal negotiations 4) ability to support complex benefits strategies
I'm really not buying their case here.
1) Expert benefits consulting seems like something that could be made easily accessible via research online 2) Obamacare FUD? 3) Haggling is a feature? 4) This seems like expert consulting re-worded
This seems like a pretty clear signal that the ability of the state to conduct mass surveillance may be slipping.
This is generally very sound advice. There is one part that I take issue with though.
We also looked for proactive junior staff out of companies like LinkedIn who were ready for the next step, but not afforded the opportunity
A candidate may have worked in sales, but if they were an account manager tending existing customers, they may not be cut out to be an account executive acquiring new business. Just because someone has made 80 sales calls a day in a prior job doesn't mean they can demo and close. Make sure candidates have the expertise you need.
These two points contradict each other, and I think it is a very important issue. If you are not willing to allow a junior person a better opportunity immediately (hiring them into a promotion) then you have to compensate them better compared to the current company for the same position (short of intangibles.)
Often times, larger companies will have a more deliberate and organized sales process that is time-based. This creates scenarios where candidates that are otherwise qualified for the next step (Market Development Rep --> Account Executive) have a seemingly artificial ceiling preventing them from that role at their current company. While it probably makes sense at the larger company for a Market Rep to be promoted after 18-24 months, this person may be very capable of the next level earlier.
If you can successfully find driven junior level people who have this type of artificial ceiling, you can hire very valuable sales people. This also means you are going to have to take a risk that they can perform on the next level, but you can also hedge this risk by offering slightly less total compensation for the opportunity _now_.
Without knowing much, this does come across as very hypocritical of them to do this to you. It seems like the type of attitude that would be frowned upon by the YC community.
Unfortunately, I think the best way (safest) to handle this as someone new out of school without a network is to ignore it and move on to other potential opportunities.
Most likely, this is an issue isolated to this one employee, who should have his position of responsibility in the hiring process stripped, written up/ demotion, whatever tools are available to the company to _strongly_ reprimand him.
There is a chance that this person (who has already shown to be outrageously unprofessional) would retaliate. He has your resume which likely significant personal information such as cell phone and address.
If you had a network, the best course of action would be to find someone you trust who is connected to the CEO. Any CEO who is not breeding a malignant culture would be absolutely appalled by this employee's actions. The CEO is fortunate to have a female grad student from a top 3 school applying to work at his/her company. Diversity is incredibly valuable to teams, and hi-jacking the hiring process into a personal dating workflow displays such egregiously bad judgement I would probably be personally offended as the CEO to the point of firing the person.
Yes exactly. This is a really badly designed implementation of a pricing tier strategy.
It also seems likely that by incentivizing users to lie about their age, Tinder will create an entire zone of fake ages between something like 25-27, where users do not want to be grouped in with all of the "27 year olds" so they go year(s) lower. Thus, eliminating user trust for ages of anyone at numbers approaching 27.
I agree. This all seems fairly basic, and from clicking through the site for 15 secs I was able to find a lot of bugs. For example, when reading the linked blog post, the social media bar scrolls and then re-anchors to its spot on the page on chrome 40.0. Reading through the other comments it sounds like there are many bugs throughout.
The Grails app that is now Cake PHP is just a tool to aggregate content from other sources and then post it to wired.com site? And it was previously built and maintained by a single developer? Sounds like a basic tool.
If they are trying to seem as immature and incompetent as possible, this is definitely a great way.
No, that issue seemed to get cleared up successfully. He used that to foreshadow issues with his manager and general escalation communication.
It will be interesting to see how this works out, and how many resources are put behind it. If it does allow developers to choose to work on Linux/Mac for .NET development, it will put a lot of pressure on Windows to create a great product.
This really speaks to this line in the top comment "It's your job—as someone who knows the consequences—to convince people of this."
Your company should really not be taking the "set it and forget it" approach to building web-based applications. It is important to educate the client on the importance of a proactive support/maintenance plan.
As a digital agency building mid-market websites/ applications, we have also found that selling clients on support/maintenance has helped increase client loyalty as well when they want to take on new projects. If you build a site and then disappear the chance they decide to use a different firm next time increases greatly.
In my opinion, it is negligence to an extent that OP should not have to pay for this, and he should find a new VPS provider.
After the first 7 predictions I made I ran into a series of many people where I was the first one making the prediction and didn't get to test my prediction against the crowd. It would have been a better experience to stagger the new profiles in with established ones because after 5-6 profiles in a row where I was the first one predicting I grew bored and clicked away.
This contract is probably behind an NDA and releasing it may also break other confidentiality agreements already in existence.
The summary is that these terms are very unfavorable according to the indie artists and the companies they are affiliated with. They feel they are being strong-armed by Google and that Google is showing a strong preference toward large media companies and making it very difficult for future indie artists to become successful with this agreement.