amoorthy

With both my startups I made some mistakes when naming the company. Sharing 3 lessons so hopefully can save you time.

Ah ok; sorry, didn't realize that.

Immigrants to any country are a unique slice of the population because they chose to migrate for a better life. Hence immigrants in most countries tend to do well economically (sometimes after a generation). Uncertain that cultural differences are the reason for different economic outcomes you observe.

Wow, thanks for taking the time to share all this data with such clear points. Much appreciated, especially the personal anecdote to make all this be less academic.

"a pricing model based on seats, a product roadmap built around features rather than outcomes [is outdated]"

I disagree with this.

On pricing, I get that agents and tokens can scale in a way that's unrelated to # of users. But for much SaaS software, AI remains helpful to a human and the human remains the receiver of value. Seat-based pricing is easy to understand and you can always layer in token/agent costs thresholds.

On features vs. outcomes, the latter is hard to define and measure in many industries. In marketing SaaS, which I know well, you can't often tell what outcome to expect. You have to try a lot of ideas and some will hit. No way a SaaS vendor can guarantee that.

Ha! Same for me: 286 in 9th grade (1990) for about $2k CAD. 286 was a bad call though as I think it was harder to expand compared with 386. I remember 1MB RAM but really only 640k usable. Had to change some BIOS settings to get to about ~700 kB?

This. I feel this all the time. I love 3Blue1Brown's videos and when I watch them I feel like I really get a concept. But I don't retain it as well as I do things I learned in school.

It's possible my brain is not as elastic now in my 40s. Or maybe there's no substitute for doing something yourself (practice problems) and that's the missing part.

Ah thank you! Sharing with my nephew who's there right now!

Yeah, much of LinkedIn is performative nonsense. However, with such a large B2B audience there, it offers a sizable opportunity for people who actually publish useful information and are honest rather than posing.

We have an "influencer" recommendation engine that is decent at finding such thoughtful folks, but it varies by industry. But yeah, it's not easy and I wish there were more thoughtful posters on LinkedIn.

We built an editor for creating posts on LinkedIn where - to avoid the "all AI output is similar/boring" issue - it operates more like a muse than a writer. i.e. it asks questions, pushes you to have deeper insights, connects the dots with what others are writing about etc.

Users appear to be happy but it's early. And while we do scrub the writing of typical AI writing patterns there's no denying that it all probably sounds somewhat similar, even as we apply a unique style guide for each user.

I think this may be ok if the piece is actually insightful. Fingers crossed.

So cool. Thanks for posting. I wish I was 1% the engineer this guy is.

Mine was a referral from the VP of sales (the coach was his dad and many of the reps in our team had been coached by him). Fwiw, his name is Rick Roberge. I think he still coaches. He's can be a bit antagonistic but he's very good at what he does and I'm glad I hired him.

My coach has a max timeline of 6 months so you are forced to swim on your own. I felt like I had the hang of it after about 4 months so stopped about then.

(sorry for delayed reply; I don't think HN notifies you of replies?)

Yes I think possible. 1. sales aptitude assessment tools like Objective Management Group (the one I took) help you identify core weaknesses that are critical to understand and work on. 2. Recording your sales calls (assuming you're on the phone) and then asking AI to critique it and coach you, with the above assessment as context, could be very helpful.

If you're disciplined I think the above approach may be a pretty good stand-in for a real coach. Or at least help you evaluate a coach better should you choose to pony up for one later.

As a co-founder (tech background but haven't coded in a while), I got comfortable with sales best when I hired a sales coach. There are so many things to learn in sales and a coach is often the fastest way to assess your inherent weaknesses and address them head on.

I paid $2k/mth about 10 yrs ago; at the time I felt scared to spend so much but once I realized it was an investment in me, and I put in the time to learn, I can safely say it continues to pay off even now. I quite enjoy sales now. Not saying I'm good at it but certainly a far way from "I hate sales and would much rather code".

Ah you might be right. But:

1. If they really have so many faulty cars on the road that's a serious hazard and any accidents where people die may end up destroying Volvo entirely because of negligence.

2. An economically reasonable answer might be refund the guy making the complaint and ofter all other owners $10k credit towards your next Volvo purchase or free 3 years of maintenance and service. Something like this might be enough to stem the bleeding while protecting the brand.

Insane that Volvo doesn't just replace the car. The cost is trivial compared to the brand damage here. The complaint is so well documented and the customer is not being a jerk at all; not sure what Volvo's logic is.

Agreed. Put another way: because software has low marginal cost and high up-front cost (even higher in very competitive markets) it makes sense to raise venture early to hire a great team and build an awesome product that then scales incredibly well (great investment returns).

Oh cool! Thanks so much. (Btw, I didn't mean to suggest that the project should address an unanswered question. Ok to repeat known experiment if it's fun/insightful).

The gravitational acceleration one is cool. I remember doing this in high school back in the 90s. Let me suggest that to him. Thanks again.

Xpertly | Founding fullstack engineer | Remote (US), ideally Bay Area | $150k + 1% equity

Seed-stage company, backed by top-tier investors. CTO is former YC co-founder.

Founders previously built and sold startup so fewer dumb mistakes this time around (i.e. smarter about when to invest, such as in this hire!)

You: 5 years backend/fullstack experience at Series A/B company

Stack: Vue/Node/Postgres/AWS-lambda. Use of vector DBs/AI where it makes sense.

Why join? CTO is one of the smartest and nicest engineers to work with and learn from. We are building something enduring and useful, both for our customers and the world at large.

ps: we're somewhat in stealth so not much info on our socials yet about the company/mission etc.

Email me: arjun (at) xpertly (dot) ai

Sorry for tangent but any recommendations for small smart phone (i.e. <6" screen)?

I like my iPhone 12 mini with its 5" screen (though it is glitchier than one would hope) but now all phones seem to be 6"+ which is hard to fit into a pocket or even manipulate with one hand.

I know the Samsung ZFlip 6 and Motorola Razr+ are small, though rather pricey at $800-1000. Any opinions from folks on reliability/usability etc of these?

I am embarrassed to say I have some Apple lock-in with earbuds and even basic conveniences like "find-my" working for my children's watches so not sure if these are worth staying with Apple for, even if I dislike their latest devices.

I'm very curious if experienced staff is available and less expensive now. As a venture-backed startup founder myself I'm quite eager to hire such folks and don't have the money to compete with larger firms. Maybe silly question but where are such folks hanging out, besides HN? :-)

Thanks for sharing your experience and glad to hear you've found a good job/team/product-environment!

My experience working with junior devs is that while they may be smart they haven't worked in teams and contributed to large codebases. So they may struggle to understand how a larger codebase is structured, where is the optimal place to fix an issue, how to structure their own code to be maintainable longer term etc. So code-reviews take longer, with seniors sometimes having to refactor a large amount.

I think some younger devs that contribute to open source projects do much better in this regard.

I don't have a view into many large tech companies but I imagine some level of tech debt exists in all of them. Are you suggesting that hiring fresh grads to resolve tech debt is unwise given the complexity of doing so?

Sorry to hear you're burned out. Do you want to work after your current job? If so, curious why you feel this is your last tech job. Is it because of ageism or something else?

Really thoughtful comment. (An upvote was not enough :-)

Hi Richard - I'd like to donate as well to help you retire your debt.

I'm sorry the company didn't work out but I am so happy there are people like you in this world doing such a good thing. I hope there is a way to resurrect your project in future.

Excellent points. Let me see if I can address:

1. We do not enforce an equal number of articles from all sides of the political spectrum. We use the political lean ratings only to help identify different framings on topics so people can see different angles to a story because issues are complex and no single article will have all the facts.

2. We agree that media skews towards outrage because it funds their advertising based business model. That's why our ratings emphasize the most objective and least opinionated writing. And thankfully, there is a lot of great writing that is trying to inform, rather than emotionally manipulate people. It's hard to find which is why we built such a search engine.

3. News orgs are eager to keep publishing stories even if the topics are not that important because they want more of your attention. That's why we group articles by topics on our site (factual.news) so that you can actually "finish reading the news". Oh, we're also ad-free and don't care to keep you longer than absolutely necessary.

Rats. 26 actually (scroll down) but bad presentation layer for sure. Our search engine doesn't do great on one-word search terms so "ukraine mariupol" shows 100+ articles.

Hi folks. If you’re worried that Google is giving you biased search results when it comes to news, or just unsure which of the many search results to click on, then you might like The Factual’s news search engine, which I built with my co-founder, Ajoy.

We rank individual news articles for how informative and objective they are using a variety of signals that proxy expertise: depth and extent of research (links, quotes), neutral tone of writing, historical topic focus and ratings of journalist, and source reputation. We overlay political bias ratings and select multiple highly informative articles across the political spectrum on each topic. We also give additional context like read time, and make it easy to filter out paywalled articles.

More on how it works here: https://www.thefactual.com/how-it-works.

Feedback/questions appreciated. Thanks!