HN user

bastian

703 karma

Co-founder of Postmates

Posts53
Comments117
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phys.org 1y ago

Hydrogels could be ideal radiation protection for astronauts

bastian
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: What websites do you visit for fun?

bastian
2pts3
en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Launch on Warning

bastian
1pts2
public.wmo.int 4y ago

Climate change triggers food insecurity, poverty and displacement in Africa

bastian
4pts0
www.medrxiv.org 6y ago

Covid-19: Analysis of 391 cases and 1,286 of their close contacts

bastian
2pts0
www.technologyreview.com 6y ago

Has this scientist finally found the fountain of youth?

bastian
1pts1
mobile.nytimes.com 8y ago

How the Frightful Five Put Startups in a Lose-Lose Situation

bastian
2pts0
spectrum.ieee.org 9y ago

AI Creates Fake Obama

bastian
2pts0
fleet.postmates.com 9y ago

Postmates Zero Emission Scooter Initiative

bastian
5pts0
www.youtube.com 9y ago

The Story of Glenn O'Brien's 'TV Party

bastian
1pts0
thecreativeindependent.com 9y ago

Henry Rollins on defining success

bastian
203pts51
www.upvotecalifornia.com 9y ago

Upvote California

bastian
1pts0
en.wikipedia.org 9y ago

Moonbow

bastian
1pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Not So Hungry Demand Curves

bastian
1pts0
engineering.postmates.com 10y ago

Introducing PMJSON, a Swift Library for JSON Encoding/decoding

bastian
13pts2
medium.com 10y ago

How to write a Slackbot in 40 lines of code

bastian
2pts0
vimeo.com 11y ago

The Evolution of Batman in Cinema

bastian
1pts0
postmates.com 11y ago

On-Demand Logistics for Your App

bastian
6pts0
www.everlane.com 11y ago

Everlane Now – The Future of online is incredibly fast delivery

bastian
2pts0
postmates.com 12y ago

Chefs On-Demand

bastian
2pts3
blog.postmates.com 12y ago

The Kale Affect

bastian
2pts1
en.wikipedia.org 13y ago

Muckraker

bastian
2pts0
techcrunch.com 13y ago

Postmates Launches Its ‘Get It Now’ On-Demand Delivery Service In Seattle

bastian
4pts0
www.postmates.com 14y ago

Postmates is hiring generalist hackers

bastian
2pts1
1000.postmates.com 14y ago

Show HN: Visualizing Postmates' first 1000 deliveries in San Francisco

bastian
63pts24
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Ask HN: Postmates - Free deliveries in San Francisco

bastian
37pts14
www.curated.by 15y ago

Interesting Use Case: Curated.by used to translate tweets

bastian
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Javascript widget scaling issues

bastian
1pts4
www.technologyreview.com 16y ago

Building the World's Most Powerful Laser

bastian
1pts0
friendfeed.com 16y ago

Paul Buchheit: Consider this the chrysalis stage

bastian
11pts1
Om 26 days ago

Thank you John. From someone who knew him less but liked him just as much.

The most interesting part to me was this: "He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished."

I did the same thing for 12 years as CEO of Postmates and I still do it when I work on new ideas. I thought it was something I just did. But reading this I have to assume it is more common.

Everyone wants this but no one really wants this. The reason these restrictions exist is because of food quality issues, conditions at the pickup, wait times, courier feedback etc. Every food delivery co at some point did deliveries from certain places and went on to restrict them because for one reason or another the experience was not great for the customer / fleet or the merchant. At least that's how we did things at Postmates

The definition of a t-shaped person here is wrong. I always understood it as: An individual who has empathy and ability to collaborate across disciplines coupled with deep knowledge in a specific area. Based on Tom Kelly (IDEO), probably 2005

Launch on Warning 4 years ago

Posting this because I am interested in this: "Strategies are available that can reduce the effectiveness of a launch-on-warning stance. For example, the first-strike nation can use a technique called X-ray pin-down to delay a retaliatory response. It involves a barrage of submarine-based missiles fired from close range in a "depressed trajectory" mode that reaches its targets in minutes. The warheads would be set to explode every minute or so at high altitudes, which would significantly disrupt the attacked nation's ability to launch its own ICBMs."

How does this work in detail?

Postmates founder here. I am subscriber to Internal Tech Emails and I couldn't help but smile reading these emails this morning. It was in 2017, around April 12th when we launched Postmates Unlimited - the subscription program that inspired all this. Now, we all know Postmates didn't win the space but some product decisions outlast a company and this was one one of them. I still remember the meeting when we decided to launch the subscription. No one had ever done it, the board thought it was nuts. It became the industry standard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[dead] 8 years ago

How did this disappear from the home feed so fast?

Gabe is the man. Fun fact: We hired some great people through Techmeme's pretty clever who's hiring in tech section.

I took me a while to figure this out but i agree with Ali. However, i'd argue that as a CEO with a product background (the same probably goes for engineering) you can still spend time with your product teams through Phase 2 and maybe even in Phase 3. It is just a slightly different role, a more guiding function.