bpm140

NGL, the pronunciation of Waikiki as “Why, Kiki?” made me laugh out loud.

This is the same thing I tell entrepreneurs.

At least with startups you can get lucky.

Writing (or producing) something memorable requires something more.

The author keeps mentioning capital-E “Elites” and never names one or even defines what that means.

My Spidey senses go off whenever someone uses an undefined label to describe a sweeping societal change.

And, yes, it is all about real estate.

It’s interesting that Graham doesn’t seem to say what Founder Mode looks like in any capacity, other than referring to a few outlier founders.

Less than one quarter of companies that go public do so with their original CEO.

Most people would say that indicates Founder Mode doesn’t generally work as companies scale.

It looks like Graham feels that it’s because too many founders listen to common wisdom and eventually get pushed out / leave?

I honestly don’t buy it. In order to scale, companies have to learn how to operationalize more and more processes. This fundamentally looks like “hiring people and giving them the space and authority to operate.”

I feel like his entire post could have been reframed as “just as VCs know there are relatively few excellent founders and identifying them is hard, there are similarly few excellent executives and identifying them is also hard.”

“they also told me my usage was higher than other developers...”

Next you’ll tell me that they’re NOT actually experiencing higher-than-normal call volumes!

Not relying on your network sounds like terrible advice.

Employee: “Hello, hiring manager. I know an incredible candidate for that job we posted last week.”

Hiring manager: “Thanks, employee, but we have hundreds of resumes from strangers, so we don’t need to talk to your contact.”

I’m not saying that never happens? But I am saying that it happens rarely enough that you shouldn’t use it to guide your networking strategy.

aka “Galt’s speech reformatted for TikTok”

Tell us more about the moochers, please?

I don’t think you’re following my point (I probably explained it poorly).

People voluntarily agreed to follow the robots.txt model when they could have ignore it. To this day, a plurality of people seem to support that standard.

That doesn’t keep content from being discoverable or accessible. All sorts of ways to find web sites outside of sites that use crawlers — directories, web rings, social media, etc.

There could have been an ads.txt model, but people probably would have likely ignored it. Your response would seem to be the norm for defending ad blockers — you somehow have a right to the content and if they can’t force you to view their ad, that’s on them.

Why do people get to dictate who accesses a page but not how it’s accessed? That binary seems completely arbitrary.

With all the ad blockers out there, which functionally demonetize content sites, why isn’t there an ad equivalent to robots.txt that says “don’t display this site if ads are blocked”?

So many good comments from several points of view in this thread and the thing I can’t square is the same person championing ad blockers and condemning agents like Perplexity.

Gaslighting has a very specific definition — lying to someone in a way that causes them to question their own reasoning or grasp on reality.

For folks who are just finding out they never stood a chance because Google does indeed have a “small site” designation, they probably feel pretty manipulated.

I’d rather not have tens of thousands of small business owners wasting their time trying to figure me out how to work within Google’s system when it’s all a tissue of lies.

Has a lot of similarities to Knotwords (https://playknotwords.com/). I like both implementations. Well done!

At least they didn’t say it takes courage to brick a perfectly serviceable product.

That was last month.

I saw down below that you’re not familiar with Vampr, which is very similar to what your screenshots suggest.

Moments like this always make me sad. Even a cursory web search would have surfaced Vampr, along with several other find-a-bandmate sites.

Weeks or even months of work because Googling was too much trouble.

So what happens now?

Do you let sunk cost dictate your actions and force you to continue working on an undifferentiated and far less feature-rich product?

Or do you stop working on your app and just start using Vampr?

I have no strong point of view and am interested in why you think safety is okay and financial auditing is not. Are both not about serving the interests of the public?

“He said that tours are limited because the foundation has only a few volunteer docents who are knowledgeable about the home…”

Perhaps they could use some of the $35M in tax breaks to hire some docents?

I think like many people, the first couple of paragraphs inspired me to see what else was published on the site for more “context” about the author’s point of views.

At this point, writing a good-faith rebuttal to the article seems unnecessary.

It sounds like you’re working with a number of services right now, so take this with a grain of salt.

Joinrelentless.com does resume review and coaching and then gets people first interviews. Not cheap, but it’s nice to literally just have interviews put on your calendar by someone.

(Not a customer, just no the CEO)

One person is incompetence.

An entire staff is strategy.

Every time I am forced to endure shitty hold music for an extended period of time, my thought is, “let the CEO sit on hold for ten minutes and see how fast this gets changed.”

What this means is I still want to believe that crap customer experience is due to a disconnected CEO, when we all know it’s a feature, not a bug.

Brian Lumley write a series of horror novels back in the 80s and 90s that had such a world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necroscope_III:_The_Source Was written in 1989. Kind of cool.

About a year ago, I stopped consuming news cold turkey (save technology and movie news [the former work-necessary and the latter a personal vice]). I took the extra step of banning Twitter and Memeorandum at the router level, so that I couldn't revert easily.

I didn't read a single political news story in the ensuing six months. Some of the happiest months of my life. These days I will read the section headlines on Memeorandum if I'm out and about, every week or so. I have found that I no longer have any interest at all in the contents of the stories. Most seem so petty.

I don't honestly give a f*ck if someone on either side of the aisle is caught doing something immoral, because there has been zero consequences during my 50 years of life. The vast majority of power players (politicians, businesspeople and celebrities) get off scott free, so I've just opted out of caring.

So much happier as a result.

Please Google "Adverse Childhood Experiences" or just read this overview: https://www.joiningforcesforchildren.org/what-are-aces/

Childhood trauma like physical neglect, sexual abuse or living with a parent who suffered from mental illness does not "make us mentally stronger."

It's not about "worldview". As the parent article shows, the types of experiences create physiological changes in the brain. The changes are correlated later in life with everything from drug abuse to depression suicide attempts and cancer. A lot of this is driven by unhealthy behavior driven by the physiological changes, but some of it is directly linked in a physical sense.

I'm all for inspiring adults to learn from their hardships, but it's cruel to ever cast childhood trauma as a good thing.

My cup literally runneth over.

I'm launching a series of community-focused dinners for Colorado-based CEOs and VCs (https://www.ThunderviewCEODinners.com)

I'm launching a social photo-sharing game that I designed over a decade ago and then put in the icebox. Super excited to share when this comes out.

I'm launching a new coaching program for successful entrepreneurs on finding enduring fulfillment and happiness in their lives by identifying and pursuing their greatest values.

And I'm still coaching 15+ early-stage startup founders at any given time. Despite all the work, I've never been happier.

That opening story just broke my heart. As a parent of a child with a severe peanut and tree nut allergy, it has been completely drilled into me: If my child is exhibiting an allergic reaction, administer the EpiPen and call 911 for an ambulance immediately.

"You're product/service seems expensive."

"As compared to what?"

Sales 101.

Wondering how much of http://Crunchinator.com we're going to have to recode. The only people they have advance API access to were the paying customers.

Hopefully it's not too much work, but then, we don't have 25 people to throw on rearchitecting for a year.

Florida has a higher percentage of winning every round than Louisville, but Louisville has a higher overall chance of winning the tourney.

What am I missing?

The author could have just as easily written "Cancer, as currently defined, does not exist" or "Arthritis, as currently defined, does not exist".

In all of these cases, the the catch-all phrase is used to describe a handful of similar symptoms that stem from a wild variety of causes.

This is why we won't be curing cancer any time soon. We may cure a specific type of cancer, but we're going to have to cure each type of cancer in a specific a relevant way.

If the author wanted to say "ADHD is actually a catch-all term for a variety of root causes that would be better treated with specificity" I would be all over that. But, hey, page views.

I've long thought that this boils down to trust.

The strong reaction against IAP from many people (including me) comes from counter-aligned goals between the designer and the player in games with IAPs.

In a traditional game, I trust that the designer wants me to finish the game and if I'm stuck, I just need to play a little more or retrace my steps and look for the correct method of continuation.

With IAP-based games, when I'm stuck, I don't know if additional effort is going to be helpful or if I just need to pay the bribe to continue. As a result, I feel like I'm being coerced any time I have difficulty with the game.

The enjoyable tension of well-designed traditional game becomes a constant feeling of coercion to spend more money. It's just not fun.

My hunch is the "freemium is bad" argument is primarily an oversimplification of the underlying concern -- the erosion of trust and how that manifests during gameplay.

When I play a traditional "pay" game, I trust that the developer want me to finish the entire game. After all, the team slaved away creating all that content and the player should damn well appreciate their effort.

As a result, when I get stuck at some point in a game (Dead Space 2 being a recent example), I trust that there's a way forward and with a little more effort or practice, or perhaps if I retrace my steps, I'll become unstuck and move along the path toward completion.

Because the developer and I are working with a common goal in mind -- get Eric to the end of the game -- I am confident that at any point in the game I will be capable of completing the challenges set forth (no matter how stingy the Dead Space guys are with ammo).

With freemium games, that trust is obliterated. When I can't progress, I am forced to ask a fun-sucking question -- is the developer trying to extort money from me in order to continue? Am I unable to continue because I just haven't mastered some in-game skill or is this simply the point at which I'm supposed to hand over my tithe?

Candy Crush is an obvious (if extreme) example. When you can't complete a level after the 20th try, the player begins to feel that the developer is expressly barring their passage. And at that point, the game ceases to be fun, at least for the generations of gamers who saved the princess.

Then again, my kids (eight and six) just assume that buying gems is how one progresses in a game. It's not unlike when I was eight and pumping quarters into Gauntlet in order to reach the next level -- Blue Warrior's health dropped whether or not you were taking damage.

Everything old is new again.