cykho

Right on. It's the failure to build in the vacuum that is most upsetting to me. There is so much value in Twitter users' content that could be used in new and interesting ways. However, the company both fails to innovate on that front and prohibits its community from innovating. It's standing squarely in the way of progress :(

This is great advice - the socratic method is really key. It also helps to drill into the concrete details (aka facts) rather than staying at a higher subjective level.

I've also found it very helpful to write down the conclusion in a follow up email/slack. Writing helps people consider and rethink their commitments. It also helps serve as a record to self-correct in the future.

Big reason we have a broker is time savings - just have them handle it and get back to work. It took me under an hour to get set up with a broker. It took me longer than that to figure out what the Zenefits cost/benefit was.

The main driver of Microsoft's net income growth over the last few years has been all enterprise software (Windows Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint). Their CRM (Dynamics) is the #2 player in the market.

Acquiring Salesforce would enable Microsoft to dominate this sector (approach 50% market share potentially). Salesforce has done a great job of fostering an ecosystem of apps that rely on their data platform.

Microsoft can add value to the existing SalesForce product by replacing their cloud infrastructure. While pioneering this concept in the enterprise SalesForce's infrastructure is outdated and aging. Plugging the existing customer base and app ecosystem into Azure (or Microsoft's cloud at large) could be a huge win for both companies.

Net-net this makes a ton of sense in theory, but big mergers destroy value more often than not as they are extremely challenging to execute effectively (it's basically a multi-billion dollar corporate refactoring exercise).

Mountain View, CA

Contastic (getContastic.com) is an IDG-Accel/Lightspeed funded company building a recommendation engine that uses ML/NLP to automate sales (customers include Splunk, Epic Games, and Proterra).

Join us to pioneer the science of sales by analyzing millions of data points to figure out what makes a sale happen. As research engineer at Contastic you will be responsible for the design and implementation of the machine learning engine that powers our content recommendations. You will lead our efforts to decipher the data we have. This position reports directly to the CEO.

Required:

Experience writing production quality, performant code in at least one language Advanced Degree from top tier Engineering School Deep expertise in ML, NLP or AI

Nice to Have: Experience with email/CRM data sets Familiarity with PHP/Python Enterprise SaaS experience

Apply at https://angel.co/contastic/jobs/40242-research-engineer

An interesting outcome of the case discussion for this was that many king believed they needed to maintain control to be rich. This leads us to believe it's potentially a set of dependent variables rather than a choice between separate options.

My advice has always been if you're not willing to commit 3 years full time to coding don't do it. It just takes that long to be useful on a team. Instead, focus on whatever area you want to excel at and leave the engineering to the engineers.

I have no idea why they don't just move the control buttons to the bottom of the screen. The real estate is great - they just need to break the paradigm of sticking the most importance tap targets at the unreachable top of the screen.

1 - build an online portfolio of work (if you don't have one do personal/free projects to build it.

2 - go on elance/odesk to find some paying clients (pay is low, but easy to find). You can also use this to try different things and discover what kind of work you enjoy best. you can also call some technology consulting firms - they are always looking for talent.

3 - specialize in that area. tailor your website/blog to talk exclusively about that technology. between the inbound from your site and client base from consultant you'll easily be able to build an overwhelming referral stream.

http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Michael-Lewis/dp/0393244660 is a great high level overview on this whole issue (including brad katsuyama).

Noone should sell to everyone :)

The cashflow amazing. A recurring license with a large enterprise means thousands of per-seat fees rolling in on a consistent basis. And larger enterprises are less likely to churn since they are more stable businesses and take longer to change either way. This creates a solid revenue stream which can be the backbone of your company's revenue.

Great idea - I just looked this up - NASDAQ has a nice list in CSV format along with market cap: http://www.nasdaq.com/screening/company-list.aspx

I'd be wary to think they are converging. The enterprise sales cycle is getting shorter and more user driven (more folks can charge a per-user individual fee as opposed to site licenses). This makes the process more accessible than ever. Government on the other side is increasingly consolidating vendors under systems integrators creating an ever higher barrier to competition (http://iq.govwin.com/corp/downloads/Deltek-WashTechTopSI.pdf).

I wonder what the all up cost of getting someone an H1B visa is currently? Is this an annoying bureaucratic hurtle or a real barrier to talent entering the US?

My perception is that the cost is around $20k (lawyers/filing fees) + some uncertainty due to the lottery. Is that a barrier to a person that's worth paying $100k+?

A good lesson that all emails are potentially public :)

I went through this program's 2013 batch. Working directly with the smart folks at Lightspeed accelerated our learning process. Weekly meetings with the partners forced us to make the hard decisions quickly and got us to launch 10x faster. Also, all the alumni are amazing - one of the best founder networks in the valley.

This is a real wakeup call - raise bigger seed rounds to last until you're a breakout success.

I wonder if this means more Harvard students are seeking careers as devs or that Harvard students in other disciplines are looking to add programming to their repertoire?

These are awesome tips! I like silence the best for focus (less cognitive load the better). These have been a godsend: http://www.amazon.com/3M-Peltor-H10A-Optime-Earmuff/dp/B0000... Basically just your basic noise blocking headphones. For extra blockage insert earbuds under them. Sublime silence.

Your contribution at a big company amounts of a little under half the compensation equation (the rest is politics). If you want to work at a big company spent half your time playing the game. If you want your life to be about your work go to a startup.

Right on. Thanks for sharing!

One big learning from my time @msft was that the gender gap in STEM really starts in middle school. Everything else (YC included) is largely downstream. If you want to help get involved at the grade school level. For those who are interested here's one of the better resources they produced: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/focus/wome...

I think most great hackers (and hacks) are driven by curiosity. Things that have the highest expected value for returning money/attention are usually boring.

One other spin on the follow up comes in timing and content: Follow up after 2 days, 7 days, 2 weeks, 3 months, and annually. This increasing time frame rarely is found to be annoying and is an effective way to keep in front of them. Also try and send a new set of content after 2 contacts.

Mine is still down in Melo Park, CA

Cool sites - I like this idea of sharing concepts and getting feedbacks. One other larger one is producthunt.co. I'd be curious to see a full list if you happen to do some more competitive research!

Thanks for sharing - this is awesome. I've had an incredibly hard time finding good hosting service reviews.

The big difference for me is Facebook has a bad reputation for abusing privacy (ask forgiveness rather than permission) and their entire company is based around the dissemination of personal information. Amazon's drone fleet delivers at the behest of a user. To me that's the difference between the paparazzi and the postman.

Haha - I was excited too! They guy was super nice and even stopped so I could take a picture :)