deepinsand

If you're in NYC, we'll be hosting folks at the Betaworks offices for the 6/14-6/15 hackathon: https://lu.ma/z3z9ipke

Here's my experience:

- When you hire, you implicitly put people in a level which dictates what you're willing to pay them.

- People will always feel underpaid, and demand more $$. Without a system, you give them out arbitrarily.

- You now have enough people to add structure to the process. Do you base people's levels on their current salary? On their skill?

- What happens when people notice the discrepancy in pay or skill among a level? Especially if it's skewed by race, gender, etc?

I think you should have as many levels as pay-bands in your startup, which might be 6.

I believe startups should implement levels once you hire 2 engineers. It's hard to retrofit a system, especially if you're trying to be thoughtful about any pay imbalances.

I've spent a good amount of time on oil wells, and this was always obvious. Methane passively leaks from the ground of most wells, and is usually related to the quality of the cement reinforcements. There is no real incentive for oil companies to use higher quality materials.

Bitcoin is an amazing wedge to install distributed solar and storage throughout the nation. Right now, utilities and governments make it hard to monetize these assets, and bitcoin provide an easy alternative.

This builds the supply chain and labor force that are needed to perform a full clean energy transition. I don't have a strong opinion on cryptocurrency, but I have a strong opinion on energy supply chains.

Plug: I'm building https://cryptoclean.energy/ with this exact thesis. Check it out to get a renewable energy system for your mining rig.

This idea has been tried a few times. There's a fairly liquid market for the resale of oil and gas wells already. There is also advanced software packages for analyzing the data. If the angle is exposing retail investors to these assets, it'll go as well as $USO.

Founded rigup.com to try address this issue. Improving the quality of the cement casing is a huge factor, along with hiring competent workers and scheduling inspections.

It all comes down to creating financial incentives. IIRC, Obama's proposed fracking regulation (that most presumed Hilary would run with) called for regular visits of sites. Sadly it never passed.

Once Trump undid the only thing Obama got through, federal land methane restrictions, companies had no incentive to worry anymore. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/climate/trump-methane-rul...

Air is a better insulator

I believe it was going to start manufacturing its own panels (IRIC in NY State)

Most VCs will mandate founder equity to vest over 4 years. They must be actively employed for it to vest, so since he's stepping down and resigning from the board, I guess he'll lose what he hasn't vested.

I think Yelp is missing proof of identity and proof of patronage. It was created before social media took off, and before you could reliably know if someone had been somewhere.

I don't know if you need both, but proof of patronage alone might not be enough to trust a review (See Amazon verified purchases).

But shouldn't that have been priced into expectations or previous outlooks?

Twitter, LinkedIn, GrubHub, and Yelp all had decent quarters, and yet they all reported tepid outlooks. When they're in such disparate industries, how did they reach this consensus? Shouldn't this be reflected in the broader economy somehow?

The article assumes that car batteries will feed into the grid. Tesla seems to think that won't be the case, car batteries need to be secured against harsh outdoor conditions and have tougher charge cycle limits.

I've heard that one of the major hurdles to smaller scale deployments is security (easier to secure a larger facility than many small ones).

And still no 2 factor authorization ...

My interpretation was that the marketers are very savvy at measuring the efficacy of advertising, but they're benchmarking it against an unknown LTV.

As you mention, Snapchat has no way of measuring their own LTV. If they were to do any Facebook advertising, they'd just be shooting in the dark.

Can't a counterparty anticipate your orders and make a risk-free return?

Sorry, I should have said "pseudo-anonymous". At least in Secret, I can see how many degrees of separation I am to someone via our phone address book. I've since edited the original post.

It's anonymous enough that you don't feel the consequences of making a FB status update that no one comments on, but with enough identity to not be creepy.

I've never used WUT, but was intrigued by the anecdote at the end: "Sun’s out; in Washington square park. Who’s around?”

I've seen tons of apps that try to solve the "I want to hang out" problem. They all fail because cool people don't use those apps. Psuedo-anonymity can potentially solve this.

Some tried to do anonymous matching, but those had cold-start-network-effect problems. Psuedo-anonymous social networks might be able to back into a solution by attracting early adopters with their "gossip network" use case.

This reminds me of how Facebook backed into essentially being a status, photos, and events platform when it started life as a networked address book.

I would imagine that these types of startups don't work with YC's traditional valuation and round sizes. I hope they start changing the terms, especially as they now have enough data to find a better "break even" number.

For instance, I'm tackling energy economics, and doing business development alone in this industry dwarfs YC's round.

I think a lot of it is cultural. If you look at any portal or popular site in Asia, it's crammed with information and call-outs.

OTOH, US sites and apps have been moving in the opposite direction. Facebook itself acknowledged this by moving to an "unbundled" app development strategy.

Thinking about this more, it's definitely not a breakthrough to use a consensus algorithm to maintain a set of transactions over a distributed system (such as a P2P network). This has been done many, many times.

The only difference is that Bitcoin literally pays the nodes to act nicely.

Good point. I think we're actually on the same page, but with different thoughts on how to classify the "breakthrough".

I consider the technological breakthrough to be hash cash. It couldn't have been possible in a P2P network without the economic incentives reaped from Bitcoin mining.

The analogies to Uber and AirBnB are actually pretty strong here. The tech that brought them to bear was the internet/mobile, but the payment/reputation structure is what made the P2P network possible.

Note that I didn't assign any political views to my comment, I merely discuss the technicalities of the protocol.

The protocol is the same algorithm that has existed for years. Bitcoin adds an economic incentive on top of it, hence my designation as an "economic innovation".

I similarly hate Bitcoin's "technological breakthrough" status. It's an economic innovation, much in the same way Uber and AirBnB aren't "technological breakthroughs".

This has incorrectly led VCs to invest in the "Bitcoin as a protocol" concept. I wrote about it in my recent blog post: http://deepinsand.com/post/70415437372/vcs-are-wrong-about-b...

Great sources, in the middle of the YouTube video now. Though I've always had this question about "Bitcoin as a protocol":

Isn't the viability of the distributed ledger predicated on the value of Bitcoin? Workers verify transactions because they get paid in something that they value. If the value of Bitcoin drops (say: government regulation), then the incentive to mine/verify goes away?

Assuming that happens and the miners go away, wouldn't the ledger be open to malicious attack?

Perhaps, but I don't think the US has worries about wealth flight. I assume the countries that dominate this "economy" are Argentina, Cyprus, etc.

I assume you'll see other countries' follow China's lead. There's no reason for a government not to.

I fear this might be dire to the Bitcoin economy. Skirting wealth flight laws WAS Bitcoin's killer feature. All of the other Bitcoin use cases I know of are incremental in nature (ie, 2.5% savings on e-commerce transactions).

The open question is if enough of a hype-market was built to keep the other use cases alive. In the case of e-commerce, I assume a rational merchant only accepted Bitcoin because of 1) viral marketing channel 2) speculative hoarding.

The speculation MIGHT work out if the underlying Bitcoin economy was powered by the transaction volume and value of international wealth movement. Running forward it'll be from e-commerce and store of wealth, and I'm skeptical if that'll be enough.

I assume Homejoy has to hire contractors given their low prices and rapid expansion.

Alternative services like MyClean actually employ the cleaners.