gregcohn

Would really like Siri AI to have an MCP server

While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.

The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.

So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.

I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)

Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.

As someone who runs a company, this article resonated with me. This stuff happens in every department and has a lot to do with how the company is run day to day. If you think about the major deliverables of a department - and pick any department - “manager culture” says the head of that department produces the deliverable internally, getting feedback from stakeholders outside their team perhaps, but “owning” the decision. Thus the product roadmap is “owned” by the product team, and the person the VP PM or CPO reports to is a passive recipient of it even if they have input or feedback on it. But that cascades downward: in manager culture, the mobile roadmap is owned by the mobile PM, the internal tools roadmap is owned by the internal tools PM, and so on. They all buy into manager culture, where autonomy is viewed as a defining aspect of their impact and importance, and to take away that autonomy is to undermine them and risk losing them (“micromanaging, which is bad”).

This same thing happens with marketing. Budgets get set. Agencies get hired. Branding and creative campaigns get developed and show up on the doorstep of the CEO hundreds of thousands of dollars deep. In engineering. In customer support. In finance (we have to do this, because the forecast cycle requires it; we can’t do that, because we don’t have the budget).

In founder culture, the founder gets down and dirty in the roadmapping process. They will give direct feedback on how a customer issue is routinely handled, or a design choice, or a creative campaign. Or a technical standard - Gates and Jobs both famously did this incisively and decisively. I’m no huge fan of Zuck, but it’s clear how much involvement he has with product and design for example. He famously bought Instagram because he wanted to, and understood its importance to facebook’s future, not because a strategy team identified it and a corp dev team engaged and investment banker to analyze and negotiate it. Mark Pincus was like this at Zynga too- ask anyone who was there.

Why is this important? Because people all the way down the organization don’t usually have the same nuanced understanding of the product, the market, the company strategy, the positioning, as you do. They will make decisions that optimize their subsystem but are sub optimal to the system. I had a customer support manager recently ask me if he could move a set of things that was causing a lot of load on his team to our law firm. The law firm of course charges 10-30xx per hour what a customer support agent makes. Even if you do a good job evangelizing the company mission and hiring non-mercenaries and whatnot, again and again and again you will see people wanting to “professionalize” their teams in ways that add more process, slow things down, and attenuate impact.

So If you let your company get into manager mode, you really lose control of the boat. And if you try to operate in founder mode after hiring a bunch of managers, they pissed because they don’t want to be micromanaged. But if they were crushing it, you wouldn’t need to.

I think the best founders are able to navigate this dynamic effectively, whether that’s by being able to effectively make a jump to a more delegated model, or building a team that can leverage their strengths without snuffing their hands-on involvement, or taking back the wheel at the right time.

A good counter example I can think of is Yahoo, when Jerry Yang took back over after Terry Semel retired. Manager culture had deeply set in there, and was not reversible despite Jerry’s good efforts and some great executives who were aligned to it. (And yes, the big, Steve Jobs inspired, “fix the company retreat” they did was literally “VP’s and up”.). As someone who worked there, was not a VP, but likely would have been in a “top contributing employees” cull by different measures, it was extremely painful to experience.

I would note that it takes a lot of energy to sustain this mode and be a leader through it, or to make changes in this direction to course correct.

Anyone who has kids has to answer the phone from strangers routinely. School staff and camp counselors are routinely using their own cell phones these days to communicate with parents.

Doing it the opposite way - tying all outbound school/camp calls to a single callerID - risks blending the important with the automated reminders. LAUSD abuses their automated calling system to the extent that my wife and I have both screened calls from the front office involving an injured child, more than once.

The real issue here is getting to the root cause, which is carriers and their intermediary aggregators having incentives to carry large volumes of spam.

In a number of markets, operators have increased the cost of SMS messages to deter spam, only to find a massive increase in traffic pumping fraud that mysteriously appears in the system of trusted intermediaries. Everyone's making a goddamn fortune off it, and no one actually cares to fix it.

I am partial to Notion and have been experimenting with it for one meeting. The Slack integration works well.

Do you have any top-5 templates you can describe or share?

From the team that made Burner, an iOS app that screens out all calls, allowing only a user-designated whitelist to ring through.

I wrote about this a while back. https://medium.com/@gregcohn/burners-dont-hack-uber-people-d...

TL;DR Phone numbers are not unique ID keys for people. But it seems like many companies view it as an easy, cheap 2nd factor (generally, "something you have"), to be combined with a strong password ("something you know").

The problem of course being that SIM-bound number can be hacked or stolen, and non-SIM-bound numbers are not actually "something you have". If a Google Voice number is controlled by the same login as a gmail account, there goes your 2nd factor.

A lot of people do use Burner for this per the link above. (I'm a founder).

See you at Tacos Villa Corona!

Burner + Ad Hoc Labs | Mobile, back end, and dev ops engineers | Los Angeles | Full-time | ONSITE

Burner is innovating at the intersection of software and telecom by offering smart virtual numbers that help users maintain privacy, organize their communications, and manage their identities online. We have a thought leadership position on user privacy and control and are at the forefront of what phone numbers are capable of when treated like smart software rather than dumb directory endpoints.

We are also a founder-led team generating millions of dollars in revenue and "control our destiny" from a VC point of view, while growing well. We have recently hired a fantastic new CTO and are building up our engineering and product teams to further innovate and drive the value and utility of Burner to our users, while also exploring other opportunities. We are hiring a DevOps lead (kubernetes, docker, terraform), an Android Developer (Java/Kotlin), an iOS Engineer (Swift), and a Platform Engineer (Scala) to join our team. We will also review strong candidates from other disciplines warmly.

We've been based in Atwater Village, Los Angeles since before it started blowing up and have a great team, culture, and office vibe.

https://www.burnerapp.com/careers

jobs@adhoclabs.co

Burner | Los Angeles, CA | Dev-ops Engineer | Full-time

Burner (Ad Hoc Labs, Inc.) Burner is empowering people to take control over their primary channel of communication – the phone number.

As DevOps Engineer, you will be a key member of a team building the next generation of mobile privacy tools, working closely with the platform team to upgrade and maintain existing infrastructure while helping to design and deploy the next generation of services to power the Burner mobile apps.

Details & apply: https://www.burnerapp.com/careers/devops-engineer

My pleasure and definitely agree some of the things I suggested go well beyond MVP. It is the blessing and the curse of getting product feedback that the second you do something interesting, people want a million more features ;-).

Good luck with it!

This is quite interesting! (Former book editor here.) I will totally use this to discover and buy books.

I might suggest your "buzzfeed for books" comparison doesn't do it justice. Perhaps "Pinterest for books" or "Reddit for books"?

As feedback, a few thoughts off the cuff: - I'm hesitant to auth Twitter, because you ask for permission to post but don't do the thing where you promise never to post on my behalf without advance warning. - I think the "shelves" model is interesting. I'm definitely interested in what David Bowie found interesting. Maybe not so much Art Garfunkel (though IIRC he is an obsessive reader so who knows) - It would be interesting if there was some cut where, for a given book on a given shelf, you could see other popular/relevant shelves it was on. Sort of the way Twitter surfaces tweets in your timeline that were liked by a friend. - Maybe a view of just books, not shelves. - I want to see what others had to say about these books, not just whose shelves they're on. Maybe that comes later, when you have more activity? - Looks like you can add a book to your reading list, "heart" it, or "heart" a whole shelf. This is a slightly confusing information architecture, vs. something like on Airbnb which has a clear architecture of saving properties you like to a list. Might want to refine that a bit.

I thought the most interesting but unexplained phrase in the piece was "contrary to paperwork filed with the Nevada DMV".

As in, "Uber also claims that, contrary to paperwork filed with the Nevada DMV, it has never deployed a custom LiDAR system in any of its cars or trucks and will not be ready to do so by the time the case is slated to go to trial in October."

(Edit for formatting.)

What fresh hell is this?

Did you know the wheels have morse code embedded in their tread? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=3497

A succinct overview, from our docs. We're excited to see what comes of this and would love to hear feedback.

--- The Burner API enables programmatic access to core telephony functions like sending and receiving messages and media, as well as the “business logic” layer we’ve spent years building.

Key Burner features include per-line configuration and settings, contact management, blocking and muting, content filtering, text auto-responses, and more.

Full API access to Burner means developers can now build integrations that enhance and extend Burner’s messaging and application capabilities in ways that we believe represent the future of smart phone numbers.

Developers can also take advantage of this API to embed Burner’s basic and enhanced calling and messaging experiences into their apps via OAuth. Your users get all the benefits and features of our top-rated voice and messaging client (and the support and business functions that stand behind it), while you get all the benefits of controlling the phone number at the network level. In effect, you can treat the Burner app itself as a service, rather than building your own “last mile” on top of a bare-bones telephony API.

We also offer incoming and outgoing webhooks that can be used in conjunction with API access or enabled per Burner Line via our Developer Connection.

Fascinating. As member I've always thought it would be a lot of temptation to leave these cars around with the keys in plain sight, and assumed there was a cut-off capability. It seems like it would be pretty inconvenient for members if it happened that often while in use.

It did occur to me that he might have been threatened by a lawsuit (or more than one). I suspect he would have been direct about that, if in a position to, but a large corporation is in a position to put tremendous pressure on a small/indie business, even if they don't have the legal high ground.

IIRC, there was a lot of drama between tv networks and Tivo, once upon a time, over the ad-skipping issue, which netted out in a pretty lame detente (Tivo pulling the 30-second-skip button out of standard UI).

At the end of the day, the issues are similar (30-second-skip == going the bathroom during the commercial break, but someone productizing it was not). Over a longer period of time, we all started time-shifting tv content and commercials took a big hit anyway (due to Netflix and to Tivo clones and licensees).

If anyone thinks a developer like Marco is somehow complicit in the death of traditional, ad-supported media, I hope they're having similar introspection over using spotify instead of buying records.

The world doesn't owe a living to people who can steal content, write clickbait headlines, and convert paragraphs into multi-page galleries the most effectively. They will have to adapt.

And some will die.

And ad-blockers are forever a thing on mobile now.

thanks -- will do!

literature major here, just chiming in to say it can be done! (I'm a founder/CEO now.) Follow the things that challenge you and that you can learn from, that intersect with things you have some strength in. Maybe marketing in the context of developer platforms?

yeah - the whole point here is that many people aren't sophisticated enough about how this stuff works to accurately predict future dilution (or to be aware of how various kinds of preferences work).

you could do something crude like extrapolating a data point such as size of last financing or TTD financing to estimate future dilution.

anchoring the exit valuation at $1B means any valuation that's already greater than that at time of grant (if user chooses that option) produces a zero outcome for equity value.

You should consider making outcome valuation a flexible number, or capping the current valuation at < $1B.

This also lacks a concept of future funding rounds that inevitably produce dilution.

exactly. at some point in the future, deaths are going to be regularly recorded in consumer biometrics, for example.

Not a technically rich article, but interesting conceptually to think about the kinds of data that are going to be routinely captured, uploaded, processed, and aggregated.

Hey Kareem, long time!

This is an important discussion, and my comments shouldn't be interpreted to mean I don't think joining an early-stage company is risky. It is! But it is easy to be too conservative with the OP's logic, and not everyone is ready to be a founder, so I think it's a great spot for people who have some risk tolerance but still want to build learnings and networks, and it has potential to turn out well financially too. And, you get a lot more opportunity to see data before you join, and to leave early, if it's not going anywhere.

To answer your question, I have turned down my share startup deals that would have had no stock upside, and accepted a few too. But I've also turned down a number of opportunities that clearly had breakout potential, and in aggregate, if measuring strictly by wealth creation potential, I believe I sub-optimized by not taking more of the startup gigs that were offered to me. (There were other personal reasons for these decisions too, which offset those outcomes.)

YMMV!

It's very easy to justify turning down early-stage jobs with that mentality -- and I've turned down a number that would have made me retirement wealthy based on precisely that logic.

But now that I'm a founder I'd take issue with the "marginally less risk" comment. Quitting a six-figure job, forgoing income for a year-plus, taking the risks of never getting liftoff or financing, taking another year or more at way-below-market angel-funded salary... this is not "marginally more risk" than someone who comes in with a salary from day one at a company that is in motion. The early employee has much less opportunity cost (and -- worth noting -- can also pull out much more easily if things seem to be moving sideways).

Furthermore the theory of "implied pot odds" applies. You're not just getting the returns on the deal, you're getting all of the career and relationship equity of having been a key player on a huge success.

I would argue that early-stage roles, if you can tolerate the opportunity cost over the near term, are one of the better deals going, and likely (though only arguably) better than being an under-ready founder with a high likelihood of failure.

Encrypted content over the cellular protocol seems more plausible than a secure protocol, given that a) it's a feature that phones can roam across networks and b) the way these "exploits" work is for LE to emulate an endpoint in a system whose principles actively collaborate with LE (to some degree under force of law).

Try just telling him "no" and see what happens. That sounds flippant but it will tell you exactly where you stand -- your value in this situation, in part because you didn't negotiate terms prior to building his prototype -- is exactly a function of your opportunity cost and his alternate options.

EDIT to add: Your framing and many of the other answers are mostly in terms of you and what you're "worth". I think you really have to reframe this in terms of what you are worth to the "company" aka the founder.

After much work, a major design overhaul, the addition of MMS picture messaging across all US carriers, and a number of productivity and iOS 8 features designed to make it easier to integrate Burner into your workflow.

Would be happy to hear any feedback or issue reports.

EDIT: Chrome extension here: http://brnr.me/a5jo

excellent point.