iddav

Thanks for the feedback. "Scam" was an attempt for a short word for "significantly more expensive than average". But it can be inaccurate in some cases.

Background: Sometimes, finding the best price for an item on eBay is a surprisingly hard process: if you sort by price, you get a lot of junk. OddPrices attempts to simply this with an interface that shows all listings for items on a single price bar -- and evaluates how good of a deal it is compared to recently sold listings. Beta is out after 6 months in development. Feedback appreciated!

It's been my plan since high school to figure out a way to work for myself eventually, though I was very grateful for my job at Google. After the initial 2 years, my work at Google began feeling more routine (I chose to stay in the same team, and I was getting better at my job at the cost of learning fewer new things). I left after 4 years after deciding that I had learned enough and saved enough to move on to what I've viewed as the next stage.

Well, I'm an engineer who quit my cushy job at Google to go it alone. So, I suppose this makes me an idiot.

I think the big question the author fails to address is: Do these deluded engineers end up regretting their decisions in the long-term?

I think most people in the startup community understand that failure-- and the misery that comes with it-- comes with the territory, and the key is whether you can learn with each failure. And I would argue that there's no better to place to learn than an environment where your income depends directly on whether you're genuinely solving a problem for people (the people who "run the lottery" are your target customers, not the VCs, by the way). In my case, I've failed at over a dozen projects (some prior to my time at Google) while finding a few moderately successful ones along the way, and I'm continuing to fail, learn, and grow.

And I like to think that this better understanding of harsh realities of how the world actually works gained from doing a startup-- whether you succeed or fail, whether you end up at a small company or a large company-- is a return on your investment that continues to serve you for the rest of your career.

I've lost 2 merchant accounts in the past due to a high chargeback rate involved with selling web hosting online.

Most chargebacks are a result of orders from people with stolen credit cards, usually from international IPs. To mitigate this, I ended up using:

1. A service called MaxMind, which includes automated phone verification (e.g., ensuring the person owns a phone number in the a area code matching the credit card zip code).

2. Using payment providers like PayPal or 2CO since they have their own built-in fraud prevention systems.

Of course, this does not prevent chargebacks for non-fraudulent reasons (e.g., unsatisfied customers). For large orders, you may need to get the customer's signature on a credit card authorization form, to enable you to win the chargebacks if they occur.