robbfitzsimmons

Highly recommended! Watched it on Netflix a few years ago and teared up several times.

The scare quotes around "invest" in the parent imply (correctly, in my view) that buying anything with this kind of volatility / lack of intrinsic value is not an investment, rather a speculative bet.

Does anybody subscribe to this magazine (1843)? I subscribe to the parent magazine The Economist, and this sounds appealing, but $50 for 6 issues seems steep (and no online subscription).

If you're using AdBlocker, fair play, I don't blame you. But please consider chucking me a couple of quid: https://monzo.me/ewanvalentine

Am I missing something? It's a nice set of thoughts, but I can't imagine paying to have read somebody's personal blog, and would have been vaguely weirded-out at him having ads on it.

Moises Naim, who wrote this article, is a notable Venezuelan dissident (and was a finance minister before Hugo Chavez took over).

I'm just about to start his most recent book, "The End of Power," which is about how hard it is to establish and maintain political control as technology decentralizes. It's not going to be the kind of book Maduro (the Venezuelan president) is going to read, but seems pretty sure to be the playbook of how that regime will end.

https://www.amazon.com/The-End-Power-Boardrooms-Battlefields...

Plus daily $5 lunch specials, which basically sustained me through a startup and grad school...

I don't have any such anecdote, but I can't even think up a hypothetical, either. If said bootstrapped company was both "well-executed" and didn't fail because it "didn't have the money," what kind of reasons would you be thinking about?

Losing to a competitor would mean you're not failing because you didn't find a market need. So you would screw up managing it, or by not spending to market/hire/add capacity fast enough. The only other reasons I can think up seem idiosyncratic (maybe well-funded competitor got regulatory approval or a big partnership from a VC intro?).

Instead of going through contortions trying to break bad Slack habits and worrying about the API getting shut off, maybe it's worth checking out something made for the purpose.

In the original post from the AgileBits team quoted at the top, that team tried Basecamp, which to me seems to do a good job of separating thoughtful/long-form discussion from chat, along with the weekend-pause feature.

Small point, but the handoff was in early 2014, not 2012.

Came here to recommend Hemingway. Even if you keep these values in mind, with a linter it's much easier to do.

I haven't yet found a Chrome extension which does Hemingway-esque linting on all text input fields, like Gmail or (god forbid) comment sections. Somebody (maybe me) should make this.

Even taking your skepticism about Chinese investment at face value, having LP involvement is tremendously different from operational involvement or investment committee involvement.

Having been involved in LP reporting at a seed fund, I can say that it happens regularly but infrequently (quarterly, or at most monthly) and at a 30,000 foot level. I've really never seen LPs interact with portfolio companies at a seed stage, beyond chatting at a cocktail party after the annual meeting.

Besides, given the nature of the platform, if they're looking into trends and products, isn't that information publicly available (this is just adding money behind the top syndicate deals on AngelList)?

Ceres = goddess of the harvest (grain, bread) Bacchus = god of the vine (wine) Apollo = god of light (enlightenment / knowledge)

Everybody who reads HN should pay Ben Thompson $10/mo for his Daily Update (this is the once-a-week public version). The man's writing has unequivocally had a major impact on my ability to think about technology, and is the only email I read before coffee in the morning.

I actually can't say I really mind the "privacy-invading" here because financial systems are already about the most heavily resold data there is, with the people who are currently charging you the fees (your bank and credit card) making billions off it.

If somebody can take the same data, package it up more nicely, and make the economics work to eliminate fees, I actually don't think we're worse off?

Really like this. Even the cheapest robo-advisors like Betterment charge 0.1-0.3% on top of the fund fees, which sounds small but eats into gains over time.

However, I think the target audience is probably more likely individuals rather than financial advisors, unless you're going to be running it as a SaaS. I can't see the overlap of small advisory firms and those familiar with Vagrant.

Will give it a poke with a few hundred dollars in Vanguard ETFs.

The only place I regularly use it is at Whole Foods, where it actually works quite well and is a bit faster than a card. And given the glares one gets in the WF line, I would definitely be informed if it was inconveniencing anyone...

However, this looks to have been the result of concerted corporate effort and training (every clerk knows how it works, etc.). Can't see it catching on in a small business.

This is an awesome attempt at a big problem. My financial data seems one of the most monetizable aspects of my life and I'm particularly reticent to give it to Intuit et al., but never seem to have much of a choice.

I'm actually curious why broader community effort hasn't sprouted up around web scraping for banks, given how horrible API support has traditionally been. Plaid (plaid.com) purports to make this easy, but it's not very mature yet and will be a paid service.

Amazing how broadly applicable Little's Law is. (I suppose that's why it's a big-L law.)

We were just recently using it in business school to look at cycle times in assembly line output.

This is a really honest, refreshing post to read. So nice to read a "postmortem" that isn't just posturing.

I bet a lot of us hit this moment, over and over again: "We didn’t obsess over it and we didn’t love it. We loved the idea of it. That hurt."

When you're on the brink, remember why you're doing this at all; to build something that you think is really cool.

This is a huge factor. They started with Yodlee (basically a paid bank-scraper service with fees that might crush a small startup) and now Intuit has built something in-house.

I'd be interested to see what partnership companies like IGG, who builds the popular iBank for Mac, have pulled off to do this (http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibankforipad/direct_access.php).

I think actually the basic problem with Mint isn't those mentioned in the article (UI is meh, miscategorized transactions, data import customization).

It's actually as mentioned in Wesabe's postmortem (http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint/); for most people Mint doesn't actually get you to change your behavior. It just provides twentysomethings with some feeling that they're managing their finances, in return for getting pitched credit cards.

Harder and more worthwhile than UI or functionality fixes are changing twentysomethings' behavior, or doing something interesting for older people with more complicated financial situations. [Mint's useless for my parents, with multiple bank accounts, investments, retirement, education and health savings accounts, etc.]

One problem (and barrier to good competitors) are that aggregating finance data sucks. Mint started with Yodlee, which is nothing but a scraper for bank sites, and now runs on something Intuit built internally. It's hard to imagine many startups meaningfully tackling the problem.

The key consideration for me here is "they communicate well."

As someone who's just recently started to consider full-time hires beyond our founding team, it's ridiculous how important this is relative to how little it's talked about. The other traits - "avoiding crises", "doing their research" - often boil down to effectively working together with your teammates and finding information / reaching decisions quickly.

And I do think it's got something to do with educating programmers. Working with interns and contractors we've had at Harvard, MIT, etc., the best have been Olin College (http://olin.edu).

I'm not going to gush about it in this comment too much, but suffice it to say the best communicators about technical problems are usually the ones who spend the most time working in teams and presenting their work, and those are Oliners to a tee.

Love the art here. The giant crashed robot looks like an homage to "Iron Giant" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Giant), one of my favorite movies as a kid.

I can imagine this having great utility for many businesspeople, but I think anyone mildly privacy or security conscious probably already thinks LinkedIn trends to the spammy. Making them an intermediary to 100% of my email is nuts.

On a lighter note, one of the "shared connections" in the blog screencaps is actually Good Girl Gina, of Reddit meme fame. http://note.io/HfhtzE

+1 for Whitelines (though I've had a bit of crash trouble with their iOS app of late).

Frankly, I don't think I'd love to have notes leave my physical possession, if are important enough to pay for scanning in the first place.

Agreed, this is kind of DOA in my book.

The thing that none of the ambient-social apps (this, Highlight, etc.) get is that literally no amount of social data is going to make hangouts happen spontaneously.

Once you get the context right (networking events, dating) to motivate people, that's when the location-awareness and social data make a huge difference.

But when I'm at CVS buying toilet paper at 11pm, there's no amount of social data that could make me wanna hang out with a person, no matter how close we are.

This is awesome.

For two years, my roommate and I hosted drinks at our house every Wednesday night; the effort of continually remembering to add people to an email list + calling + texting was a drag. We were always trying to find ways to reduce friction for the event, and a similar setup would have been fun.

I continue to be confused about when a README is appropriate for documentation on Github, and when a wiki is preferred, as do my coworkers. (It's a minor bone of contention.)

If you have this many pieces that it's hard to keep straight without a tool like Gutenberg, isn't that modularization the whole idea of a wiki?

I think the key quote for me is about how effective Githubbers are as communicators. Which isn't at all common in our industry.

I think about it is as being highly networked. [...] you look at the strength of connections between people, the communication channels, and how information travels amongst them, and then you can draw a diagram.

What seems like a higher-than-average percentage of Githubbers are particularly effective communicators publicly, even outside the management team. (Zach Holman in particular comes to mind.)

Reminds me of my favorite Tumblr lately, wtfviz (http://wtfviz.net/).