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tarunm

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datanetstudio.com

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Not OP but if I may, these numbers alone also does not necessarily indicate that you can successfully weather a downturn in near future or is well on the path to future success. Your headcount doubled last year and so did your revenue, maybe you doubled your sales team and the model won't scale further (I don't know what is your industry/product is so just speculating). Your revenue per employee is ~$114K, if most of these employees are in tech, maybe there is already too much bloat that you may need to shed soon if the growth does not materialize. If half of your customers just came onboard last year, maybe you are being too quick to boast a 117% NRR. NPS, Glassdoor and best place to work can also be dismissed as easily manipulatable stats.

I am not trying to dismiss anything or being cynical but just trying to point out that a lot of things goes into determining if you are a "good" VC backed startup. In my opinion, a smaller growth in headcount (compared with revenue growth) would have been a better indicator of a healthy startup.

CPLEX, XPRESS and Gurobi are the gold standard for solving an MIP of a meaningful scale (relative performance will depend on the specific problem but you cannot go wrong with either of these three). Unfortunately there is a big gap between performance of open source v/s commercial solvers in OR space. Type of problems I need to solve are usually unsolvable on open source solvers (very large scale supply chain problems). For smaller problems, OR-Tools or GLPK or CBC do work fine - but once you go commercial, there is no need to switch back to an open source solver.

My typical setup is using Pyomo for model formulation (gives me flexibility to switch out solvers with ease). I bundle multiple licenses using GAMS, it is more cost effective than purchasing individual licenses from solver companies.

Why shouldn't google be able to paste ads for its products on certain searches?

Because their monopoly in search business is an illegal advantage for the other business they are promoting. (Not my words - taken from [0]). I guess it ends up being what one thinks of one business v/s others. For me, content search should be a different business from content creation.

App bundling is another area where I side with un-bundling, something Google have had issues as well[1]

I have no intention of trying to have a conversation regarding "regulating algorithms" and such, just that Google should compete fairly with other content creation and keep search business separate from others.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_1... [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/27/1040889789/google-eu-android-...

Agree that they are well implemented from user point of view, I use them all the time. What I do not like is that they do not have to compete with others, especially when it comes to search results. I didn't follow it in details but I believe they did get in trouble with Froogle in EU[0] for similar reasons. I guess in that case they were against big businesses who were able to fight it out but for snippets it's against hobbyist and small time one developer sites.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/MEMO_1...

Isn't this another blatant case of Google abusing its position of being the gate-keeper of internet and pushing its feature above the websites that exists with the same feature for years? Same as it has been doing for things like online calculators, weather sites, currency conversions and so on.

Worse is that they don't have to really play by the rules of SEO. Any other website with tuners or weather forecasts have to fill their content with keyword crap to get noticed even if they may not really add any value to end-user. But hey, Google can push it's nice little hobby feature to the top and bankrupt other legit websites. How is this legal?

edit: Grammar

(From the article) I found that having a physical paper show up at my door made me more likely to read it.

So true. I had the same experience with magazines. Growing up, I would have a magazine in my hand all the time. Somewhere in between, I moved on to digital versions, but it just hasn't been the same experience. I also feel I retain information much better given that a physical copy has fewer distractions compared to 10 open tabs and banners and snippets and what not while reading online. I haven't bought a physical magazine in quite some time, maybe it is time to try them again.

[dead] 5 years ago

And 11 mentions of "digital". Definitely high on buzzwords with no real substance

Notion that supply chains are "old technology" is frankly part of the problem. That combined with the author's point of supply chains being emergent and not designed has made companies invest less and less in understanding and reacting to supply chain issues. It works fine during periods of slow growth and decline as that ensures enough time for supply chains to reach new equilibriums but we pay the price in disruptive situations like the one we see now. Hopefully, it motivates companies to invest in understanding the impact of uncertainties on their supply chains.

Amazon spent capital on building an efficient supply chain based on technology which is a huge entry barrier for any competitor. They did not use VC on exclusively providing any discounts. Uber, on the other hand, is using VC almost entirely on discounts hoping that users will stick around. Their product is essentially an app which has been replicated in every major economy with considerable success.

If anything, I find this very clever. While there are many valid reasons that justify anger against Uber (workplace harassment and predatory pricing), I don't think this is one. Instead of outlawing Uber, cities and governments should take a step back and reflect on these laws which Uber has proven servers no one.

Well I did some clicking around and came to know that this falls under their First Click Free [0] option. The details sounds more unfair to me. Example -

'A user coming from a host matching [www.google.] or [news.google.] must be able to see a minimum of 3 articles per day.'

Isn't this a net neutrality violation? Because of their monopoly, they are able to force a work around to get access to content and a better UX for their visitors at the cost of other referrers. A more fair/neutral program could be a 'limited subscription' type access where the content site allows a limited number of articles to users (from any referrer), Google gets access to content for indexing and tags the content appropriately as 'limited access'.

[0] https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543