tbrooks

Transparent in retrospect is not, in fact, transparent.

I'm shocked no one has mentioned Close.com

I've been using it for close to ten years and can't imagine using another CRM.

I believe they were an early YC company as well.

Yes.

What does Twenty do that Close doesn’t or can’t do?

(I’m a huge Close fan.)

I've long wondered why there are no college courses on sales.

Almost every company has a sales department and there are tons of careers in sales, yet there is no formal path to learning in higher ed.

Does RDS require a lot of maintenance and management?

No one on our team has DevOps or DBA experience -- we feel good about Heroku PG (even as inflated prices).

“Letting this narrative persist”

As if it’s in their purview to control. Ask the poor PR folks at CFA (chicken QSR)

I wonder if the author’s primary gripe is with

1. VCs funding a so-called “servant economy” or… 2. The fact that there are these businesses that perpetuate some form of servanthood (to use the author’s parlance)

If the gig marketplaces were bootstrapped, is there still an inherent problem?

Mike Perham from Sidekiq (OSS Ruby background worker) has office hours every Friday for an hour. I've gone before and he was really helpful.

https://sidekiq.org/support.html

I've thought about this, but I wonder what the UX is like.

You always show success? What sort of confirmation does the user get? If the card is declined, how do you notify them later? Would that notification confuse them?

So many things to think about.

You would have the same sort of downtime as Stripe today.

But the tokenization wasn't failing for us in today's Stripe downtime -- just the API requests.

This is where solutions like Spreedly and TokenX make a lot of sense. Once the payment method is stored in their vault, you can try (and retry!) payments on multiple gateways.

There also does not appear to be a front-facing camera on the display.

A lot of businesses don't have the luxury of positive cashflows that software businesses do.

There are a lot of factors that would contribute to running a business without a month's cash on hand. But I wouldn't say that the business owner is _seriously_ incompetent.

https://www.interviewcake.com

I met Parker at MicroConf a couple years ago and was really impressed with Interview Cake.

I can't speak firsthand but it might be exactly what you're looking for...

You've brought this up before. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12013088

Different strokes for different folks.

I hope to work at the same company for the rest of my life, raise my kids, vacation regularly with my wife, then die. I would be completely content with a 'boring' life.

Which part is terrifying?

Working at the same company for a long duration? Or dying soon after retiring?

FE International is known to broker a lot of SaaS company sales. I haven't sold/bought a business with them, but I have friends that have.

It's not a marketplace per se, but it might be what you're looking for.

[1] https://feinternational.com

CRM: Close.io

Email: Gmail / Amazon SES

Automation: DripEmails.com (I'm the founder)

Why host Jekyll on AWS Lightsail and not S3?

It's simpler, faster, and cheaper.

Plus you can use Cloudfront and use AWS Certificate Manager for SSL.

I feel the same way about Elixir here's why:

- docs

- testing

- Slack chan, IRC, mailing list

- package manager (Hex)

- build tool (Mix)

- web framework (plug & Phoenix)

- db framework (ecto)

- books from major publishers (manning, pragprog, etc.)

- ElixirConf

- ancillary teaching (ElixirSips, LearnElixir, Elixir Fountain, etc.)

- helpful blogposts and stack overflow answers

All these things sum up to lower barriers of entry when trying a new language. Elixir has it in spades. It's really easy to pick up and learn the syntax and predicates of the language (BEAM, OTP, etc.)

Even though Crystal is closer to Ruby in syntax and Ruby can be valid Crystal -- Elixir still feels easier, because there is less work to be done with learning everything else.

When I worked at a bureau, we had a running joke... When a meeting planner asked, "How much is so-and-so speaker?" We'd reply, "What's your budget?" Coincidentally, that was how much the speaker was. Regardless of how much we knew the "rack rate" of that speaker was.

During the 2008 election, Rudy Giuliani was running as a Republican nominee. When his financial disclosures came out, he surprised everyone with how much he made on the speaking circuit. News orgs filed FOIA requests to see what universities and public institutions paid him to speak.

For some events, he'd speak in the same city to different groups. The price each group paid was wildly different (+/- 50k). The meeting planners hit the roof.

Speakers bureaus do not view meeting planners as their clients, the speakers are.

sure. my email is my username at google's mail service.

No, none of the sites you mentioned solve the problem I posed.

Bigspeak, Keppler, Eagles Talent, and Celebrity are bureaus and function in a traditional way. Espeakers and SpeakerMatch are essentially speaker directories -- they make money from speaker's paying them a monthly fee or in a lead gen style.

Orate.me is new to me, I haven't seen it before. In a cursory look at their site, it looks like their speaker list is just NSA members.

Also the calendaring problem is easy to solve...

There's enough public data to develop a sentiment algorithm and solve the popularity problem.

I used to work in the keynote speaking industry as an agent.

This industry is horribly inefficient and intentionally so. It's mostly east-coast based - NY/DC but functions similarly to the LA entertainment industry.

The main problem is this:

You are a meeting planner (not your job title, you are actually a marketing person or executive assistant) and your boss just tasked you with find a speaker for your next company meeting.

What do you do? You can either:

1) Find a speaker yourself by searching Google and sifting through the mess of results

2) Call a speaker's bureau and get raked over the coals on price

3) ???

Ideally, there would be a marketplace for speakers. Where you would be able to search for talent that fit your criteria (available these dates, for this price, talks about these things, is well-regarded, etc.) and book them online.

Nothing like this exists.

I don't really understand why someone would not just stay with $200M without hassles, instead of hiding $400M.

Pride. It's not about the money, it's about "winning".

Kudos to Mike. I'm glad to see Sidekiq Pro/Enterprise are this successful.

My favorite things about Sidekiq (and how Mike runs it) are:

1) The documentation and wiki pages of Sidekiq. [0]

2) The weekly happy hour chats. [1]

The docs and getting started guides are some of best I've seen in OSS -- everything is well-documented and thought through. There's a lot of good things to emulate here.

In addition to his years of conferences talks, blogging, and helpfulness through over mediums... Mike has a weekly happy hour on Fridays to answer questions. I've done it a couple times and he's been extremely helpful.

[0] https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/wiki

[1] http://sidekiq.org/support

What about the Austin office?

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on Crystal...

It seems like it takes the hits of Ruby and marries them with the LLVM, to make a really awesome, performant language without sacrificing developer happiness. (which is also a tagline of Elixir)

Not asking you to start a flamewar, just genuinely curious about your thoughts on Crystal and if you've played with it.