waxman

A practical application of this perspective, and one that has a lot of virtues is:

When evaluating a crazy new idea (particularly something like a product or business), don't bother asking "will this work?" because no one truly knows, but rather ask: "if this does work, then what are the implications?"

Pg has quite a track record here by being an early investor in textbook crazy new ideas like Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. "Will this replace a chunk of the hotel market? Unclear, but if it does, it will be a huge and valuable business."

For folks talking about Mighty, its through this lens that pg is thinking about it. "Will it work? Is it better than alternatives? Who knows... But if the vision does pan out, I think it's more obvious to see how this could be a big and important business."

I'm a big fan of both Ben Thompson and Tim Wu. One of Wu's specific critiques is my biggest disagreement I have with Thompson, and is a train of thought that seems to be dogma in Silicon Valley Twitter.

Wal-Mart putting their own brand of toilet paper on more prominent end cap shelves is fundamentally different than Amazon promoting their own Amazon Basics toilet paper on a search results page on Amazon.com. Amazon has a much greater ability to drive conversion to its own products than a brick-and-mortar retailer (e.g. limited screen space, UI, information hierarchy, better data, etc.)

Thompson's argument that "it's all the same," "private labeling has been going on forever," is flimsy and intellectually lazy.

Once we agree on this basic set of facts the more interesting question becomes: is this dynamic bad for consumers long-term?

The crux of this round of tech anti-trust scrutiny is time horizon. Many of these practices are neutral or beneficial to consumers in the short-term, but that's always how monopolies operate. Undercutting prices to put a competitor out of business benefit consumers immediately, but hurt consumers after the competitor goes out of business and the monopolist can raise prices. Amazon selling Amazon Basics products at a loss or near-loss is good for customers now, but if it puts too many other online retailers out of business, eventually they'll raise prices and hurt consumers.

I worked on a video chat startup in 2006 and a concept that still stands out is "floor exchange," which is when one person stops talking and another person starts talking during a conversation.

Floor Exchange usually happens seamlessly in most in-person conversations, but it can be a challenge over video chat, even in 2020.

In any video chat it's helpful to keep your points short and pause for longer than you normally would at the end of each one; if you're doing it right, the pauses will feel uncomfortably long, especially at first. This allows extra time for floor exchange.

I'm excited to see how this remote batch goes!

Garry and the Initialized crew are simply the best!

You can really judge investors by how helpful they are during adversity. Through ups and downs, but especially the downs, Garry and Initialized have been the absolute best!

If you're a founder and you have an opportunity to team up with them, do it without hesitation!

There are interesting challenges with data collection (and I don't think the survey paper discussed in the OP really solves this problem), but to be clear, somewhere between 10-30% of Americans average fewer than 6 hours of sleep per night, which increases your risk of catching colds by 450%.

So getting less sleep than you need is definitely harmful, the questions become: a) how much do we really need, b) how much are people actually getting, and the jury still seems to be out on both of these.

A recently published controlled study found that in two groups who were deliberately exposed to the cold virus then forced to sleep less than 6 hours a night or more than 8 hours, the group that slept less than 6 hours caught colds at a 4.5X greater rate, which was independent of previous immune system strength, age, socio-economic, and every other variable they tracked.

The experimental design seems to be pretty solid, and once these findings are replicated, this is pretty strong evidence that "we're not getting enough sleep."

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/short-sleepers-may-...

The idea that a startup's end game should be to "build a monopoly" is one of the most profound insights in Thiel's excellent book, Zero to One.

This move just deepens YC's monopoly in its domain, as sama would say, "in the Peter Thiel sense."

pg has described email as a to-do list of tasks assigned by other people.

The social dimension is my reason for pursuing inbox zero. Especially as a founder, it's important a) not to be a bottle neck and b) to respect others by responding promptly.

Sorry about that. Please email me at michael [at] joingrouper.com.

We use several techniques to filter out sketchy accounts, and your sparse Facebook information may have triggered our suspicions.

We need to use Facebook for, at the very least, making sure you don't know the other group.

Also, in terms of the allegations of vaporware, just search Instagram for the hashtag #groupergram. There are over 1,000 photos from recent Groupers. We've also collected our favorites on our landing page http://joingrouper.com and here: http://joingrouper.com/groupergrams

Try Grouper (https://www.joingrouper.com). [Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder].

The "browse-and-message" paradigm is fundamentally broken, not to mention a little dehumanizing (you're kind of shopping for people, which, let's face it, is pretty weird).

Our take is that the biggest problems with online dating are both the online part and the dating part --- it's hard to gauge chemistry online and it's cumbersome (and for women, potentially dangerous) to arrange a meeting. Meanwhile, labeling it as dating increases the pressure and the awkwardness for everyone.

Grouper Social Club sets up drinks between 2 groups of friends: 3 guys and 3 girls (or 3 guys, etc.).

There are no profiles or messages on our site. We match the groups together ourselves using Facebook info (which overcomes a lot of biases), then take care of all the coordination. Members pre-pay for their drink and the experience (the only fee), confirm a time, then we give them the place to meet.

We don't like labels, and don't think of Groupers as dates. To some they're similar, but the expectations are importantly different. Worst case: you're out with your friends and experience a funny story together, the average case is a super fun night out where there are some sparks between at least a pair of you, and the best case is, well, sky's the limit. Also, there's safety (and less awkwardness and more variety) in numbers.

We're live in 13 major cities in the US and Canada and growing quickly. 93% of members who go on a Grouper say they want to go on another one, and about half already have.

Our mission isn't to fix online dating, it's to end loneliness. Specifically, we want to help people get out from behind the blue glow of their computer screens and actually connect with people.

Social networks and online dating sites can be more isolating than social. But they don't have to be.

Shoot me an email at Michael [at] joingrouper.com if you have any questions.

This applies to different types of design/designers.

If you're looking for graphic design, then find a designer whose graphic design you love. If you're looking for a UI design, then find a UI designer whose UI you love.

Congrats guys!

Thanks for responding, Dalton. I really appreciate it.

Responses to the responses below :)

"can't argue with that :) meant Valley v. New York more as ideas than places, but you should at least come visit for inspiration

I actually agree with that :) I like the Paul Graham line that many huge startups start off as "toys"

seriously best of luck with http://app.net , I don't want to come off as a dick

I just find the idea of crusading against ad-supported models with an awesome team inspiring, but not necessarily the api idea"

Source tweets:

https://twitter.com/wxmn/status/224958061226360832

https://twitter.com/wxmn/status/224958718230544387

https://twitter.com/wxmn/status/224958289140658176

https://twitter.com/wxmn/status/224958976733888512

Congrats! Keep crushing it guys.

I just unsubscribed you. Sorry for the hassle.

If anyone else is having problems, we send all of our e-mails from addresses that you can respond to. The one-click unsubscribe links seem to be working fine, but if they're not, you can just respond to the e-mail and we'll take care of it.

Frankly, the first time it happened we didn't believe it either. But you can't make this stuff up :-)

Fixed! Good call.

Sorry, @weff.

Right now we require Facebook, because we heavily rely on the graph to match groups while requiring minimal work from our members. For instance, we want to make sure the two groups don't already know each other, and we haven't figured out a good way to replicate this functionality without Facebook (e.g. "tell us all the people you know!")

If you have any ideas, though, we'd love to hear them.

Thanks! Really well put.

Thanks, Abbas!

We're actually soon going to roll out a big, new feature that will take this notion to the next level. We're really excited about it. Stay tuned...

Ha thanks!

We hand-rolled it with jQuery and a hook image from iStockPhoto (what can we say, we couldn't avoid the the easy fish pun), but if people are interested we could release it as a jQuery plug-in.

It's extremely rare (see above), but when it does happen we do everything we can to make it up to the other group (free drinks, free Groupers, profuse apologies, etc.) and lay down the law on the other group (including removing them from the community).

We call these "no-shows" and, fortunately our no-show rate is less than 0.2%. In other words, both groups show up more than 99.8% of the time.

This will likely be the topic of a future blog post...

Yep, it's definitely not their real a number. We built a simple Twilio app.

Thanks :)

I certainly appreciate your hesitation, but we currently don't have any plans to offer other forms of authentication, simply because it would slow down the onboarding experience by at least an order of magnitude.

We want to get people meeting each other offline as quickly as possible (not filling our laborious questionnaires) and Facebook really helps to lower that friction.

Unsurprisingly, that's a relatively common feature request. Although that one isn't on the roadmap :)

That will be a feature we'll add in the future, but for now 3 guys + 3 girls keeps things simple.

It's essential that startup teams have great chemistry.

If you don't appreciate their sense of humor (or vice versa), it's probably not a good fit. That's fine.

It's better to establish these things sooner versus later in the interview process, so you're not wasting each other's time.

To this end, I think it's productive when startups post job listings like this that genuinely reflect their culture and personality. It can serve as the first of several mutual filters to weed out potential candidates who wouldn't work well with the team.

Comments definitely can be the best part of a site or the worst. We're trying to figure out how to scale better comments.