There's a pretty big difference between a diner in a small town and a global media/technology company. Both could be unprofitable, but only one has large potential upside in terms of both profit and business exit.
And that would matter to a VC. But a bank isn't looking for a big exit... just to get their loan back with some interest payments. Which is why they consider not only the business itself, but the credit history of owners, and their assets.
Do you have any data to back up your claim that New York is "substantially more sustainable than the rest of the US"? I'd be genuinely curious to look at that data
From the article:
"New York, with a population of 19.6 million people, had the lowest per capita CO2 emissions – 8 mt per capita. A large portion of the population is located in the New York City metropolitan area where mass transit is readily available and most residences are multi-family units that provide efficiencies of scale in terms of energy for heating and cooling."
Remember when Mayer banned remote work at Yahoo? She still defends that choice even though she has clearly failed to prove her thesis that you need to sit next to someone collaborate successfully and deliver improved business results
I've always suspected that people took that decision too much at face value. Yahoo needed to make staff cuts, and too many layoffs are bad for the share price. Convincing all the remote employees to quit lets you claim "there's a plan!" while quietly thinning the ranks. The catch is that it doesn't work if you state your real reasons.
That would be about the worst form of leadership possible.
By relying on attrition, you can pretty much guarantee that the people with the best offers waiting on the outside are going to leave, and that's pretty highly correlated with the people that you actually want to keep.
If layoffs are required, there is no other way than to take the bull by the horns and make hard decisions about who has to go and who has to stay. Sometimes that involves making decisions about what programs are going to go/stay, which consequently leads to letting good people go when you shut down some of those programs.
I'd also guess that shareholders have learned the lesson many years ago, which is why active layoffs often increase share price. Layoffs tend to increase near-term profitiability; whether long-term profitability is increased depends on whether you get the layoffs & refocusing done right.
The problem is many of the remote employees were the truly valuable ones. Talented engineers get spooked pretty quickly and a flexible work schedule is a very good reason to stick it out at a struggling large company. The more of those reasons you take away the more you'll find yourself with less desirable engineers.
Definitely - I don't think this was a good decision.
The only reason it might have looked good enough to take is that axing remote at a stroke gets pretty much everyone, good and bad. I suppose a few young/single/unemployable people might move to the office, but my memory was that Yahoo lost most everyone who was remote.
That's marginally better than the usual "make the workplace intolerable" option, where you lose exclusively the good. Of course, it's still much less good than actual dismissals, where you (hopefully) keep the good engineers in particular.
At my company, we only approve remote employees who are proven to be dependable and self-directed. usually senior hires who are willing to take paycut because they want to live where their spouse can work or care for family/kids.
Not just engineers. sales and ops folks who are close to clients/vendor offices are also prime for remote work.
I currently use Mandrill on about 6 projects, a few of them use templates, so I've got the added complexity of dealing with that, which sucks
But, I'm not going to give Mailchimp my business ever again after this stunt. I'm going to bite the bullet and port the templates over to Sendgrid.
As it is, Mandrill basically wants us to create new Mailchimp accounts, then manually copy and paste our templates (as if that's an appropriate solution to ask a paying customer to do). If I'm going to do that, I'm just going to leave and take my business elsewhere.
It will take longer, but I'm optimistic it won't be that bad. I'm sure there are blog posts on template migration from Mandrill to Sendgrid. If not, I'll write one when I do it
In an increasingly digital world, how long will physical proximity be an advantage?
The notion that a region could somehow have its own brand of patriotism centered around startup success merely due to density is somewhat difficult to rationalize. You can't deny SV's success relative to other technology hubs, but I'm wondering how far in the future physical proximity will continue to carry such a steep advantage
My first impression of min is that it looks nice. Really, for it's goals, it's pretty tight.
As a branding thing, I'd change that URL. I get that it's short but minfwk.com doesn't really look like "Min Framework" to me. It just looks like a bunch of letters. A domain like mincss.com, getmin.com, minframework.com or something more legible would be better.
> My first impression of min is that it looks nice. Really, for it's goals, it's pretty tight.
Thanks! You have no idea how good that feels.
> As a branding thing, I'd change that URL.
I have had minframework.com for a while and still do, but it seems too long (Right now it redirects to minfwk.com) but I just got mincss.com and I prefer it quite a bit. I'll update Github accordingly. Thanks for the suggestion!
Why build a native iOS app? What capabilities of the phone are you utilizing?
I ask because this was my experience: I just tried to download the app on my iPhone 4s and I couldn't download it because my iOS version is too old. My Nexus 5, obviously, won't be able to download it either because it's an Android device.
Unless you're doing something majorly different in native than you are in the web version, I don't understand the iOS lock-in and the need to have the most recent iOS version. I mean, I do get it from a developers point of view...it's less devices to test...but it comes at the cost of a lot of people not being able to use it.
The first version of the app admittedly looks very similar to the web experience. We wanted to get something out sooner, rather than later and the most requested feature since Product Hunt launched, has been an iOS app. Our most dedicated fans visit the site multiple times per day so we wanted to make it more accessible.
Although our mobile web version isn't terrible, the native app is faster and easier to use. More importantly, it sets us up to do some interesting things later on, such as interactive push notifications.
I think the reasoning would also be fairly similar to the reason that the big players are unbundling their apps.
The most valuable real estate is the homescreen of your phone. A website bookmark isn't likely to get that placement. A website bookmark that you can download from the App Store on the other hand...
I think it's easy, but not quite obvious to the non-technical user. Then they have the issue that once they've tapped on the icon on the homescreen, they are thrown into Safari. And doing the multi-tasking gesture shows them Safari, not the website directly as a first class app, so it's not obvious how to get back. If they tap again and the URL is not identical to what they are currently viewing, they will get a new tab. So there's good reasons to ship an app, even it is just a webview.
I can't speak for ProductHunt, but I think one reason people release iOS apps that are basically just WebViews, is because it's the only way to make the company "findable" in the iOS app store. Users expect to find stuff in the app store, and if you have a website but no app, they won't find you. Just how Apple wants it ;)
I am on iOS 6. I've stopped upgrading (intentionally) because every iOS upgrade significantly downgrades the performance of the device. My iPad is a few versions old for the same reason
These driving while high statistics are pretty error prone. There is no marijuana breathalyzer. A blood test shows traces of THC in your body from up to 30 days ago. So if you get in an accident and get blood tested and it comes back positive, were you high at that moment? Or a week ago? Or a month ago?
I'm sure the technology will improve. In fact, a "marijuana breathalyzer" (using that term loosly because you would need something that can test for edibles too), is probably a pretty interesting product to bring to market
Lived in Denver 5 years. Never driven to work, a pro sports game or a bar. Trains and busses have never been empty any of the times I've ridden them...which is daily
