I always feels it's disingenuous to say you don't take equity if you ask for warrants or other % of the upside - it's essentially a proxy for equity. When you factor in a 3-5X cap, PLUS warrants - this doesn't seem like a better deal than something like Lighter Capital which has a smaller cap and zero warrants.
Not necessarily, equity and loans both have conditions around them. Sometimes loans are more punitive than equity. Taking common stock has almost zero downside for instance, it's when you get in to preferred equity and the rights that come along with it that you can get in trouble.
"In most cases, we’ll agree on a long-term residual stake for Earnest if you ever sell the company or raise more financing. We want to be on your team for the long-term, but don’t want to provide any pressure to “exit.”"
This seems to imply that they get a % of an exit or future financing even once the cap has been reached. That is functionally warrants right?
Once Return Cap is fully repaid the founder can run the business profitably forever and not pay us anything more. We do typically prefer an option for a % only if the business is sold but can do a deal (with a higher Return Cap) that excludes this easily.
I've seen that, but doesn't it take SMS/iMessages with it? IOW, I won't be notified of messages no matter who sends it? Regardless, it's just phone calls I want to block, I don't get enough spam SMS to care about who is sending it.
I guess I'm going to have to fiddle around with when the wife gets home and gather some empirical evidence.
> I've seen that, but doesn't it take SMS/iMessages with it?
Indeed it does, which makes it a non-solution for me. I apparently have the same desire you do - an option for voice calls to go direct to voicemail unless they are in my favorites list, without having to use the more general Do Not Disturb mode.
This is only partially true on iOS. It doesn't take into account when you're using the phone, then it just lets everything through. Which is SUPPERRRRR annoying.
The pricing page is available at https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/on-demand/ , but it looks like it's not yet updated with the per-request rates. The blog post mentions rates in us-east-1: "in the US East (N. Virginia) region, you are charged $1.25 per million write requests units and $0.25 per million read request units, plus the usual data storage costs."
Provisioned:
$0.00065 per WCU. One WCU is 1 write per second for an hour = 3600 writes. So 277 WCU is 1 million writes in an hour. Cost is $0.18 per million write requests. (If you reserve this for a year it's $0.08 per million write requests.)
We generally run our tables with autoscaling set to 70% of capacity, so at $0.18 per million write requests our effective cost is $0.25 per million write requests. A good deal cheaper than on demand.
We have a few tables where we run closer to 30% of target capacity because of hot shards. There our effective cost is $0.60 per million write requests, which is still cheaper than on demand (assuming on demand doesn't have the hot shard problem).
I'm having trouble understanding when this would be beneficial.
This is actually meant for companies like ours. We have a very spiky workload (need massive throughput needs and then nothing happens for rest of the day). The current auto-scaling doesn't work since it takes time to scale up and you are limited to only few of those changes per time period. We ended up setting the throughput high to avoid that. Also people in company set up these high throughput on dynamodb and we end up paying thousands of dollars more before this is discovered. I know we can write lambda's to automate the detection and all of that but that is too much work. This feature is ideal and will drive our costs down a lot.
I'm considering using this for our staging tables since 90% of the time, we'd want to scale to 0 instead of 1. Doesn't do much for cost savings, but it does make it easier to manage.
One use case where it would be beneficial is for tables that have batch-style patterns, where you (at least in my experience) need to provision a good enough baseline before autoscaling kicks in.
In some cases I've seen, autoscaling can manage going from ~500 to 10k WCU without heavy throttling (as the burst capacity can handle the five~ten minutes before autoscaling kicks in), but not with a smaller baseline. On tables with hot shards, the baseline usually has to be higher.
This would be beneficial for companies who have not yet figured out the math like you have. Also for companies who have 5-6X spikes in a non predictable fashion. Also, even for predictable spikes, there is a non-trivial lag for autoscaling.
Probably also useful for multi-tenant apps like web analytics. One cannot possibly predict the workload.
See also about:telemetry to see if anything enabled. If enabled, they are sending a bunch of information with unique id. Even if disabled, the telemetry is still always being gathered, just not sent.
about:addons is an iframe that includes the addons.mozilla.org website - which happens to use GA with a special contract. This page now respects the Do-Not-Track setting.
The fact that someone in the organisation actually thought "on let's approach Google and ask for this special agreement" shows a naïvety that really shouldn't exist in a company I'm supposedly trusting to protect my privacy.
I really hope this kind of non-sense starts changing in Mozilla soon. This post is promising, but—as the gp points out—still not without glaring irony/hypocrisy.
What's naive about it when they _got Google to agree under contract_? Let's turn that around instead: I really hope this kind of sensible demand becomes wider spread, with more people going to Google saying "we only want to use your tools if the data is anonymised and you do this under a contractual obligation that we can sue you over if you ever violate, as a partner agreement rather than a service/customer relation".
Plenty of huge sites out there could quite easily demand the same thing without affecting ABC's bottom line while making the lives of others better in incremental steps.
"Mozilla went through a year long legal discussion with GA before we would ever implement it on our websites. GA had to provide how and what they stored and we would only sign a contract with them if they allowed Mozilla to opt-out of Google using the data for mining and 3rd parties.
We now have two check boxes in our GA premium account that allows us to opt-out of additional usage of our data. Because Mozilla pushed Google so hard, those two check boxes are available to every other GA user in the world regardless if they have a premium account like we do. GA also doesn't track IPs or store PII within the tool."
--
Seriously, those bastards.
Only having internal controls and debate, sustained legal engagement, and ultimately DNT-obedience.
"GA had to provide how and what they stored and we would only sign a contract with them if they allowed Mozilla to opt-out of Google using the data for mining and 3rd parties."
(emphasis mine) am I the only one who finds the usage of the word provide odd? Literally it means GA had to list what and how (insinuating they blindly trust GA to do only what it says it does). Not-literally but the flow of the phrase makes it seem like they want to convey "GA had to prove how and what ..." but without actually making that claim. In the case Mozilla does have proof why don't they share the anonymization framework with proofs? In case they don't we are supposed to be OK with their feigned naivety?
Google is a company that have a track-record of breaking the law to contravene user-privacy. They are also Mozilla's primary competitor (albeit also a large revenue source). Please tell me how, as a company selling oneself on user-privacy, approaching such a company to negotiate a contract that ensures you can continue sending them your users' data is not naïve? Calling it naïve is kind, as the alternative is malice.
No matter what way you cut it, Mozilla is sending your data to Google's servers, and they're deciding what to do with that data. An opt-out contract doesn't change any of that.
> I really hope this kind of sensible demand becomes wider spread, with more people going to Google saying "we only want to use your tools if...
To turn that around, you're going to Google saying "your market dominance makes your tools are so indispensable to our business, that we would rather go through an expensive year long legal discussion with you to negotiate better terms that consider alternative competing solutions"
Hey, don't tell me, tell Mozilla if you know of any established alternatives. Bearing in mind this is part of a multi-year funding agreement between two (not even close to competitor) companies, where the "offer our search" is the price for receiving literally hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. If Google was really Mozilla's competitor, we wouldn't even be talking about this: you don't give your competitor money to keep them afloat. Not in America.
And incredibly, Mozilla talked Google down from their normally "and we get everything your users do" conditions to only "and you make us a trivially changed default search engine, and we are under contractual obligation to anonymise the data we get through our GA channel. And offer everyone in the world the option to have that same anonymisation turned on. For free". That alone is worth one-time changing a search engine after installation. After all, you get this product for free, and you're even given every possible way for you to customize it should you not like any of the default settings, from default search engine to default skin to default webgl hardware binding settings.
So if you still think none of that was worth doing, and just seeing google.com find you search results, but clicking three times to change that is too much work, then... I don't know man. I don't think browsers are for you.
Not really, unless a fine 0.002% of their revenue counts.
> and change their ways?
On that specific issue, after being investigated for it, it seems so. On any other handling of personal data, one can only make assumptions based on their ethical record.
It's to assume that in a company as large as Google it's impossible to know what happens with the data and where its stored and where it gets commingled and when maybe even devs are granted access for "debugging". If you give the data away, it's gone, no control. Facebooks issues taught as that.
I don't work for Mozilla but presumably they will be at a disadvantage in identifying and thus prioritizing features that their customers want compared to competing browsers. Less features -> less users -> less revenue from google for paying to be the default search engine which then completes the reinforcement cycle as they will have less money to spend on features.
Now they probably don't NEED it, but with every user they lose to chrome, they get less and less money until the only market for them would potentially be the privacy focused ones (although I here chromes got really good privacy features nowadays) which are such a small population that they wouldn't even have enough customers to justify the revenue to even match competing browser features. Thus, you would end up with a lackluster browser that cannot match competing browsers and its only niche are privacy people.
We have been using this at Adzerk since an early beta and it's been just what we needed. We used to pay 2% to another cloud pricing company and we were able to cancel that since we started using CloudForecast.io, saving us thousands of dollars a month. If you find yourself not using all the fancy features of the bigger tools, save yourself some money and use this great tool instead.
I second the need for "simpler" solutions like this. At Perfect Audience (where I worked with the CloudForecast team!) we spent a lot on AWS and used vendors to help monitor the spend. Because these vendors were venture backed, they needed to charge a lot of money. To justify charging that much money they needed to build a lot of features...when all we really wanted was a good email each day to alert us if something was awry.
There is some work going on to remove Javascript, but it is slow going. Most publishers won't trade off revenue for performance and security so there is no incentive for the buyers to change their ways.
Giving publishers a choice would be a start. A checkbox 'Allow JavaScript' for AdSense publishers and a way to run revenue experiments about JS on/off.
That does raise the question is Google big/ubiquitous enough to force that on publishers? If Google unilaterally decided no more JS in ads., would the publishers grumble about it but adapt, or would they look to other ad networks.
https://www.amazon.com/Let-Go-Extraordinary-Entrepreneur-Phi...