i wish we lived in the same area and could have an OTR conversation about this. believe it or not, the new "strategy" now that ZO is all shut down is even less well-defined and more pie-in-the-sky than ZO ever was.
I'm working on IP cameras sending their video to Surveillance Station on my Synology NAS. Totally local recording, and was super easy to setup with some random IP cam I had laying around.
My plan is to run cable for PoE cameras soon. Will have 24/7 recording, but accessible only locally.
Firebase is probably a bit of an edge case on this one, because it was a paradigm-shifting developer product before dev products were cool.
If you were a top-tier developer, there was a >0% chance that you would be super excited about the product because you realized the pain point that it would solve for you if you were building a real-time product at another company. And that excitement or lack thereof was a useful litmus test for Firebase specifically.
I agree that "excited about our company" is not something you get up front if you are interviewing at a company that is building an on-demand AI marketplace for ML-optimized scooter rental office spaces.
The $15 "1st Generation AWS IoT Button" is out of stock, but the $20 "AWS IoT Enterprise Button" is still in stock. Is there a difference besides the label?
The AWS IoT Enterprise Button is for the AWS IoT 1-Click service ("Trigger AWS Lambda functions from simple devices"): https://aws.amazon.com/iot-1-click/
Notice how the Enterprise button listing (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075FPHHGG) says "This is not the AWS IoT Developer Button" with a link to the other button.
1) Double the lifetime clicks (2000 vs 1000)
2) More tightly integrated with the AWS IoT 1-Click service. (so arguably more restricted, but actually easier to manage and scale if you're an actual enterprise managing thousands of these in the field, rather than one developer building a toy app)
Yes, but at $19.99 it's pretty expensive. I don't know what the right price point for something like this but, given the fact they are easily lost, definitely < $5, more like $1.
If you wanted to make it for yourself. A general rule of thumb I've heard several times for makers is to retail at 4x the cost of goods sold - else your business is unsustainable. So for a 5$ retail price you'd have to be somewhere near $1.25 COGS. Going the otherway - 19.99 for a 5$ COGS is perfect.
That's zero margin for Amazon though and no budget for assembly. If the materials cost is $5 then $10 is the absolute lowest you could probably hope for. $15 is a more sustainable (profit generating) product.
Being tangentially involved in this project it was my understanding that the devices were financed in large part by the marketing departments of the brands that had buttons, which is why they were tied to brands.
"We lose a little money on every customer, but we make it up on volume." :-)
I think in Amazon's case it was just experimentation with a sunk cost. Based on the discussion above it looks like it's impossible to form a company to sell these to turn a profit, at least in the dash button form.
The original purpose of the “hackable” button was to give a fun piece of experimentation kit that worked with AWS and encouraged people to try it out. I set up my AWS account just to use one.
McKesson has not yet determined what changes it will make as a result of the findings, but has considered adopting a more open office plan to encourage more discussion between employees.
LOL, way to be super creepy AND learn exactly the wrong lesson from this.
Imagine telling your investors how much money you spent to decrease morale and increase turnover cargo-culting SV companies. This article reads like something out of a Dilbert strip.
I can't imagine why they're having problems with "higher turnover".
I feel like another unstated risk here is that if someone can get his plate number through the DMV registration, they could buy tracking on it from one of the large ALPR firms and deduce his home location.
I'm interested to know what you run on this server...plex? torrent client? file server? on-prem file backups (if so, which software you use)?
I have a small Intel NUC running windows that runs always-on and does some of these things just fine, but I'm always looking for some excuses to upgrade a gadget.
I would like to use this as a file server and a torrent client. Does anyone here have some idea about the SSD endurance or can explain with some numbers, how long it'd last for the specific SSDs Apple is using (or even generic SSDs as a comparison)? Let's assume I write 2TB of data every month on to a 512GB SSD or 256GB SSD.
I tend to use such machines for a decade or longer (for as long as it doesn't break down completely), and considering that right now using Linux on these (with access to these SSDs) is difficult, I fear I might be out of up-to-date options in the future.
"New Amazon Tier One employees receive a small number of restricted stock units (RSUs) within the first month of hire. These shares are set to vest after two years of continuous service. For every year of continuous service, an employee receives another small number of shares of restricted stock, always vesting two years of service later. For example, I received four shares on 8/27/14 set to vest on 8/31/16. I received four more shares on 4/2/15 set to vest on 7/1/17. I received three shares on 4/7/16 set to vest on 6/16/18."
Angel investors almost never provide the bulk of the capital for a startup. We provide initial money, advise, and introductions to help raise more. So, yes, I expect the bulk of the "heavy capital" to come from institutional investors in later rounds.
Also note that I invest in follow-on rounds, so my total investment in a startup might get much larger than $250k.
All of the above. Prove your team is credible and your idea is solid and the only thing holding you back is the money. Even if you don't have the capital to build the full-scale thing, you can still make a lot of progress on the cheap: conduct research, model your business, test components, do user testing, get LOIs from customers, line up your first few hires, and so on.
YC invested a small amount in a supersonic airplane company and a nuclear power company. Ostensibly, you can start proving that people want what you are building and developing technology before going to market.
They want to get in early, get a certain % of equity before the larger capital rounds are necessary to scale or build a technology to a useful scale - and not afraid of investing in that, though what equity they expect for that, is a missing part to the equation.
