Hey folks! I built Vocal because I genuinely want to make remote work feel less remote and I don't believe any of the current solutions do a good job of that.
I thought using Discord at my company might help, but that my company wouldn't be able to use it since its for gamers. After doing some research, I found that I wasn't alone. A lot of have tried to use Discord at their companies, but they failed because it didn't have the customer support, branding, single sign-on, intuitive access control, video sharing, and so on.
I also saw that apps like Gathertown and Workadventure were fun and quite novel for one-off events, but they are not ideal for every-day use in a business environment.
Thus Vocal was born! Gimmick-free virtual offices and rooms for every-day business use. It brings back those long-lost water cooler conversations while still promoting an environment of productivity and collaboration with private offices and distinct room types.
Please check it out and give your honest feedback! While the app is in private beta (working out the kinks), you can download it directly at: https://www.getvocal.app/download
Yeah, its quite disturbing that YC declined to comment - especially knowing how many similar crypto companies they are funding. I don’t want to see YC get targeted and brought down by the Feds.
Sure, I'm expecting a statement more along the lines of "Here's how we attempted to do due diligence and failed (and thus failed in our responsibility to fund investors)" rather than accepting fiduciary responsibility for Stablecoin.
I think the due diligence at the point of acceptance into YC is fairly minimal. It might not even go beyond the application answers and the 10min interview... not sure though. I'd be curious to learn more about it.
*edit: Seems YC participated in the follow-on round after the batch ended, so I imagine some extra due diligence goes into that.
The point is that they are an investor and do not run the company. Would they have known about allocation strategy, how to evaluate that? Even if they did know, are they in a position to control or dictate anything within the company?
This applies to investors at any company. At some point you have decided to believe in the founders and executive team, rather than deal with daily operations and micromanaging your portfolio
Isn’t this one of cited reasons for a lack of diversity in VC funded founders — they invest in a founder as a person and their team, thus biased by personal relations, rather than the merits and details of the actual business plan?
Yes, VCs care more about the people behind the company than what the company does. Projects , products, and ideas evolve and the founders need to be adaptable. VCs don't always know the founders well, but they see a ton of founders and have learned to discern.
The personal network is often more used by founders, who provide introductions to investors. You have to be social to be a founder, which is really why networks are more noticeable therein.
there have been issues around this, insofar as how much the VC investors - who are part-owners, remember - are involved in the running of the company.
When Telegram did its failed ICO, a pile of the VCs who bought tokens behaved with sufficient involvement that the SEC deemed them underwriters, i.e. partially responsible for the offering.
So how much business help did Y Combinator offer this particular blatant Ponzi? Looking forward to YC and PG's comments on this.
* all the laws are to protect investors from issuers
* splash around money to incentivise securities fraud
* buy a pile of tokens
* if the SEC doesn't bust the issuer, the VC wins big
* if the SEC does bust the issuer, the VC gets their money back and doesn't lose
it also realises liquidity much quicker than the long and tedious process of backing a tech company that does things
So did YC buy the tokens, or buy equity in the company? If the latter, then they're part-owners and may claim to have been completely hands-off, but might need to show it.
Silatus makes it extremely easy to share your content by automatically creating high-quality, natural-sounding podcast episodes from your written blog posts and articles, without the need to manually approve or upload episodes. It also works with any blogging platform or website that supports RSS 2.0 (WordPress, Blogger, etc). You can test it out for free, but you’ll have to refresh the page every 60 seconds to keep testing it (our way of preventing abuse).
We decided to use podcasts instead of an embeddable audio player so that the app would be instantly compatible with any blogging platform that uses RSS. If you’d like to see an embeddable audio player or if you have any other feedback, please let me know! Enjoy :)
Knowing how to code and knowing how to build scalable architecture and infrastructure are two very different things. Its pretty well understood that if you know a few of the most common programming languages, which it seems like you do, then you can learn others. And theres also a massive wealth of developers around the world willing to work for (probably) less than you. Where you can shine as an experienced developer is in knowing how to avoid many of the problems that arise from building for scale and building complex systems.
Of course, you can read a lot about software architecture and building scalable systems, but the best way to improve is to actually work on those systems at whatever level you can. Get your foot in the door with people building systems that serve hundreds of thousands to millions of customers. If you’re having a hard time doing that, build something on your own purely for the sake of proving that you understand the challenges of building complex software systems and software at scale. That way, when you go into an interview, you can say “yeah, I integrated a sharded multi-cluster DB with worldwide CDN endpoints and full management control.” (This quote is mostly jargon, but hopefully you get the idea) As a dev, DON’T WORRY about if people actually use what you build. Worry about how it’ll help you communicate your skills when you talk to people and interview.
Hope this helps. P.S. I’m a PM with a background in CS and I work with a lot of devs at many levels in a large tech company.
I thought using Discord at my company might help, but that my company wouldn't be able to use it since its for gamers. After doing some research, I found that I wasn't alone. A lot of have tried to use Discord at their companies, but they failed because it didn't have the customer support, branding, single sign-on, intuitive access control, video sharing, and so on.
I also saw that apps like Gathertown and Workadventure were fun and quite novel for one-off events, but they are not ideal for every-day use in a business environment.
Thus Vocal was born! Gimmick-free virtual offices and rooms for every-day business use. It brings back those long-lost water cooler conversations while still promoting an environment of productivity and collaboration with private offices and distinct room types.
Please check it out and give your honest feedback! While the app is in private beta (working out the kinks), you can download it directly at: https://www.getvocal.app/download