This is a pretty terrible analogy.

It's not a retailer; it's a marketplace. Marketplaces don't get commoditized. Is there another Ebay out there?

Retailers can purchase the inventory at will, then earn the demand. Marketplaces have to earn both sides.

Airbnb was not the first here; Homeaway has been away for a long time, owns all the web properties, and has far better SEO. Airbnb is kicking their ass.

Sure their dominance won't last forever, but no company's does.

I disagree with this comment but understand the spirit behind it. This incident just shows the immaturity of the reddit community. People get let go all the time. At the risk of sounding like a monster, it's just business. Nobody knows the reasoning behind it, yet a bunch of people happen to have 'power' in this instance revolt, despite how childish it is.

I'm also not a professional programmer, but I used to do a lot of data analytics for a large company which required lots of SQL.

I often used excel to track my code and keep it organized. Part of this is that most of my work was done in excel; the SQL queries were just to get the data workable. But, so many things would change and it was easy to use the concatenate features of excel to change variable names, table names, and stuff like that.

I am a professional programmer (although not a DBA), and have used excel to generate SQL scripts. You can often just put all the variable in cells and then use string concatenate to add in the parts of a SQL script that repeat. It works well and lets others easily maintain/modify it. These are mostly for throwaway scripts or one-off analysis tasks.

While this makes total sense, there are in fact roles where working more makes you progress faster. I feel that this is less the case in programming roles. But, in many business roles, working more allows you to learn more about the business, which in turn allows you to contribute more. As long as you are in a meritocratic environment (as I was in), where results are rewarded with advancement/higher pay.

As a carpenter and programmer, I think this stretches it a quite bit, but still funny.

It's clear that most people commenting on this do not understand finance. If you look at Tesla's financial statements it's clear that they should have a junk rating.

While the term "junk" sounds bad, it is simply a rating of riskiness. From any objective standpoing, Tesla is a risky company. They have had negative net income over the past 3 years. You need income to have positive cashflow (excluding financings of course) and you need cashflow to pay off debt.

Do I think Tesla is going to change the world? Yes. Do I think they will survive? Probably. But from an objective, financial standpoint, they are a pretty damn risky company. Stop putting down the ratings agency for doing their job. The financial statements really do tell the whole story.

Even though I'm not a father I very much enjoyed this piece.

Sure, there are a lot of companies that initially sounded like bad ideas. But there are ideas that aren't just bad; they aren't thought through.

I hear dozens of people tell me about an idea and it's apparent that there's no chance they will succeed with this. A lot of time they're trying to enter a market they know nothing about (as this article described), for example finance students trying to do a clean-tech startup. Other times, it's the market opportunity. These ideas that suck so badly are just people who haven't been around startups to realize how to think about them. They're the kind of people who I wonder if they've ever read The Lean Startup, PG's blog, or any of the commonly-accepted startup wisdom.

Agree with this article 100%. The reason I discarded programming (and went into Mechanical Engineering)sophomore year of college was because I was frustrated with the syntax issues with C++. Years later, once I learned Python, I started experimenting with other languages and learned to deal with the syntax. Syntax isn't a big deal for people who are used to it, but for people who are deciding whether to be interested in programming or not, syntax can but a huge turn-off.

Interesting, especially the part of making it mobile-only. Seems odd to me but I'm sure they have a reason behind it.

Also, part of the reason why Costco and Sams are so expensive is the fact that they have no signs, which forces people to search for things and come across things they need. Also is this startup planning on charging a membership fee?