It sounds like you made a choice, and like the examples he cites in the article, you had significant upside. And, kicking everyone else out meant that you were aware of the tradeoffs, at least conceptually. Think a lot of us have chose tradeoffs like that in our lives. The thing that's tacky here is that the CEO assumes his employees need to behave like a founder.
Does anyone remember that awful Schwarzenegger movie, the Sixth Day? It seems like the cars could work like the ones from the movie at the current stage. Basically they take over for the long, boring part of the ride and then hand control over for the trickier local bits. That way, when I make the long trip to my parents' house or my in laws, for example, I can hand over control for the parts where I might get tired, distracted by my son, etc. That capability would be a huge win for me.
That's a great interim step but ultimately people still have to learn to drive. There may even be an increase in risk as you become less skilled at the things you don't do very often (when the car hands you control, the cognitive load could be overwhelming).
It'll be great when we can do away with the need for learning how to drive at all.
I think someone hits on this in a different thread, but there are forms of incorporating these sorts of utilities that avoid most of the difficulty of maintenance, etc. For example, in the recent multi-week power outage a few years ago here in CT, the best response came from the municipally owned power company serving the Norwich area [1]. It's not impossible to do this.
Also, there are better ways to look at how to fund these. For example, having municipalities own the wiring only, and let ISPs pay to have access to the homes (similar to how telecom or power systems work now, e.g. different charge for distribution). I would love more choices of providers, honestly, and with fiber, there are better options for managing traffic at the neighborhood and local level.
It's not really mentioned in this article but EPB owns the fiber and EPB Fiber Optics which delivers the broadband service pays a fee to them to use the infrastructure. What would be interesting is if EPB opened the infrastructure up for other providers to use and compete for customers.
Love the hacks that turn into something useful. I know it may have been a 'trick' or whatever, but this is an example that proves that "scratch your own itch" to build a great product. He could've used BetaList for his own startup, so he built it.
That it was built quickly, using Tumblr, and then evolved is just being fast on your feet and doing good work.
We changed the pricing page last night (and added a note about it being something actively being thought about). However, it's not $30/u/mon but $3. That puts us in between services like Hipchat and idonethis. I'm compiling a more thorough spreadsheet of competitors in the space and how they break down. Lots of different price points in this space.
