Congratulations on the launch! FYI there is a pretty well-known YC startup named Vanta that helps companies manage various security compliance certifications.
Obviously, there are often different services that share the same name, but given that Vanta isn't an actual word in the English language, I would think this might be confusing for people.
As a data point of one, I just assumed Vanta (the company) was doing a Show HN today and was confused at first glance.
For context, Coda's last valuation was $1.4B in July 2021 and Grammarly's was $13B in November 2021. Grammarly's revenue is likely taking a hit with the rise of LLMs and they were always at risk of being a feature by not owning the document editor itself. An all-in-one approach to compete with Notion (and Google Docs, Confluence, Sharepoint, etc) makes sense, but time will tell if this merger works.
I started a side project with my older brother called NanaGram.co that makes it easy to text message photos to a unique phone number, then once a month they get printed and shipped to your loved ones.
If you have kids, it makes a good holiday gift for the grandparents if you're stumped on what to get them.
I've since moved on from it, but my brother makes enough to work on NanaGram full-time now. It's also just been really cool to see the project grow over the years and bring happiness to thousands of grandparents all over the world.
According to Verisign, there’s over 1.5M domains registered on the .io TLD.
According to this Wikipedia entry, there were 800 domains registered on the .an TLD the year it was phased out.
Who knows what ICANN will do, but my guess is there will be a lot more pressure to keep the .io domain going even though the British Indian Ocean Territory is being ceded to Mauritius (.mu) at some point.
For context, Drew Houston's total compensation for the year in 2023 was $1.5M:
> According to our data, Dropbox, Inc. ... paid its CEO total annual compensation worth US$1.5m over the year to December 2023. That's a notable increase of 34% on last year
Even if Drew took minimum wage, that would save ~15 jobs assuming $100K all-in comp (which seems low to me for a tech salary). 500 employees is more like $50M/year, and probably more.
Of course, Drew Houston's net worth is ~$2B and he could technically loan Dropbox Inc money personally to save the jobs, my guess is a lot of his net worth is actually Dropbox stock that he would have to liquidate and would affect the stock price materially. He would also need to follow insider trading laws too and can't just up and sell vast amounts of stock on a whim. Most executives are on pre-approved schedules to sell any stock to avoid triggering insider trading.
The severance package Dropbox is offering is pretty good - 16 weeks of pay + an additional week for each year of tenure, impacted employees get their Q4 equity vest & prorated bonuses, everyone keeps company devices, an offer for extra time + help for people on visas, and job placement help for everyone.
Dropbox is a public company that is profitable, but not really growing through their flagship product. No growth is more or less bad on Wall Street. They also haven't really had a major hit since their initial file-sharing product and missed some shots they probably should have hit (mainly vs. Notion with Dropbox Paper, Mailbox acquisition, etc). With many systems moving away from "files" and to "cloud objects" like Figma, Notion, etc, their workhorse product might be going away over time too. They need the time and focus to find that next S-growth curve.
Layoffs suck and no one wants to do it, but sometimes it's needed to save the ship.
The videos on the site didn’t work on mobile for me. Found this YouTube video with some footage of the electric giraffe and an explanation from the maker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfG2Ur5TGHQ
Plugging the Pi Day Challenge, an online puzzle math quest all about pi created by my high school math teacher, Mr. Plummer (aka Plum). He’s been updating it with new puzzles for the past 15 years with the only goal of getting students excited about math.
It requires a login to save your progress which I know a lot of people dislike here… but it’s worth checking out: https://www.pidaychallenge.com/
Curious to see how Clearbit will be integrated into HubSpot and if the Clearbit API will remain open for others to use. Are there any other viable competitors to Clearbit for coverage and quality? We have a legacy plan for my startup at a very good price, so I've never checked out the other options.
I worked at HubSpot for a year before their IPO and a year after. They used this approach of basically spinning up multiple different teams in different orgs to solve more or less the same problem.
For example, before they figured out how to sell and onboard SMBs, there was at least three teams working on solving that problem while I was there, including mine.
Once there was a “winner”, that team would get more funding (aka budget) and the people on the other teams tended to be absorbed into the winning team or would be repurposed onto other projects.
This wasn’t a codified, explicit operating system, but basically is how they worked for awhile (but I’m unsure how it works now.) The gist was to hire smart people and let them figure it out.
It probably depends on the geographical scope of the uproar. Trillium and Treehouse shutting down suddenly would cause quite the kerfuffle for people living in the Boston area. Allagash from Maine would cause a national uproar in my opinion too.
If the grandparents enjoy getting physical mail and like hard copy photos to have around the house, then https://nanagram.co is a good option[1] You just text in your photos and they printed and shipped once a month. We use it for my mom to send baby photos and she loves it.
[1] Full disclosure: my older brother built this service, but I don’t have an affiliation other than being a proud brother and happy customer.
Anecdotally, most founders are extremely busy and much of their financial success is in finding product/market-fit to maximize equity value. Therefore, learning about maximizing interest and managing dozens of bank accounts to minimize insolvency risk didn’t seem like a good use of time. Parking cash in SVB, which had been around for 40 years (with some investors even requiring startups to bank with them), seemed like a safe, secure option. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20 here.
I wouldn't say there was no real benefit and only risk to being an "open startup". Sharing what you're doing and how it works is a marketing strategy, pure and simple. Up until recently, it was a low effort, high reward marketing channel to sell to other founders. Now with ruthless competition and the ease of cloning a service, it is becoming low value and even risky.
IIRC, the very first version of Notion actually was built to be a CMS, so they've come full circle now after gaining traction by pivoting to work documents.
Obviously, there are often different services that share the same name, but given that Vanta isn't an actual word in the English language, I would think this might be confusing for people.
As a data point of one, I just assumed Vanta (the company) was doing a Show HN today and was confused at first glance.