Looks interesting, well done for launching and good luck.
One question - not as a potential customer but as just another founder - how are you offering 24 hour a day support? Do you have a remote team that just naturally covers enough time zones or have you specially hired people or a service for this? It looks really impressive for a new product to launch with 24 hour support! I’d love to do this with my services but not a big enough team yet...
I was quite interested by this article. Raising $60 million so fast for such a margin-brutal high logistics complexity business when the founders are literally straight out of high school is either very promising or very bad.
I.e this is either a massive case of FOMO investing or these founders have articulated a really novel approach that’s going to give them an edge beyond the big raises.
The Airbnb for Kirana stores explanation downthread is maybe compelling. Almost like the 10 minute delivery is a byproduct of their approach rather than an insane logistics system they’ll need to build from scratch.
Pieter Levels (the guy who made Nomad List) reached $1 000 000 ARR with a single VPS, all his code in an index.php file and using FTP to transfer the latest code to his server...
I think if you’re a solo founder you have to accept on day one you’re at a time disadvantage when it comes to the actual hours you’ll spend on moving the business forward vs admin, ops, legal stuff etc etc and so you have to really fight smart!
I.e K8S? Definitely don’t need it. Complex CI/Deployment workflow? Nope, just the minimal shell scripts to do clean deploys and rollbacks. Pay for a HA RDS so you never need to worry about DB replication etc.
If you just work with the minimal set of tools you’re comfortable with and relentlessly keep things simple it’s possible. I’ve built high availability stuff as a solo founder and still found (at least some...) time to work on sales and the business.
It certainly seems like this agent was wildly negligent in his duties but I wonder if part of the slow and insufficient response might have been induced by the way in which the CEO handed over the complaint. One of the hallmarks of this case seems to have been large amounts of willful ignorance of the part of USA gymnastics leadership. I wouldn’t be surprised if less than 100% of the full import of the accusations made it across to the FBI from the CEO. Of course the FBI ideally should investigate everything professionally and thoroughly no matter the framing and how powerful the people involved are...
Yes, it’s great to be able to just use pure WireGuard - I’m allergic to the idea of VPN providers expecting you to run their proprietary app. WireGuard has a great iOS app these days too.
I don't know much about electric grid engineering - are there opportunities for a ML approach to increase efficiency in ways other than the sort of better supply forecasting implied by this article.
The article does mention the losses involved in long distance transmission, but surely traditional approaches can already yield fairly well optimised planning for improving this sort of efficiency?
(Finally, this article seems quite light on details to me & doesn't mention a source Google press release or anything like that with more specifics. Maybe just better supply forecasting could yield bigger benefits that I imagine...)
Can you call emergency services via Amazon Echo? I've read on a car forum I'm part of about someone who was working on their vehicle without jack stands and got trapped when their jack slipped. They used Siri to call their wife and jack the car back up. They probably would have died without it.
I can easily forsee a future where consumers ask companies for voice assistants that turn on automatically when they detect duress (not needing to say "Alexa ...") before one where governments actually compel product manufacturers to do this.
One question - not as a potential customer but as just another founder - how are you offering 24 hour a day support? Do you have a remote team that just naturally covers enough time zones or have you specially hired people or a service for this? It looks really impressive for a new product to launch with 24 hour support! I’d love to do this with my services but not a big enough team yet...