I'm sorry but there's no correlation to AMZN's stock price reaching all-time highs. 1) The entire world was caught in a two-year pandemic and caused e-commerce to exceed retail spending virtually overnight (See: SHOP, BIGC, etc)... and 2) The fed printed an asinine amount of money that dislocated the market from reality.
Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.
One of my first startup experiences was working on the multiplayer platform that supported Quake Live. We eventually licensed it to Riot Games for what became League of Legends but both games were significantly delayed and we ran out of funding.
The fact that you assign innovation purely to science/engineering is why many startups fail. You don't seem to recognize that innovation happens across all segments of the business. Plenty of ingenious products never reach critical mass because engineering founders dismiss all other aspects of business building. Facebook's toe-hold that helped them beat MySpace and Friendster wasn't an act of innovative engineering as much as it was their go-to-market plan starting in Universities.
Engineering will remain flexible because of all the virtue signaling big tech is doing in order to retain their talent. It's almost comical that they are struggling to bring people back to the office after being the biggest promotor of work-remote while the rest of the service-economy had to show up every day to their Walmart jobs...
This is exactly how I feel as an end-user over the same time period to the point that I don't even login anymore except for work. It's exhausting and it's no longer about the projected vision of "connecting people", it's about connecting people to content and other monetizable assets as a first-order priority in everything they do and touch.
This is why Facebook/IG is unrecoverable to me as a destination for connecting with the people I care about. Instead, it's become iMessage and I'm quite happy about that. No ads and the conversations/photos are a lot more authentic compared with social media.
I still love social media as a form (I think), it's just become more media and less social.
In my experience working in finance and healthcare as a founder, education and cash flow needs box out poor people from conventional banking; they live check to check, public schools in poor areas are below average, et al. Poverty feeds on itself, unfortunately.
KYC/AML ensure our online applicants are who they say they are. It's a very straight forward regulatory requirement to safe guard the movement of money by US citizens and not foreign entities. This is one of many anti-fraud measures we take because fraud is a massive issue and capital loss is exceptionally hard to recover -- especially for internet banks where attacks come from all over. Fraud networks are extremely sophisticated and based on your remark about KYC/AML, I don't get the impression you appreciate the depth of it. It has nothing to do with low-income citizens except to the degree to which social determinants (lack of transportation) may prevent someone from getting their identification renewed, but this is a much bigger issue for that individual than just opening a bank account. Online banking is more accessible for low-income for this reason vs. brick and mortar who avoid branches in those areas.
For a startup or even a crusty old bank looking to improve margin and slim down their back office, services like Alloy make KYC/AML a very simple request/response component within our application. There's really nothing complex about it. I'll take KYC over HIPAA any day of the week.
I may be misunderstanding your question but I'm a big fan of Denon (or Marantz) receivers w/ HEOS. Their AVR line can support up to 3 zones and can be paired together. I have 11.2 and 9.2 powering 18x speakers and a sub in my house. You can use a single receiver to play music outside by our pool and simultaneously play 5.1 over the living room for sports or movies. It also handles the connection to Spotify (et al) directly so I can take a call or leave the house with my phone and the music will continue to play.
I use Personal Capital and love it. It's just better when you have a variety of 15+ assets and supports things like Carta. Admittedly, it's been a long time since I used Mint but I now need a much broader view. I don't really care about my individual transactions; I'm more focused on turning a different set of knobs at this point in life.
My biggest complaint about Personal Capital is the frequent phone calls from their financial advisors despite asking them to stop. I'd be happy to pay $10+ a month just for their aggregation services but my private bank is leaps ahead in terms of sophistication and access to alternative investments not typically available to the public.
I didn't fully appreciate the value of our data room until it mattered. Since the last deal, we've kept our data room impeccable and exceptionally granular. We're also way more sensitive about the timing of what we share and what we black-box for as long as possible. There's a strategy for managing your data room in situations like this, so I encourage talking with mentors/advisors if it's your first time.
This is also true for general communication to the team about offers like this. It's way too distracting and too high of a risk to morale if the deal falls apart.
Direct primary care is (generally) much cheaper for better quality/more holistic care. I think DPC is particularly attractive if you’re a low utilizer on an HDHP and never hit your deductible.
The 'problem' you just described has nothing to do with crypto-currency as the 'solution'. Apple Pay is the most frictionless payment system I've used, can integrate with the browser, and attached to any of my credit cards.
Paying for 'bits' of content is already a thing, you can buy single article access on many of the newspaper websites today.
The comments in this thread are hilarious. I guess some of you all have forgotten about that can of duster you’ve relied on for the last 30+ years to clean the muck from just about every keyboard. I don’t understand the rage...
I use my MBP just as much as anyone, the butterfly keys feel so much better than the old clickity keys and I’ve gotten use to the TouchBar. F Keys we’re useless to me unless they were remapped, and now the TouchBar gives me a lot of options for customizations.
Size and shape reminds me of the arguement the music industry made about CD packaging and inserts being tangible, value-adds to the listening experience.
Turns out, especially with a lot of CPGs now being sold online, consumers care more about price and quality/quantity than size and shape....
I find Dark Sky to be the best forecasting tool for weather within the hour. It's almost always ahead of all the other apps in terms of the latest forecast.
I don't even know that many people who "store value in gold". The ones that do are usually also the people screaming that the sky is falling, at which point I favor guns, ammunition, and food & water.
That's preposterous. Healthcare startups are doing just fine managing HIPAA, which includes up to $1M fine and prison time for violating patient privacy.
I travel a lot. The problem isn't your first bag, it's that a lot of people also store their second bag in overhead which should go at their feet but they want to stretch their legs. This adds way more problems than the first bag.
I'm always carry-on even with my free & priority checked bags thanks to status. For business travel, I like to move quickly through the airport. For personal travel, especially international, nothing is worse than pulling around a lot of luggage like a first-time tourist. Those pebble roads, tight commuter trains, and long step-walks in Europe can be a drag. Last month we travelled 21 days across 5 countries with just a carry-on.
In both cases, the airline losing your bag is a real pain to deal with on any trip – happened a lot to me on multi-connects but much less of a problem on directs.
Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.