2) OpenAI recently raised 40B from SoftBank and others.
3) Windsurf is getting roughly 1% of OpenAI's valuation.
OpenAI needs to keep moving fast to outpace MS, Google, and others -- and I think we can all agree that agentic coding is a major trend -- that is likely to keep growing really fast -- and super high leverage in that the folks doing the coding are well paid -- and more likely to be early adopters than any other field. (e.g. if openAI wants a fast way to grow beyond $20-$200/month, owning a tool like windsurf is a good move)
Some folks have been speculating the cash/equity split. I'd be confident whatever number they arrived at de-risks things for windsurf, and preserves the right amount of cash on hand for openAI.
Even if OpenAI is burning 10-20B a year, with the recent raise would buy them between 1-2 years, and given the pace of AI development that's a pretty long time.
1) How do you know the new place can’t match the counter offer?
2) why do you think the folks who hired you for less than your current salary would not understand sticking at your current job for 25% more and a role change?
3) if you took the raise/counter and it wasn’t fulfilling would you be willing to take a job paying 30% less 1 year from now? Why or why not?
4) why did you want to work at the other company you just signed and offer letter for?
We’ve lost candidates after their current employer drastically increased their salary. It happens, normally before an offer letter is signed.
My guess is there was likely some move behind the scenes to boost revenue, and keep the business running initiated by a founder, or board member, which resulted in hiring Greg, relocating the headquarters from MN to CO, and probably also shifted the future of makemusic.
Cumberland also happens to be where the Chesapeake and Ohio canal tow path terminates, and is a really nice 168 mile mostly off road dirt bike ride all the way to Washington DC. It has been extended all the way to Pittsburgh. So if you were into biking, Cumberland could be kind of a cool place to hang out.
Useful context:
Open ai had 11 cofounders.
Schulman was one of them.
Schuman was not the original head of ai alignment / safety he was promoted into it when former leader left for Anthropic.
Not everyone who’s a founder of an nonprofit ai research institute wants to be a leader/manager of a much more complicated organization in a much more complicated environment.
Open Ai was founded a while ago. The degree of their long time success is entirely based on their ability to hire and retain the right talent in the right roles.
It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes.
I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.
I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.
As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).
Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.
I’d be curious to know:
- how folks who work at X think about this move?
- how much remote work will be allowed?
- tax savings.
- lease savings.
I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.
If you are selling ANY product, customer experience is part of what you are selling. Apple gets this better than practically anyone else.
BUT, as a small business owner you are forced to make decisions about where to allocate your limited resources. In your case (and in mine) customer service likely created word of mouth referrals, retained customers, and future expansion opportunities.
I guarantee you that there are many businesses where folks somehow think customer service is merely a cost center to be eliminated. For the folks who are already in that boat, AI arguably will likely be better than their outsourced callcenters.
When will they swing back to seeing the bigger picture, and realize their business is only as valuable as the customer relationships they build?
I think support is going to get worse before it gets better.
From a quick glance the chatbot described in this post it is clearly moving through a dialog tree and not LLM based. The outsourced support agent is likely also just moving through some sort of script. I don't think the chatbot necessarily made the experience much worse than typical AT&T support.
I think the big challenge with promise of AI chatbots (not in this example though), is that somehow you can just replace your entire support team with a bunch of bots, and free up your reactive support team to do other things. We (Olark: https://www.olark.com) have definitely seen this in our customer base and try really hard to walk people back from this perspective, but even then we are going to see more and more unstaffed chat solutions (e.g. every drift bot ever, and most intercoms) before things swing back to some hybrid of AI and humans.
That said, a very simplified version of the way I think about how AI chatbots and what the future of support looks like might help you:
1) Big enterprises (or regional monopolies) who are mostly monopolies selling to consumers, where they have to just be good enough that regulators don't come after them (or sometimes compete on price (AT&T, Comcast/Xfinity, Verizon, power company)), these folks will always offer the cheapest support they can get away with.
2) Companies that still win business with human relationships. These folks will likely over index on AI and provide worse service if they BELIEVE that they are winning business based on some sort of non-relationship based factors.
3) Small businesses with small teams wearing multiple hats all the time, where providing AI support lets them offer a better service than they'd be able to provide (e.g. we now can answer 50% of questions 24/7 instantly). They will over index on AI until it hurts the bottom line.
I still believe human relationships matter, and figuring out how to create hybrid bot / human customer service to enable humans to do their best work is still huge unsolved opportunity.
Additionally, you could hire other people to read them, dividing the task into whatever manageable chunks or even having multiple people read the same parts for agreement.
In the days before good software transcription I saved a ton of time I grad school by splitting up interviews and using mechanical Turk or up work ( can’t remember which one, to transcribe 1 minute snippets, and then took another pass)
I am bootstrapped founder who built a B2B product that lives in the bay area.
I think your intuition is spot on, that living in SF is probably not the best way to save $$. That said, a few thoughts.
1) I'd recommend going somewhere where you can get coffee with your customers, so if you are picking a new location, being able to in person meet up with folks who are using your product and love it ... especially in the early days ... can make a difference between giving up on your dream and keeping going.
2) You can live cheaply in the bay area, but it's kinda of crazy. We did it with about ~30-50K - ignoring opportunity cost - 4 cofounders, no car, and more or less shopping at CostCo until we made enough $$ to pay ourselves anything. Rents have gone up, but I think it's likely still possible to get something off the ground while keeping cost of living low -- probably not living in SF though -- perhaps a suburb, or San Jose.
3) If you do plan on selling to startups, I doubt there are too many places where you'd be able to do as much door-to-door sales as you could in SF.
In short, I'd recommend picking location based on your target customers as #1 priority if your goal is to build a successful business.
If your #1 goal is to not work in tech again, and focus on your own stuff -- there are a lot of other places to live that are far cheaper, think -- a small college town somewhere rural -- you might have a 10-20 year runway if you have 2-5 in the bay area.
Many folks on hn live in California in the. San Francisco Bay Area, and enough of them like to drive down the coast on route 1 — a fairly famous scenic road in the us, that we are all excited this section is open again.
Does this kind of news belong on hn.. I guess that’s for the voters
This is a good time to remind everyone that tomorrow, May 16th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) (https://accessibility.day), and that there are over 176 events worldwide going on to celebrate the process we are all making at improving accessibility in our products -- any plenty of learning opportunities for beginners and experts.
I was really hoping this article was going to about how someone was able to turn their cable modem into a sales development representative (SDR), because of the absurdity :). I was pleasantly surprised by the actual article: SDR (software defined radio).
I still think it's reasonable to have Apple consider building a car. Their core competency is in design, integrated platforms/ecosystems, and outsourced manufacturing.
Assuming that they could use their supply chain expertise to simplify and outsource manufacturing, the cars of the future likely looks more like a software enabled consumer electronics device than a consumer mechanical device, and there are some really neat things you could do in that ecosystem that only apple could pull off (cutting edge design coupled with high end finishes, and a software ecosystem with a self-driving car as a new platform).
That said, it's likely not the right market timing for Apple to bring an electric car to market.
Much of the sf area old money comes from folks selling tools into the gold rush, for example Folgers started serving coffee to miners, Levi’s selling jeans, Wells Fargo.
Looks like total revenue in the 990 was 910K, so 910/membership is likely in the 10K/year range assume only 100 members.
"According to Villa Taverna’s most recent 990, which lists the club under a different name, it raked in more than $700,000 in membership dues and $130,000 in initiation fees in 2021, along with nearly $80,000 in contributions."