Some people honestly just need 4-5 hours of sleep. I used to work for Zillow and their CEO Spencer only sleeps 4-5 hours a night. It's all he needs and all he's ever done, according to people who have worked for him for a long time.
But these people are the exception not the rule. I think the reason they tend to be successful is because they are up before everyone else and have time to get a lot accomplished before they are thrown into the day with everyone else's schedules pulling on them.
> I can't necessarily say whether they had inefficiencies in their company structure, but they certainly over hired.
Yep, we are seeing this time and time again with startups in the Bay Area who went on a landgrab for talent a few years ago and now realize they can't support them as the VC money dried up. I actually wonder if Medium was trying to raise more and they were unable to, therefore they have to do this and are trying to spin it positively.
I respect Ev a lot. He revolutionized blogging and publishing on the web. And I want Medium to do well. And maybe I'm too cynical about the startup and SV world (I moved away from SF in October), but this smells of the same old same old to me.
Yeah that's insane. We use a local one here in SF (Sudzee) though it also can take a day or two to pick up and a day or two to return, and on weekends that's a bummer. And it costs $45 each time for over 40lbs of laundry.
I miss my days of $12 wash and fold in Brooklyn :-/
I value stock options at zero. There is potentially a huge upside if you are an early employee at a company that gets enormous. Even then, you have to be top 20 or 30 to get f-you money, and even then it might not even be that.
I had stock options (not RSUs) at BigCo where I worked for 2 years. At one point, had I been fully vested, I was sitting on about $240k worth of stock. After a 3x1 split and the company going back down to almost the strike price I was granted stock (and most of it was worthless because was given it as part of a raise at a high strike), after I parted ways with the company and sold my options (had to as part of the severance agreement), I walked away with $2000. Basically a $1k/yr bonus. I would have gladly taken extra salary instead of stock. Lesson learned.
Hi Hacker News! Today I pushed live an update to HireGun, which is my company aimed at bringing transparency to the consulting industry while connecting businesses with marketers (to start)!
HireGun is very upstream from eLance/Upwork and focused on businesses who don't have a Fortune 500 level online marketing budget, but also can afford more than $50 for a Twitter bot army.
There are a few more versions already planned with more around consultant/agency partner transparency, making the lives of service providers easier with payment support, and more. It's early days, but I'm excited to be working on it fulltime after wanting to for a few years now!
What a classic terrible management move. I worked at a ski shop in college that also sold (really bad) used ski equipment on eBay. One time the lead manager accidentally let a lot of stock go live with a $1 minimum. They realized it and went back in under different accounts and bid them all up. When eBay caught them, they blamed the employees for it (myself and 4 others), who all had nothing to do with it.
We all quit the next day. Who wants to work for someone like that?
Holy shit that last line gave me goosebumps, especially being a climber and extreme sports enthusiast and knowing that Dean's spirit animal was the Raven.
"A person who went through the trouble of setting up analytics tracking is probably a person with just enough vanity to immediately check up who's referring to their site."
Wait, what? I'm pretty sure if you go to the majority of sites on the Internet you will find some sort of analytics tracking code, whether it's Omniture, GA, or another. They don't do this out of vanity - they do it because they want to know where traffic is coming from so that they can monetize it.
BTW, you have GA implemented on your site as well. Does that make you vain, or simply smarter than the average bear?
Hence why business owners need to be educated that "all the traffic" is worthless if it's not making you money. Vanity metrics are called thus for a reason.
Disclosure: professional marketer and former FT SEO who is tired of people getting fed snake oil.
I try to address this by asking a lot of questions about why they're choosing to do something in a particular way. Don't go at it with trying to poke holes in it (which is the point of the original post), but rather to understand what they are doing and why. Ultimately, the job of the senior person/manager is to set the vision/direction and ultimately trust the person to do what's right. This is hard with junior people, but you were allowed to screw up (and succeed) when younger, so allow them to do the same thing :-)