I’ve seen many people climb the SWE ladder or build a YC company (having done both myself), and trust me the founder route is not the most efficient. You only believe this because you didn’t see the 2 failed startups and 10 year journey grinding 80h weeks almost running out of cash a few times.
My experience could not be more different. I’ve made life long friends at work, especially when I was working for smaller firms. I don’t think those relationships are transactional.
If you follow his logic and believe that the ultra-wealthy pay too little tax (as e.g. Warren Buffett does), then a balanced approach is to set the tax rate to: "37% of income or 1.85% of wealth, whichever is higher".
This would close the gap between Buffett's tax rate and that of his secretary, but would not be the "highest taxes in the world" that PG decries.
Gross margin doesn't tell you much about their level of investment. Gross margin is only revenue minus COGS (i.e. hosting, support, potentially infra teams). To understand further investments you'd have to know R&D or at least Opex broken out for Apple Services (which AFAIK they do not share).
SaaS typically expects 80% gross margin, so Apple is not out of line here.
In practice, I don’t think tax policy is the primary driver for where people chose to live. Even very wealthy people.
If I were very wealthy the first thing I would want to buy is proximity to the people I love, the food I like, the culture I’m excited about. For many people that means being close to home.
I can’t imagine how shallow my life would have to be for me to optimize it around taxes.
Extremely impressive that they were able to ship inside-out tracking, pancake lenses, and eye tracking + foveated rendering. Each of these is a serious engineering challenge. Very few organizations could pull this off.
Every vendor you bring in comes with switching cost, and this is no different. But we do our best to make it easy for folks to migrate off of our platform should they decide.
It's all on Github (https://github.com/nordicsemiconductor), but it is not technically open source as it is a modified BSD that does not let you use the SDKs with other chipsets.
I'm the co-founder and CEO of Memfault. We were in the W19 YC batch. I never thought our news would make the front page of HN!
This is a very exciting day for us (after a very intense few months). We've known the Nordic team for years and could not think of a better partner to grow our platform.
YC Badge: 0x7c2ae206ae6f648168712194544893e3bc412131