This is my take too - that said, I think this is a structural problem across low-wage jobs. I don't think driving for Uber is inherently worse than working for Walmart or Amazon.
There needs to be greater orientation around skill acquisition that helps drivers, package handlers, etc. move up the skill stack.
I don't know anything about the business or cultural elements of Udacity, but they have such high quality of courses that this makes me genuinely sad. I hope they can figure out a business model - even if it leans B2B vs. B2C.
Thanks for this - interesting that you focused the postmortem on technical lessons (other than #1).
I'm super curious around what the sales strategy was.
I'd imagine for devs, it would have to be around productivity (time saved by exporting vs. manually coding, adherence to consistent CSS standards, etc.).
For designers, I would imagine it would be around taking more of the software dev lifecycle - e.g. designers can now eat up part of the value that front-end dev provides. Based on that, designers should be more in demand, paid more, and so on.
Those seem like huge levers to pull from a PMF perspective, but to your point, maybe it all sounds great until you get into that conversation, and it's really not something that teams are looking for (at least right now).
At a high level, that makes some sense - these tools might not be the most practical way to get from point A -> point B today for a typical web or mobile app.
In my head, I'm wondering if they are just way too early? Going from design -> code -> UI is, in theory, less efficient than just going from design -> UI, in a programmable, customizable, scalable way.
Would a member of the Pagedraw team share a postmortem? Seems like this is a huge need and will be the future state of web / mobile design - what stopped you guys?
1. Real estate agents aren't often "experts" at real estate valuation, inspection or execution; They have dependencies on appraisers, inspectors, and lawyers. The work an average agent does is more or less cookie-cutter from my anecdotal experience, though I think there is a proportion of rockstar agents that do much more.
2. Not every buyer wants homebuying to be a client-services relationship. I'd rather have a trusted intelligent ratings system based on criteria like location, price and so on. I would hypothesize that there is a divide here with boomers and millenials / gen z. If I sell my house, it will be on a technology platform that takes 1%, not through an agent.
3. The vig an agent takes is insane in urban centers - 3% might make sense in areas where the avg. home costs 200-250K, and is harder to sell. In dramatic sellers markets where homes are in the 600K - $2M range, the take should be much much lower.
My point on the tax incentives were that current homeowners are grandfathered into their mortgages (assuming they bought before Dec. 2017).
Regarding state property taxes, I think they are treated as a local tax - so it wouldn't affect NY or SF given that their state income tax is likely to be higher. Your point is true in other geos though.
Congrats to the OpenAI team for one of the most significant breakthrough discoveries in AI history.