Experienced SWE with over 10 years of working experience. Looking for opportunities to own full-stack features, drive platform modernization, or bridge ML/AI systems with robust engineering. Open to staff+ level roles or senior IC with leadership responsibility.
Instant Pot died primarily due to private equity greed, not because of Instant Pot reliability.
In 2017, Cornell Capital bought the company for a total $500M of which $300M was financed by debt. Then 4 years later in 2021, it refinanced and added on debt, bringing the total debt to $535M. $245M was immediately paid out to shareholders as a dividend. Cornell Capital got paid back all the cash it invested in the company's acquisition, and then some. In 2023 due to high interest rates the company was no longer able to service its debt, costing the company ~$50M a year, and the company had to file Chapter 11.
Would it be possible to build a business that were completely public and transparent?
Every dollar that was spent would be published publically. All source code would be made free and permissive, open source. Users would always own their own data and could frictionlessly share with each other.
There would be no advertisements. All analytics would require explicit opt in and be visible to the general public.
The app would be localized to all languages, using heuristics and machine learning to perform the bulk of the translations, with human verification.
The app would be an attention focuser, calendar, general search, peer-to-peer connecting, encrypted, public monstrosity. It would be subtle and discrete, running just out of reach of direct human interaction.
I am surprised that the Internet Archive does not fully control the storage of their assets, or at least have some kind of contractual agreement with Flickr to prevent this from occurring.
I don't see why Google does not trial offering a paid service where advertisements are stripped away from the search results. A new revenue model in addition to the existing ad supported approach where you pay for your search.
This was my strategy for some time, but I switched to using a proper password manager (Bitwarden). If your algorithm is discovered you're in as much trouble as if you used the same password across multiple sites.
