CARTO is more focused on backend pipelines and large-scale data (where everything needs to be tiled before it can be visualized), while Kepler is a great last-mile visualization tool. It probably makes more sense for enterprises that scale beyond what Kepler can do.
That said, credit where it’s due - their engineering team is a super active contributor to the deck.gl framework powering kepler.gl.
I had to look this up. You are talking about Carta Maps? That's different from what this audience will think of when we read Carta but ironically your comment is the same.
I’m a CEO, I was not given a magic ring to predict the future when I took the role, I make the best decisions I can as a totally flawed human being.
Businesses have natural expansion and contraction cycles. New products are built and iterated on with a hope of finding product market fit, but most of these endeavours fail.
I am paid to make the hard decisions. Sometimes that hard decision is to scale down the workforce. Yes, it sucks, but a large majority of those impacted end up financially ahead (rehired quickly and one, two or three months ahead because of the redundancy payout).
Penalising a CEO for making hard decisions is a great recipe for stagnant companies. What would have happened to Kodak or Blockbuster if they had a CEO with enough grit to cut the workforce and pivot the businesses before they collapsed?
> What would have happened to Kodak or Blockbuster if they had a CEO with enough grit to cut the workforce and pivot the businesses before they collapsed?
The CEO would have made less money for a few years while the turnaround was in progress. If it succeeded, the stock would take off and they'd profit handsomely. I don't see the problem with these incentives.
Let's remember again, the proposal from the article:
"freeze CEO pay and stock options and prevent stock sales for a year following any layoffs that exceed 5% of the workforce"
What you don't want is a CEO dumping the stock when it goes up after the layoff. That's a conflict of interest. And if the company needs to do layoffs to conserve cash, the CEO and rest of the leadership taking pay cuts will also help the shareholders.
> Penalising a CEO for making hard decisions is a great recipe for stagnant companies. What would have happened to Kodak or Blockbuster if they had a CEO with enough grit to cut the workforce and pivot the businesses before they collapsed?
The situation they were both in, if the CEO had just cut staff and taken a windfall bonus then there wouldn't be the cash to pivot. Because thats what we are talking about here.
It would have taken a couple of years to pivot successfully, so they should be compensated a couple of years after the layoffs not firing workers and taking their salaries as a bonus before quiting.
We have bought 200+ macbook pro’s over the years, but when the M3 air came out we started rolling that out to everyone including developers and it has been a huge success. I would only recommend Pro’s for heavy media editing applications right now. We don’t do any AI/ML stuff yet so not sure how that will change the landscape.
I use an Air for ML. It's perfect if you work in the cloud. Locally it's too much hassle. Not just because of the limited power, but because of lack of support for MPS in recent kernels in modern frameworks.
3% on payment processing, subscription management and collection.
7% on AWS.
10% on product support, account management and retention.
If you’re fast growing this is about right. If you’re starting to slow down then you can afford to spend more time optimising these, eg 2, 4 and 9, giving you a GM of 85% which is elite for a B2B SaaS.
I like the % on AWS (or infra let’s say) because it is possible to be too cheap and get engineers to solve problems the clouds can offer you a solution off the shelf. Since the Engineers are making the decisions the may balk at spending $10k/m for something in a cloud but if it is framed as 0.1% ARR it can be put into perspective: this is 1/1000th of your infra spend, is it worth it? Or would you rather have X? The idea being to untie personal spending decisions and fear i to a business decision.
This argument can be extended to anything, which suggests it might not add any value to the discussion.
- You make Microsoft Excel. Someone uses Excel to leak a million people’s PII.
- You build shovels. Someone murdered someone with your shovel.
- You build an analytics product, explicitly ban collecting PII in your EULA, someone does it anyway.
It’s fun to be outraged and hating on GA is very in vogue at the moment, but this specific incident is just someone (yes, someone, not a nefarious company) using a popular tool incorrectly.
> This argument can be extended to anything, which suggests it might not add any value to the discussion.
Excel has many primary benefitial purposes, it wasn't built for leaking PII.
Shovels likewise are useful for a benefitial purpose, they are not made for beating people up.
Third party spyware ("analytics") has only one purpose, collect data from unsuspecting customers. They have no valid benefitial purpose, if one accepts that spying is not kosher.
Well, I’ll tell you what the answer is not: ignoring these externalities, and assuming they are someone else’s problem
This is my least favorite part of product development, which is the part where people who like developing stuff just arbitrarily decide when to stop caring about what the product is used for, and then fighting the rest of the world on that design decision because it’s obstinately “simply their product and their choice.”
I don’t know anything more antisocial or lacking in responsibility than taking on the responsibility of being a leader, promoting your services or product to other people via advertising and marketing and then shirking all responsibility when people say your product is being used to harmi other people.
As long as you get paid and do only the things that ONLY you think are important, that’s that’s the kind of society we want to build, right?
I agree, these shovel makers need to be held accountable for their cavalier attitudes about how their products are used by murders to bury people, which is concealing evidence and that is a crime. As long as they get their fat shovel checks, it doesn't matter to them. Is this the society we want? Where murders are helped along the way by these fat cat shovel makers?
A bunch of very smart bankers have spent an enormous amount of time doing due diligence on the company you work for and they think that the risk is low and repay-ability is high … but the contrarian always knows better. To them this is a sign that the end is nigh, and they rejoice in the feeling of their beautiful superiority.
The company was sold in less than a year, everyone laid off 6 months after that, and the equipment was all shut down within 3 years of that announcement.
But your right, I'm sure the 5 shareholders and the bankers did fine for themselves.
This is very cool! We just built our own internal billing tool for our company after bad experiences with Recurly and ChargeBee. We are B2B and B2E and ChargeBee/Recurly felt very clunky when used for enterprise billing — specifically around usage based billing, discounts, and multiple geographies.
The billing part was easy to build (though of course we under-estimated the effort by 10x), but the reporting is the really tricky part. Revenue recognition, plus simple things like correctly tracking upgrades/downgrades vs expansion/contraction when someone changes plan mid-month.
Is this something that Lago does now or intends to include? I could not see it in the docs.
This is definitely something we'd like to build in the future.
For now, we focused on building the core billing features and giving access to the billing and usage data so that end users could leverage it in their own BI and data stack (tracking, revenue recognition, etc).
The next step would definitely be to offer these kind of features: either through partnerships or internally with the help of the community. If someone is building a great product in this space, we're very interested!
I’ve been looking for an alternative to CARTO, their sales reps are awful and their pricing is wildly expensive and opaque.