The main issue is the conflating of usage and value. The persona/user group that consumes the Trending pages are likely users who themselves contribute to open source, and thus are part of a flywheel that drives more code contribution overall. (e.g. how 1% of users post on reddit vs 99% consume) Not all usage is made equally.
This scenario reminds me of a funny story posted on HN a while ago: https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi (TL;DR; if you take this "usage based" feature removal logic to it's conclusion, a lot of important keys would be removed from computers/keyboards).
"Over here we have our random number generator."
"Nine nine nine nine nine nine"
"Are you sure that's random?"
"Thats the problem with randomness: you can never be sure."
Randomness is a weird concept, because if you roll a die it's random right? Unless you have all the physical variables - roll speed, angular velocity, height, shape of die, air resistance, air movement, temperature, etc to work out where it will land. So randomness is more a lack of knowledge. Randomness is that you are not sure.
And I don't know enough about quantum mechanics to even comment on that, but that's some weird shit too!
I haven't started a company that needs to provide employee healthcare--does this have a short-term improvement to insurance rates? What incentivizes a company to employ HealthWiz--are there insurance providers that reduce rates as a result?
How do you convince employers that this service is in their best interest?
In the US, employers ultimately shoulder much of the burden of health care costs, so a tool that helps employees make cost-saving choices eventually saves money for the employer.
However, that's a very indirect path. Most employers use a separate insurance carrier (Humana, Blue Cross, Cigna, etc) and adjust costs on a ~yearly basis by shopping around. HealthWiz would probably love to go to market by integrating with these insurers, and offering an incentive to employers whose members make use of the HealthWiz product to save money.
That's a tough way to go to market because you have to convince an insurance company to trial your thing with their customers. Insurance companies have deeply risk-averse cultures. Plus you have to actually achieve significant cost savings for individuals who use HealthWiz, and wide enough usage throughout the employer, to make the insurer comfortable with offering a discount for that population.
Two other potential markets are self-insured employers and accountable care organizations. Self-insured employers are companies (or often, government agencies) huge enough that rather than paying an insurance carrier, they just operate their own, and pay for healthcare directly. These folks feel the costs a little more urgently and may be easier to pilot with.
Accountable care orgs (ACOs) are a relatively newer model, where the ACO operator (usually a hospital/health system) receives a fixed per-person amount to address all the health needs of a population. These orgs are probably the most informed about both cost and medical needs, and are making real strides in long-term cost saving measures like improving preventive care. But because they're so different from insurers and employers, they'd probably need a somewhat different product, likely one that maintains the primacy of their brand (and maybe doesn't do things like suggest that cheaper hospital a few miles away).
That's a great assessment of the space! We're focused on the midsize self-insured market for that very reason. The incentives are closely aligned.
For example, ERs frequently take in patients hoping to get a UTI treated. Much of the time, the right treatment is a prescription. But, going to the ER to get the diagnosis can cost ~$2K (split between the employer and the employee) and take as long as 12 hours of waiting in the waiting room.
In this case, if a patient uses a telemedicine provider for the same service, they're likely to get the same diagnosis and prescription but the visit will cost ~$50.
The nearly $2K in savings would go to both the employee and employer, the employee saves money and is able to get treatment faster.
The site and data normalization are great. The problem is that applying the phrase "best case scenario" is simply false, and it is just a distraction that was not necessary on the site.
Amortizing my entire data usage over my entire cell plan (which includes talk & text), costs me literally $0.001/MB.
You should not present $0.24/MB (US|Prepaid) as the "Best case scenario" when someone on a standard AT&T plan pays 240x less.
From personal experience in a YC interview: My cofounders and I decided we would speak and answer in turns. The problem we ultimately ran into after a few minutes was that one of our interviewers asked, "so who is the CEO?" Inside, we knew that was a bad sign (I believe I've heard PG say that it's a very bad sign).
It probably wasn't the only reason we were ultimately rejected, but it certainly didn't help. Looking back on that experience, one of the things I would have changed would be the author's next bit of advice:
> "Generally speaking, there will be one person that answers most of the time"
> "It's really bad if we're talking to a bunch of founders and we can't figure out who the leader is..."
Again... This was one YC interview a number of years ago, and I of course have no real insight into the final impression we left on our interviewers. Just something that I remember not feeling great about in hindsight.
It's not a bad sign at all if YC interviewers ask "who is CEO?"
YC is famous for asking that question to make sure all founders wholeheartedly agree on the answer, not because they think the the other founders are any less valuable. As a founder, there are always going to be times when serious disagreements happen and at the end of the day someone has to be the overruling vote. One of the most common killers of startups is founder disputes and it's important to know who is CEO so that the company has a chance of still surviving if a founder leaves.
For example, if you have a highly technical product, the CTO might actually do way more of the talking in the interview but both sides better agree on who is CEO. It's not at all a bad sign if it's unclear based on who is the dominant speaker.
Yea but you can't gauge team cohesiveness that well in a single interview (most of the time). I think YC, and most investors frankly, just want to know where the responsibility is and frankly if they have to ask it's a bad sign. All IMO of course.
Not necessarily -- you can have the really big decisions made by consensus in a horizontal fashion while still delegating much of the decision-making power. No one's arguing that everyone in the organization sit down for every decision. There's no need for everyone in the organization to sit down and decide whether candidate X is a good hire (though that might work just fine for really small teams). Delegate as much authority as possible to the actual experts in the domain and the stakeholders of that decision. As decisions affect more and more people, figure out ways to involve everyone in that decision making process in a horizontal rather than a vertical way. Asking "Who's responsible making sure the code is high quality and we're not taking on too much technical debt? or "Who's responsible for making sure we're in legal compliance?" or "How are you going to resolve a disagreement about which vendor to use for XYZ" is a different question entirely than "Who's in charge of everything?"
I have no idea of YC internal procedures. I will comment a bit on the concept of flat organizations.
IMO, it's much more efficient if each individual focuses on his domain and provides a single interface for the stakeholders for that facet of the enterprise.
The overhead of communication and context synchronization become ginormous as the organization grows and the issues affecting the enterprise grow in number if every decision is made on a flat basis. If the context synchronization is not made then the decisions made by the group will be less informed than that of an individual. For informed decisions, it would require then that each individual become an expert on the single issue discussed. This would effectively negate the main benefit of small teams - individual focus and small communications overhead.
A flat organization cannot rapidly scale. And sometimes there might not even be a consensus. Having an overriding vote, albeit rarely, is crucial to break deadlocks.
This is not to say that flat organisations are bad. But I don't think they are a particularly good fit for the scale YC companies work at.
In our interview, it was very apparent that I held the most knowledge and expertise, but still left some of the answers to my co-founders. The partners did ask us who the CEO was too. I think the question is more about whether or not you've established who the leader is, and given it thought. The bad sign is when none of you is really sure.
Have the best person answer the question, even if that means one person does 90% of the talking. Marketing question? Tech question? Maybe different people answer those. You're there to get your best answers across, not to show off how well you can take turns speaking.
If one person is visibly moderating your side's responses by directing it to the correct person, that's not a bad thing either, re: "Who is the CEO?"
> > "It's really bad if we're talking to a bunch of founders and we can't figure out who the leader is..."
This is really much more than how much time someone takes answering a question or speaking. It's also subtle signs of deference from others as well as body language not only from participants but from the CEO.
Just to be clear, I'm asking why the original commenter believes that this is PG's opinion and a source backing this up.
To be honest, bit odd that YC wouldn't know this before even inviting a startup in for an interview; or if agility is the goal, nametags with first names that match a brief covering roles, responsibilities, etc. with headshot on the sheet too.
If someone is using the question to express something indirectly, I would rather someone directly express what they're thinking.
Personally, not knowing who's the CEO in my opinion isn't an issue; in my opinion, partners not understanding what's being said, being unable to answer a question, not agreeing, giving conflicting answers, etc. - are issues.
Airtime | New York City, NY | Mobile Engineer (iOS)
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Let us suppose that there is an organized group of Bitcoin enthusiasts with a combined amount of Bitcoin holdings of around 100,000BTC. Would an article "App.net begins accepting Bitcoin" increase the BTC/USD exchange rate by more than 0.01%?
To me it seems that a continued stream of press is good for Bitcoin, and I am genuinely curious is there is such a group of enthusiasts that strategically spend Bitcoins for PR.
At this point I doubt it -- and the exchange rate fluctuates so wildly it would be heard to measure anyway. It seems to take macro scale events to move the price these days, e.g. the policy announcements by the Chinese government.
This scenario reminds me of a funny story posted on HN a while ago: https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi (TL;DR; if you take this "usage based" feature removal logic to it's conclusion, a lot of important keys would be removed from computers/keyboards).