LOL, no. It's just a fun application of some neat technology. We like to publish those kinds of things on our company blog. It's a chance for our staff to do something fun in between engagements, it helps promote the company, and somebody may learn something from it. We see that as a win-win.
thanks for sharing your thoughts. Its a great idea.
One thing that I was thinking was to provide ability to recruiters to push jobs to my job stream but based on my filters/preferences a recommendation engine will sort them and also collapse them if they are irrelevant(like some quora answers) .. that way limiting how many jobs I would take in my feed is also one of the parameters
Great anecdote. Brian is a great guy though.
I am not sure I completely understood your concern but I think it comes down to how do you create value for influential people. I think this is exactly where having customizable contact questionnaire would help. Someone on the influential person team or ideally the person himself will do a onetime thing that people have to fill in to contact him.
That enables two things - it gives the system well structured data. And then we can give the user a UI which enables them to filter out interested reach outs than not so interesting reach out.
So in your case Brian can have a form titled digitalocean customer. You can use that to connect/contact him. He can either chose to accept it, ignore it, or if we can make it downloadable/forwardable he can send it to head of customer support etc.
One challenge that is posses is to have limited number of such contact forms do the trick and its relevance to the person who is connecting.
That was my concern. Brian (didn't here back, but everything got taken care of) seems like a great guy. I was raising the concern that; and this is rather unfortunate, he is atypical.
If I am simply in it for the money/selling favors. Well then the business ends up being a consultancy. The other end, would be the example above. However, the ratio of really successful and thoughtful people willing to read unsolicited email and provide feedback likely isn't very large.
The gap between the people at the bottom - their perceived value, is much lower than the people at the top.
Your model works really well for the middle third of the social network. People in the middle may or may not be willing to help ostensibly equal people do something (advice, get a deal done, talk politics, etc.)
The problem I found was the people in the bottom (me in this example) and Brian[1]. But not actually Brian, but a character representing how the media portray Travis Kalanick.
Travis has a lot of money, success, insight and power. He has a super small amount of time. I on the other hand have more time now as my recent contract negotiations didn't go super well.
The problem, we found doing the model is what the people at the bottom could provide of value to a guy like travis that would be equal in value to his perception of time.
So I like the model, there has to be something interesting to bridge the gap though, a twist that would tie it together. I don't love just limiting people to castes or something, or only letting high value or mid-value people on.
My buddies Idea was basically a reverse syndicate. Actually turned out to be interesting, but I don't thin workable, where I (a person at the bottom) am an entrepreneur.
1. Entrepreneur [me]
2. You [you]. You and I know each other, and you know Brian. I am raising a seed round and I want Brian to fund me, but I don't know him at all. Well, you know me so we are a degree of separation.
3. However, that isn't really enough for you to leverage your friendship with him for an acquaintance. His idea was something like:
I would give you micro equity to introduce me if you got a deal done. maybe some bips if you can get him my deck, and the guy get's me to invest
4. So I am bridging the gap with a maven in the middle. However, it get's crazy as some people are social connectors and some aren't and then you just end up trying to remap society into a sql/graph database, or distributed ledger if your trendy.
I really like both the ideas (yours and his), but really cracking that code is the win, and while I trivialized it above, it is both high value and a super hard problem which is not solved at all. Especially, if I need to/want to connect with some subset of the billions of people like me, but who don't speak my language.
The idea is pretty decent. Execution is hard as it always is of course, but really connecting the dots here on ux and psych will be interesting to tackle.
Jeez. I realized I have been invoking this guys name a ton, and I don't know him at all. I mean, I assume he is a great guy based on the fact that I was able to email him, and you said he was a cool guy, so I am making him out to be a social network hero, but this is an example. Brian, if you read this, hit me back man, I could use some more DO credit.
Thanks for such a detailed advice. Couple of things regarding the example of a regular person trying to connect with say Travis, Mark cuban or trump.
- First of all I think those might be desired but are mostly less frequent cases so designing a platform around that is not ideal IMO
- I like your friends take on it. But like you said there is a problem with it. I think this idea can really solve the problem of introduction through mutual connections though. Because lets say you asked a friend for an introduction to somebody influential. Because the platform knows how your friend initially connected with that influential person( By contact forms or well defined edges), the platform can hint you the quality of your friends connection with that person.
i have a different take on this . I think buffer and pocket have done great work in this year. Obviously pinboard as well.
I am not sure if I am the only one but I think the problem is bookmarking. On HCI terms, bookmarking is not intuitive to how human brains work. Instead we just go through events and the nature of events makes us AUTOMAGICALLY index them in our brain and when we wish to retrieve them our brain just uses that index.
On those lines I think it should be more like log everything that I hit on all my devices and make the search organized. Something similar using apriori algorithm was my school project and I used it a lot until now when I have slowly moved to pocket.
My 2 cents - "In short better to have a smart search and indexing instead of bookmarking "
Thanks for your comment,
Employers will do a percentage match towards the repayment. Also pay for the SaaS platform.
Currently a lot of students do not automate it because of not having the minimum balance on the due date. One more problem that it does solve just like 401k is to mandate some financial discipline. Like 401k they can obviously skip few months given that they will be fined by their bank.
Regarding benefits for employers - One is a benefit to attract talent. Some companies like deloitte pay off your one semester fee if were an intern who got and accepted a full time offer. Other employers have plans to pay towards your continuing education. I dont think this will add much extra cost to employer but yes there will def be some friction to onboard first few companies. But if Google is in, Facebook will not miss it
Either zenefits or adp. Right now none.
Yes sharing repayment status might be tricky. Good point. But employer doesn't have to see the repayment status though. The platform can automatically stop or notify the employee once the repayment is done.
I sent an email to few people who manage education loans at banks.
No cuts. Ethically I dont think it is great to eat commissions out of repayments towards loan. I think it would work more like how gusto or small improvements works for ex. Another enterprise SaaS tool with per employee charge.
Also there might be other revenue streams. For example refinancing options or getting into loan market itself and marketing a loan that is in terms with employers, etc.
In some countries it does. Just like how companies get tax credits on their spendings on free food, perks etc this might also be covered. Good point, I will research on it.
All my employers have had great 401k match(upto 6%) and it is a key factor to attract talent. This can be a a great way to not only attract talent but also retain them for the period of their repayment of loan. And then similar programs can be expanded to mortgage, auto, child related loans, etc.
I think 401 k makes sense when you are first out of your debts. Planning for future retirement funds while being in debt currently does not sound very right
Yes jotting down notes from this thread to build a MVP. Essentially I wish to target one particular vertical(engineers) or segment(students) of users. Also in case of engineers, let them import their github data or simply allow them to upload their work in files.
Regarding the lack of users, I agree that deserted website is not ideal. But I think it should initially go from a individual centric website and organically evolve into a community
