avichal

6 ms·

1.
by avichal 7y ago
I'd completely forgotten about Digg and how much of a diaster that rollout was. Great example.
2.
by avichal 7y ago
"Our voluntary attrition rate for women engineers since 2016 is still zero." -- impressive
3.
by avichal 8y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Obviously I won't be able to do justice to an entire business plan in a few sentences. They are definitely not representing their order book as the basis for a full debt financing. I appreciate your
4.
by avichal 8y ago
They are going to fly transoceanic routes to start so they don't have to worry about sonic booms over population centers.
5.
by avichal 8y ago
Obligatory quarterly post from me about optimism (or lack thereof on HN)! :) It's unfortunate that so many people come out of the woodwork to tell people their ideas are terrible or won't work without actually understanding the id
6.
by avichal 8y ago
It's unfortunate so many people come out of the woodwork to tell people their ideas are terrible or won't work. I think it's far more interesting to ask how a thing might work, which uses cases might be dramatically underserv
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by avichal 9y ago
Ah yes, the annual resurfacing of this blog post :) unfortunately I think most of it is still true. I should do a follow up... Edit: I'll address the comments/thoughts here in a follow up blog post. Glad to see so many people thin
8.
by avichal 9y ago
Are you live everywhere in the US or only in certain cities?
9.
Statistical Report on Internet Development in China (January 2017) [pdf](cnnic.com.cn)
1 points by avichal 9y ago|0 comments
10.
by avichal 9y ago
This should be the top comment.
11.
by avichal 10y ago
It's hard to be helpful here without specifics. What sorts of jobs are you applying for at which companies? What industry are you in? What are the brands you've worked at before? What industry switch are you hoping to make? Do the
12.
Microsoft Appoints Kevin Scott as Chief Technology Officer(news.microsoft.com)
1 points by avichal 10y ago|0 comments
13.
by avichal 10y ago
I'm going to disagree with a lot of the sentiment here. I think it's rare to find a business that really truly works and you may have found the beginnings of one. Be ambitious. Figure out how to scale this 100x. In terms of what y
14.
by avichal 11y ago
Pick the one with better, higher quality people. In the long run what matters most is who you surround yourself with. You'll learn more from smarter people and become better as a result.
15.
by avichal 12y ago
Check out Insight Data Fellows
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by avichal 13y ago
Find out why the stopped. Did they find something intrinsic in the market that is off or did they just get bored? The range of possibilities is broad and without that information you may just waste a bunch of time re-learning the same painf
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by avichal 13y ago
Unfortunately I think most of it still holds. The underlying psychology of the typical consumer hasn't changed. I think it will take a lot of liquidity to stick around long enough in this market to see the underlying market dynamics sh
18.
by avichal 13y ago
Kno failed because it focused on trying to make education better when most Americans care about getting the same quality educational resources for cheaper (textbooks in this case). If anyone is interested, I wrote this blog post 2+ years ag
19.
by avichal 13y ago
The guy who owned the mansion was a former entrepreneur who didn't want to live in the Bay Area but owned this giant house, and several other very expensive properties. To pay the property taxes on all of these places, he bought/s
20.
by avichal 13y ago
I ended up with renting a mansion in Atherton right off of Fair Oaks for dirt cheap for about a year. If you look at the tickets, a lot of them are on the streets around Fair Oaks since that's also a short path to/from Redwood Cit
21.
by avichal 13y ago
I don't think a lot of people know about the Insight Fellows program yet, but it's highly relevant here: http://insightdatascience.com/ They're taking people in STEM fields who are over-qualified and under paid, and helping them transitio
22.
by avichal 13y ago
Actually, Instagram turned out to be a fantastic deal. Many thought it was over-valued at the time but Instagram has passed 100 million active users early this year and users spend more time on Instagram than they do on Twitter (or practica
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by avichal 13y ago
That is a pretty big misunderstanding of how Facebook operates. If Facebook put advertisers ahead of users, it would not be at 1B users and it would not have been around for 8 years, and dominant for many of those years. The business model
24.
by avichal 13y ago
It's really not that hard to understand why Facebook "actually" bought Parse. Parse has a great product that developers like to use. Facebook has a platform and that requires making users and developers happy. Buying a product that makes de
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by avichal 13y ago
Averages miss the point. A top trader at a top firm on wall street will make millions in a few years. There's no chance of making millions by working at Google. The reason someone with a technical background can make millions on wall street
26.
by avichal 13y ago
I'm not sure why there is so much talk about ulterior motives on this one. In this case, I think everyone's incentives are aligned. Successful tech companies like Google and Facebook hold their engineers in the highest esteem and pay very g
27.
by avichal 14y ago
Starting a company is different than building a disruptive startup. Elad is really getting at potentially disruptive startups. Disruptive startups require a supportive ecosystem and often need to burn cash for years before they can monetize
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by avichal 14y ago
Investing in great people is the ONLY viable angel investment strategy. Most great early stage investors invest in the team first and idea second. Capital is plentiful and readily available. Great entrepreneurs are extremely rare. These peo
29.
by avichal 14y ago
I think Yammer is probably too expensive at this point. But they might want to build a competitor. Social CRM in general is a hot space and LinkedIn is well positioned to take a big chunk of that market.
30.
by avichal 14y ago
Yeah, it's pretty hard to know when it is and isn't. Vertical integration is as old as business.

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