the_bear

6 ms·

1.
by the_bear 20d ago
In Google's defense, they weren't the ones that championed the "everything must be an app" movement. My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm) pushed cross-platform web apps, but Apple ra
2.
by the_bear 2mo ago
Sure, if you gather the investors from the start to have a unifying theme other than money, that's fine. But it's very difficult to take a random company with a bunch of unrelated shareholders and convince them all to care about t
3.
by the_bear 2mo ago
Companies can prioritize things other that money if the shareholders all agree. The more shareholders a company has, the harder it is for them all to agree on anything aside from "we want more money". Family-owned business often (
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by the_bear 3mo ago
I run a small CRM company that serves some travel agents (we're not travel-specific, but we have a lot of small broker/agent businesses using us). We have ~11,000 customers with ~25,000 users between them, and our database stores
5.
by the_bear 3mo ago
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm currently working on getting my company HIPAA-compliant, so I know more than the average person about this. My understanding is that there's a thing called the "conduit exception" which bas
6.
by the_bear 3mo ago
I was going to say the same thing. I only saw two things that are sort of about the future and not the past: - BIMI (I hadn't heard of that before) which seems like a very minor thing to be calling "the future of email" - AI
7.
by the_bear 3mo ago
Those "message centers" aren't just about security, they're also about compliance. For example, insurance companies need to be HIPAA-compliant which requires that they can only send health-related info to other HIPAA-com
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by the_bear 7mo ago
Agreed. Unless it's a really frequently used UI, my company defaults to showing all options to all users regardless of permissions. It's better to see "Manage users" in the settings menu which takes you to a page expla
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by the_bear 7mo ago
I think that's the point though. The AI companies can't compete without hiring very talented employees and raising lots of money from investors. Neither the employees nor investors would participate if there weren't the poten
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by the_bear 7mo ago
When we used Stripe, we opted out of all their fraud prevention stuff to save money (not sure if that's still an option). As a b2b SaaS where payment happens after a free trial (not at signup), we're just not a target for fraud, s
11.
by the_bear 10mo ago
My small SaaS app has been DDoSed a handful of times, always accompanied by an email asking for a ransom in the form of bitcoin. The first time we switched to Cloudflare which saved us. Even with Cloudflare, the DDoS attempts are still dama
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by the_bear 11mo ago
This is the main thing that's been bugging me about the AI discussion. People seem to forget that capitalism is competitive, and if everyone gains the same advantage, then it's not an advantage. If the cost of labor goes down, it
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by the_bear 1y ago
As someone who switched from Dropbox Paper to Notion... There's no question that Paper is a better pure writing experience. If you're viewing Notion as just a note-taking app and nothing else, I think you're misunderstanding
14.
by the_bear 1y ago
I think there are two common definitions of startup, and neither require VCs to be involved. One (seen elsewhere in these comments) is any small business. I personally don't like that definition because there is a pretty big difference
15.
by the_bear 1y ago
I agree that LLMs turn short prompts into long code blocks, but I don't agree that it's fluff in the same way that email pleasantries are fluff. The short prompt leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The code itself leaves zero
16.
by the_bear 2y ago
This is basically what Google's reCAPTCHA v3 does: https://developers.google.com/recaptcha/docs/v3 The other versions of recaptcha show the annoying captchas, but v3 just monitors various signals and gives a
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by the_bear 3y ago
Many people who want to work from the office are mostly interested in doing so because they want to be around their coworkers. If their coworkers are remote, they won't get what they want. Similarly, remote people might not be happy at
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by the_bear 3y ago
I think this is the right answer, and I especially want to call out the second part, because it can be a bit counterintuitive. The reason for having security documentation isnt so that it can answer the questions the client has. No one will
19.
by the_bear 3y ago
That's an interesting thought. Any company that raises money from VCs will ultimately either fail or end up publicly traded (via IPO or acquisition), and at that point it's just a matter of time before they start squeezing their u
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by the_bear 4y ago
From what I'm seeing, Photoshop only costs $20/month (actually $20.99) if you commit to an annual plan. It's $31.49/month if you want month-to-month. And in the past, every time I've wanted to cancel a subscription,
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by the_bear 5y ago
Right now, a lot of "creators" use Twitter to generate leads to sell premium content of various sorts (e.g. paid newsletters, ebooks, etc.). But the premium content has to live somewhere else, and there's a challenge getting
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by the_bear 6y ago
Yeah. I'd argue this is quite a bit better. People can comment on the image, add it to their dropbox, view entire galleries, preview things like word files that couldn't open natively in the browser. And it doesn't make it an
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by the_bear 6y ago
Since people are commenting on how they hate Dropbox offering additional products beyond the basic file syncing, I feel compelled to say that I really like Paper. I use it for all my personal note-taking, and our company wiki is in there si
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by the_bear 6y ago
This is still a feature. It's actually "Copy dropbox link" but it's very much still there. Here's a screenshot of the feature I'm sharing with the feature itself: https://www.dropbox.com/s/
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by the_bear 6y ago
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I don't think it's true that optimizing for profits makes you more competitive. When a company makes a profit, it essentially means that they're capturing wealth that could h
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by the_bear 7y ago
The tax benefits and better rates (which I think is a myth btw, but it shouldn't effect the argument either way) would be there regardless of who pays. It's still a group plan, the question is just about who is paying for it. So g
27.
by the_bear 7y ago
I believe that this is not possible in America. I'm a founder and we just started offering health benefits earlier this year. I tried really hard to figure out a way to let employees effectively pay 100% of their premium (either by p
28.
by the_bear 8y ago
Not as well as I'd like which is why I'm asking about this. I meant this as a discussion starter about unions at smaller companies, so even if I'm not the one paying the overhead, it's still relevant to the topic of whet
29.
by the_bear 8y ago
I'll admit I'm not very knowledgeable about the logistics of unions, but I imagine there's some kind of up-front legal overhead. Like, maybe there are contracts between the union and the company, or within the union itself to
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by the_bear 8y ago
Is anyone aware of an example where (a) a really small company unionized and/or (b) a workforce unionized without any real demands? I run a 17 person company and I've heard employees mention that they think all companies should be

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