Ever wonder why your bank or government has such a terrible website or app? Surely building these things is simple no?
It’s actually a super interesting, perfect storm of misaligned incentives. I’m not even scratching the surface here but I have observed:
- good engineers don’t want to work in big bureaucracies like banks or government because the pay is shit and the work isn’t interesting
- dev is seen as a “cost center” it’s something that management tries to minimize, or needs to be able to calculate ROI of
- everything gets outsourced to overseas body shops where cultural / time zone differences make good execution nearly impossible
- lack of senior technical knowledge, if the dev shop says it will take 3 months to add a button to the homepage the manager at HQ just shrugs and reports back to his boss. and he’s fine with that because it means his job is safe for another quarter until they ship that button.
it’s all very tiresome.
@matzatorski@benln Hey. I've been looking for good map bookmarking app, all existing ones suck.
The key UX flaw across all (including google map) is lack of visual info density.
An icon is not good enough to visually differentiate a place. I need to be able to see short text next to the icon.
@ksaitor I think its a bit more nuanced. I've been actively coding with LLMs for the past year, and observing others code with LLMs
For now, LLMs are an amplifier of existing skill. If you are a great engineer you will get better, if you are mediocre or worse, you will at best plateau
@asmartbear Is the "100k companies" threshold too high ?
For example I asked ChatGPT about the total number of companies in US involved in Oil & Gas, and it's roughly about 30k companies.
But that doesn't get you closer to being a billionaire if you wanted
The odds of IPO'ing a VC-backed startup are 1%
If you do IPO you're on average left with 10% ownership as a founder, likely you have a cofounder so that's 5%
The median IPO of a startup is "just" $650M
So you're left with $32M but you only have 1% odds even that happens (which is fine, it's a choice/bet you make)
That's not easy but in reach for a bootstrapped SaaS founder if they operate lean and either save or sell a $5M ARR biz
What about "taking money off the table" pre-IPO? It's common but only gets you maybe $1M-$10M:
A typical secondary sale by a founder is 10% of their ownership, let's say each founder still has 5% ownership then so you sell 0.5% of $650M median = $3.25M per founder, it doesn't get you closer to a billion either
Of course there are outliers you'll hear of more (survivorship bias) but this is the average founder's situation of a VC-backed startup
My point is VC and indie are very different paths: one is more stressful with higher upper boundary (billionaire) while the other is more chill with a lower upper boundary ($50M-$100M)
But most importantly: they actually have quite similar outcomes in net worth (due to dilution for the VC founder)
Recently learned that Adalo, the company I founded & ran for the first 3 years, is being sold for $2M, and I’m getting $0.
Yeah, $2M, which is less than their current ARR.
They raised ~$10M, and there’s a $1M employee carvout from the $2M, so investors are getting $.1/$
@tylertringas@calmfund I'd pay for such pre-vetted investment opportunities as a newsletter. (As long as the price is reasonable).
Sad to to hear that calmfund is on pause :(
Would you be willing to fully open-source the legal framework ? Is the "Shared Earnings Agreement v1.3" comprehensive?
@Shpigford Refactoring requires knowledge of essential complexity (users & use-cases for which your software creates solutions).
ChatGPT does not have this knowledge, thus it's suggestions for refactoring will always be subpar.