Agreed. Valuation is based on sum of future profits - so essentially how profitable the business can be AND how big it can be. If
1) Ratio of fixed to marginal costs is high you have economies of scale, and will get much more profitable as you grow (software vs consulting)
2) You can capture revenue quickly because it's operationally simple to add customers (e.g don't need to hire with each dollar of revenue) you are more likely to reach that profitable scale faster.
If your company uses tech to achieve (1) and (2) then they should have high valuations. If you happen to use cool tech but don't have economies of scale or easy operational growth than how you brand the company shouldn't really matter.
One interesting thing to think about is how reliant Facebook is on startups. If there is a wider reduction in VC investment, Facebook may be dramatically affected (like Yahoo in early 2000s).
I am not the founder of my company, but I ask the same thing of new hires (it's probably easier to give ideas to the non-founder). One thing that has worked well for me has been to say "One of my favorite things to hear from a new hire is what we could be doing better. You have the perspective of someone who has been elsewhere and have fresh eyes, and don't just accept things that aren't working. One example of something that isn't working is X. Another is Y. Besides those, can you think of other ways we can make the company better?"
That way you start by being self-critical, which makes people feel more open to complaining.
Btw, remember if you ask this... you have to follow through to _fix_ some of these problems or you can lose trust. Only ask if you really do want to hear feedback and action on some of them.
Obviously this vision is compelling. I'm confused by the decision of their prototype car to not have manual control overrides (e.g steering wheel or something similar). Air travel has been revolutionized with autopilot, but there are clear overrides for safety in case systems crash. I don't think we need to be wed to the pedal + wheel paradigm - but having a manual override option seems critical to safety.
a big red emergency switch telling it to pull over and shut down may be useful.
Anything more than that would mean your system is not fully autonomous, because the driver would have to pay attention all the time. What good is manual override if there's nobody paying attention? It would also mean you need a qualified driver, you couldn't use it to ferry around children, disabled people or simply people without a license.
They seem pretty clearly, however, to have changed their minds on the topic. It's enlightening to compare the information on this new site with information on the old site (https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/). You can see what language they've either removed, or toned down.
The argument is that if you aren't paying attention 99% of the time, that you wouldn't be capable of dropping whatever you are doing in order to take control. Also, these are meant to enable transportation for people incapable of driving.
As an intern project years ago I had to all the BLS data into a database for analysis. Any time I ran into an issue I would call them directly. Little known fact that every BLS data set has a source.txt file with a phone number to call. You might think of government agencies as massive bureaucracy, but I was amazed at how helpful and knowledgeable everyone I spoke to was (and that the calls were answered at all). They would answer my immediate question and often explained the logic that went into the data structure.
Making survey data structured is quite challenging and I gained a lot of respect for the work they do.
Anyway, if you go down this rabbit hole, maybe make it an IRL rabbit hole and giving them a call may help get to your answers quickly.
Comparison: EC2 charges 9 cents per GB, linode charges 2 cents and starts with a much larger (2TB vs 1GB) free quota. Rackspace charges 12 cents, Azure about 9 cents too.
Those figures suggest that linode seriously oversubscribes their service and expects people not to really use it. EC2 and Azure are in the right cost range. And Rackspace's customer service is expensive.
Pure B.S. Cloud providers over charge for bandwidth because they can, they treat it like a luxury cost like RAM where if you need more bandwidth you can usually afford to pay for it. It's not the "right" cost, it's the price AWS set which Azure copied.
Bandwidth is dirt cheap outside of the Cloud, e.g. I'm getting 30 TB of bandwidth as part of my 64GB RAM / 500GB SSD / Quad-Core i7 Skylake for €39 /mo (https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex41ss...). Which roughly equates to €0.0009 /GB that also includes the cost of hosting entire server with resources that would cost an order of magnitude more on AWS/Azure.
Enterprise level network equipment and infrastructure are extremely expensive. Unusually cheap BW rate usually means cheap equipment or over-subscription or not enough qualified support personnel. And in some cases under-selling to get penetration to a market.
The reason Google Fiber can sell cheaply because (AFAIK), in almost every town or cities that they deployed their network they negotiated special deals with municipalities or equivalent entity to get free access to existing infrastructure or get special deals. There is a reason why Google Fibre is not everywhere or they are not pushing it very aggressively. Because building networks are freaking expensive even for google.
BW may not have any value but building the network and maintaining it to serve you BW is expensive. Your BW cost is a reflection of the cost of your network.
> There is a reason why Google Fibre is not everywhere or they are not pushing it very aggressively. Because building networks are freaking expensive even for google.
I am not sure if that is entirely true. At least, Google owns the fibers between any 2 google data centers. It is probably only the last-mile that needs municipality support.
I was specifically referring to last mile fibers in reply to OP implying that outside the cloud business internet is cheap. In this context, I was not talking about cloud business and connectivity cost within data centers (which are also not cheap btw).
Oversubscribed means there's a chance you won't receive the rated speed. Just because tonight's results were good, doesn't guarantee you'll always achieve that.
Nope, they all just overcharge like crazy. Bandwidth from any traditional data center will cost you (at most) $0.0015 per GB. That's about 60x cheaper than what AWS costs.
AWS only kind of makes sense until your bill starts approaching that of a full time engineer's salary. Then you can slash costs like crazy by rolling your own infrastructure (at higher risk of downtime). Or pull a Netflix and negotiate wholesale prices.
Is that really true? In my experience, "real" data centers always charge by bandwidth, not traffic. You can get 10mbps, or 100, or 1000, but it makes no difference how much data you push. (95th percentile is also common, if you don't commit to a full link.) I've always thought of data quotas as a "consumer" level service. After all, the wires that make up data links don't care about the amount of traffic.
Yep, that's technically more accurate. I should have added the qualifier that, "for those centers that do charge by traffic this is roughly what they'll charge".
I think the other clouds are actually rather undersubscribed since most people run their stuff on AWS.
At least you can leverage Digital Ocean, Linode, etc to run varnish caches to offload bandwidth for things like static assets while keeping your main workloads on AWS. You can build this sorta thing in a couple days I'd say.
At the exchange levels, you don't pay for traffic... you pay a subscription membership for the IX and you pay for your hardware; you might have some contracts for peering and transit that could cost money, but no where is it done based on data flowing through the network... It's all just to extract money based on usage with the rationale that people who use more can pay more, but it's not like they get a higher bill when they have more traffic, therefore, you can't say that a provider is selling their BW to cheap; maybe they already paid for all their fixed costs via their compute pricing....
I think the dirty not-so-secret of advertising is that for most content on the web the ads are awful, poorly targeted (or at best basic retargeted). Many content producers want to focus on building great content, so advertisers go for low CPMs and spray and pray. This is why the brands are so interested in Facebook and other platforms that seem to be able to deliver great content and are, increasingly, willing to pay the differential.
It's impressive to see StackOverflow putting this together in-house and I imagine it'll continue to be a competitive differentiator for companies that can pull it off going forward.
Try the "this was a gift" checkbox in order history. I've been hesitant to share this as I don't want it to stop working, but it's magic for me. Allows you to select what you want ads for in the future.
Yeah, the algorithm behind that is insanely stupid for a company with so many technical resources. No, Amazon, I don't want to buy three more $1,300 SLR cameras.
I think that's why I find it particularly inexcusable. No company pulling in that much money, with that kind of tech muscle, should have a recommendation system that poor.
Once in awhile it will reanimate old purchases too.
I took a class in college many years ago to meet a diversity requirement that involved reading a bunch of books about gay Latinos. I'm neither gay nor Latino, but something refreshes that connection -- every couple of years they decide to hit me up with books on the topic, including books that I bought for the class.
Maybe their algorithms is trying to any nostalgia you might be having for some old topic? In your case they figured wrong, but I can see how it could work for old games, movies, music, tv shows, etc.
It's the worst when ITEM_X is a large TV. I wonder what percentage of TV buyers will impulse-buy a second TV because of "you might also like.." recommendations. Can't they make a list of products compatible with my TV and sell me that?
I wish there was a way to tell an advertiser "I Bought it, stop bothering me".
I don't want to completely block ads because I understand how they bring in money, but there has to be a way to interact with them a bit to make them less annoying.
Had the same thing happen to me with a monitor. I neglected to install an ad-blocker right away on that freshly installed computer. Not making that mistake again.
Targeting is pretty difficult unless you have a well-defined audience or type of content.
My site matches office furniture ads against photo tours of office spaces - fairly is easy to see why they would work. StackOverflow attracts a specific type of person so it seems like the targeting is built-in.
I don't envy a general news site like CNN where you're trying to target specific types of people who read CNN as opposed to an industry vertical.
Just a quick note of gushing praise, OfficeSnapshots is one of my favourite sites, I've been a reader from being a teen to a twenty-something, I never expected the creator to show up on HackerNews!
I don't know what you mean by bubbling. The overall essay produces a quite useful heuristic. Perhaps the specific example is inspired by recent experience... But it has power for me.
It's amazing to watch how many young people get caught up in various online outrage missions. Hours spent browsing Twitter or Reddit to dive incredibly deep into some current news outrage is bull shit wasted time.
Get back to work and try to build something (if that's what you want). Or be with your family (if that's what you want). Or do whatever. But this stuff (including my post right now) is addicting.
1) Ratio of fixed to marginal costs is high you have economies of scale, and will get much more profitable as you grow (software vs consulting)
2) You can capture revenue quickly because it's operationally simple to add customers (e.g don't need to hire with each dollar of revenue) you are more likely to reach that profitable scale faster.
If your company uses tech to achieve (1) and (2) then they should have high valuations. If you happen to use cool tech but don't have economies of scale or easy operational growth than how you brand the company shouldn't really matter.