(Richie's co-founder here) We are aiming for Washington by the end of 2021. If you'd like me to let you know when we launch there feel free to fill in the "Am I Eligible" quiz and join the waitlist or send an email to luke@joinfella.com and I'll add you manually
This was tough for me to read. I get panic attacks thinking about this regularly. I’ve heard all sorts of answers to this question, “accept what you can’t control” being the prevailing theme.
The issue for me has been that while that advice is easy to hand out and to some degree I agree with it, it doesn’t say anything about how to reach that point of acceptance.
I’ve tried a lot of things to alleviate these panic attacks, and that’s as successful as I’ve been so far.
The answer: meditation and medication.
I visited a psychiatrist this year after a particularly difficult time and got diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. The doctor put me on a program where I started with natural alternatives, I was hesitant to try medication. But eventually, once it was clear that the natural remedies were not working, I put my reservations aside and tried the medication the doctor prescribed. And lo and behold, it’s actually helped. I don’t get the panic attacks as often and when I do they are not as bad.
There is only so much that medication will do for you however. My psychiatrist recommended I a read a book called “10 percent happier”, and this has helped become more aware about what goes on in my mind and what my body is trying to tell me.
> Are there companies where people are motivated by the company's vision or impact on humanity?
Check out any relatively young startup unable to pay FAANG salaries and you’ll find people who are there because they actually care about the work. You’ll also find people who are there purely for the potential upside when/if the company exists.
I think what you’re really trying to ask is: Are we all destined to end up jaded by the tech industry and in turn end up trying to maximize our salaries in order to get out as quickly as possible?
So far the only place where I have seen most of the employees give a damn are companies that hire mostly senior people, that pay above market and that are fully bootstrapped, so they don’t offer stock/options.
Once you reach a “senior role”, you’re going to be getting compensated well enough that slaving to squeeze a little extra money every year is just not a great return on that investment. So you either show up and just do work that you’re happy with and find fulfilling or you leave and build your thing.
It amazes me that FAANG companies continue to grow despite such promotion focused mindset among employees.
Being a startup founder is much harder than working at FAANG. You literally have to fight everyday to earn your right to exist as a company. You cant create some fancy slide deck and come up with some BS reason why you should launch something.
I love Stratechery, but I think this one gets it wrong.
Think of App Store as three products:
1. App quality screening
2. App promotion/distribution
3. In app purchasing
Ask any reasonable dev if they are willing to foot a fixed cost to get their app screened, a fixed cost per app download (bandwidth), and variable cost to get their app promoted in the store (not everyone needs this) and they would agree. What pisses people off is Apple’s entitlement to the revenue of a company when there is no value add from Apple after the customer has gotten the app. So Apple is using their monopoly to force #3 on developers at no less than 30% of revenue.
In my experience with the App Store this is not true for the vast majority of apps.
Only a very minor subset of apps actually get promotion on the App Store, everything else is so undiscoverable that searching the store with the app name verbatim isn't guaranteed to show it.
I am considering building some paid apps for the App Store.
If I had to deal with payment processors, handling subscriptions, etc. myself there is zero chances I'd do that.
Have you had bad experiences with other payment processors in the past? Honestly curious. I’ve used Stripe, and they are amazing in terms of product quality and customer service.
There are plenty of payment processor platforms other than Apple, if the mobile market was opened, you could checkout if Stripe better suits your needs.
I agree, Apple's approach forces one kind of value capture through in-app purchases, then they do a value capture on that value capture with the 30% take.
I'm paraphrasing Byrne Hobart here, but if they beefed up their App Store discoverability and had proper search functionality and a self-serve ad engine like Alibaba, their revenue model would reflect demand and then, finally, the Ubers and Facebooks would have to start paying significant amounts for all the free App Store support they've had this entire time.
The fact that digital content services like Spotify are expected to subsidise other companies with different business models like Facebook or Uber is indefensible IMO.
Read Job’s quote in the article, someone has to foot the bill to ensure the quality of Apps on the store. $100 a year seems reasonable to me for unlimited App screenings imho.
$100/year is peanuts. It’s a relatively token amount, designed to discourage “non-serious” players, like a minimum bet.
It certainly doesn’t make them money. It just helps to ensure that the people who do use their developer services are ones more likely to generate the revenue that does make them money.
This is something that Apple’s development community is known for. There’s fewer of them, but they do make money.
I’m not weighing in on the issue on either side. They each have quite valid arguments, and I’ll deal with whatever comes out of the scrum.
I agree, screening happens every time you submit an update, that's likely to be hundreds of dollars a time so thousands a year for many devs. Waiving this for free apps won't work because whether or not an app should be free is part of what this is all about. It will kill most genuinely free apps.
Have any of you heard of DocumentDB from Microsoft Azure? It is very similar to documentDB but It was specifically designed to have atomic transactions.
I think I have tried it or one of the derived / related tools earlier, and may have had some issues with it (maybe minor), but will try it again - thank you.
P.S. I don't remember if it tried its tmux-like feature (multiple virtual consoles without opening separate Windows GUI windows - if it has that feature), but will check for that.
