4 ms·

Denouement

112 points by philip1209 10y ago

cturlica 10y ago
Great piece -- good luck Philip!
apathy 10y ago
Thank you for doing this -- all of it. It seems like you've built up a tremendous amount of goodwill and I hope it will pay off for you, in what seems like a much more focused new venture. If you can capture 10% of Craigslist's reach without the sketch, you should be OK :-)
douche 10y ago
Bubble?
- tomhoward 10y ago
  If anything this suggests the opposite. They showed initial promise, raised seed funding, tried to grow, couldn't, so they gracefully wound down before they wasted any more investor money and employee time. This is exactly how things should work in a healthy economy.
forkLding 10y ago
Interesting to see mobius, looks like an optimization-model-as-a-service, very cool!
- philip1209 10y ago
  Yes - Mobius used a lot of the Gurobi API features, including tuning the model before deploying. It's a pretty vanilla use of their library. I'm more proud of the Autoscheduler algorithm in Julia, which uses a bunch of different models in a kind of Dynamic Programming approach. Check out its README for an explanation: https://github.com/staffjoy/autoscheduler https://github.com/staffjoy/autoscheduler
lewis500 10y ago
What a classy way to set your tools down. Also the new startup sounds great. Reading this made me trust this guy and want to work with him if I ever had the chance. I'm sure he and the rest of the team will pull off something good one day.
gsylvie 10y ago
What does this mean? > Control money to make money. In workforce management, I now realize that controlling payroll data is key. It’s tough to quantify the creation of value otherwise. My (fuzzy) interpretation: since we weren't integrated with the payroll/hr/accounting systems, we could not prove the efficiency gains our product was meant to bring with hard numbers. On the one hand I agree that integration with payroll systems is probably critical in this space. On the other hand, if your product brings a 10% efficiency improvement (which is still huge, not discounting that), it's still going to be hard to prove that, even with access to raw payroll data. Raw payroll data is probably too noisy.
- philip1209 10y ago
  What I meant is that we were not a key link in the workforce lifecycle chain. Without us, people still got paid. Our V1 timeclock product garnered a lot of interest because it directly led to people getting paid, and it integrated with scheduling to make it easy to tell whether records were correct. I now understand that many more established players, like Kronos, started with payroll as a core feature, then diversified to scheduling. How this lesson applies to my newco Moonlight - we're charging a transaction fee and managing payments, rather than doing something like a SaaS subscription model.
  - sulam 10y ago
    The challenge that I'm sure you're aware of is the risk of being disintermediated by your product (consultants) and/or your customers (people needing consultants). I'm not convinced the situation is impossible, but the history of such marketplaces isn't a strong recommendation for building more of them. I totally agree with the thesis that the future is remote work, but personally I would focus on ways to improve the notable problems about remote work as opposed to matchmaking. There are many people trying to do matchmaking, and not nearly as many focused on improving the challenges once the match is made. I suspect that's at least partially because it is hard, but hopefully your current direction will give you an unfair advantage when it comes to finding solutions to this hard problem. Anyway, first rate blog post and handling of a difficult situation!
protist 10y ago
> Good technical talent is hard to find. When in hiring mode, I spent about a third of my time trying to source and close candidates. Hiring a candidate through a recruiter can cost $20K or more. Good, cheap (and let's be honest, gullible) technical talent is hard to find.
dccoolgai 10y ago
What a downright decent human being. I like the part where he concerned himself with finding his employees jobs. I like to think this is the kind of CEO/Founder I would be if I ever start a venture.

112 points by philip1209 10y ago

Great piece -- good luck Philip!

Thank you for doing this -- all of it. It seems like you've built up a tremendous amount of goodwill and I hope it will pay off for you, in what seems like a much more focused new venture. If you can capture 10% of Craigslist's reach without the sketch, you should be OK :-)

douche 10y ago

Bubble?

tomhoward 10y ago
If anything this suggests the opposite. They showed initial promise, raised seed funding, tried to grow, couldn't, so they gracefully wound down before they wasted any more investor money and employee time. This is exactly how things should work in a healthy economy.

forkLding 10y ago

Interesting to see mobius, looks like an optimization-model-as-a-service, very cool!

philip1209 10y ago
Yes - Mobius used a lot of the Gurobi API features, including tuning the model before deploying. It's a pretty vanilla use of their library. I'm more proud of the Autoscheduler algorithm in Julia, which uses a bunch of different models in a kind of Dynamic Programming approach. Check out its README for an explanation: https://github.com/staffjoy/autoscheduler https://github.com/staffjoy/autoscheduler

lewis500 10y ago

What a classy way to set your tools down. Also the new startup sounds great. Reading this made me trust this guy and want to work with him if I ever had the chance. I'm sure he and the rest of the team will pull off something good one day.

gsylvie 10y ago

What does this mean? > Control money to make money. In workforce management, I now realize that controlling payroll data is key. It’s tough to quantify the creation of value otherwise. My (fuzzy) interpretation: since we weren't integrated with the payroll/hr/accounting systems, we could not prove the efficiency gains our product was meant to bring with hard numbers. On the one hand I agree that integration with payroll systems is probably critical in this space. On the other hand, if your product brings a 10% efficiency improvement (which is still huge, not discounting that), it's still going to be hard to prove that, even with access to raw payroll data. Raw payroll data is probably too noisy.

philip1209 10y ago
What I meant is that we were not a key link in the workforce lifecycle chain. Without us, people still got paid. Our V1 timeclock product garnered a lot of interest because it directly led to people getting paid, and it integrated with scheduling to make it easy to tell whether records were correct. I now understand that many more established players, like Kronos, started with payroll as a core feature, then diversified to scheduling. How this lesson applies to my newco Moonlight - we're charging a transaction fee and managing payments, rather than doing something like a SaaS subscription model.
- sulam 10y ago
  The challenge that I'm sure you're aware of is the risk of being disintermediated by your product (consultants) and/or your customers (people needing consultants). I'm not convinced the situation is impossible, but the history of such marketplaces isn't a strong recommendation for building more of them. I totally agree with the thesis that the future is remote work, but personally I would focus on ways to improve the notable problems about remote work as opposed to matchmaking. There are many people trying to do matchmaking, and not nearly as many focused on improving the challenges once the match is made. I suspect that's at least partially because it is hard, but hopefully your current direction will give you an unfair advantage when it comes to finding solutions to this hard problem. Anyway, first rate blog post and handling of a difficult situation!

protist 10y ago

> Good technical talent is hard to find. When in hiring mode, I spent about a third of my time trying to source and close candidates. Hiring a candidate through a recruiter can cost $20K or more. Good, cheap (and let's be honest, gullible) technical talent is hard to find.

dccoolgai 10y ago

What a downright decent human being. I like the part where he concerned himself with finding his employees jobs. I like to think this is the kind of CEO/Founder I would be if I ever start a venture.