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I thought it's the opposite. Most of the things we could buy are pretty boring - stuff like Slack, wikis, HR tools, CRMs, customer loyalty, travel claims manage

by muzani 3y ago

I thought it's the opposite. Most of the things we could buy are pretty boring - stuff like Slack, wikis, HR tools, CRMs, customer loyalty, travel claims management. I wouldn't sign up for a fashion marketplace job only to end up making a HR tool for it. But I wonder if it's a front end vs back end thing, because front end are the peeps who also work on branding, marketing, etc.

withinboredom 3y ago
Some of the things we built in-house because it wasn't worth buying at our scale: - data lake and supporting tools (we fired over 100 million analytics events in a single day). - a/b testing software (assignment and analysis) - support software - email sending tech (we sent over a billion emails a month) - hr tooling (the company hired in over 50 countries) - payments integrations - probably other stuff I don't remember Basically, due to scale, these tools were interesting in their own right. Paying for them was either impossible (no off-the-shelf solution would be able to support it) or prohibitively expensive or both.
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  It makes perfect sense to build when you are at a certain scale. I remember talking to Citi's C-suite some time ago and their mentality is/was "we are an IT company that is also a bank". But! you have to be Citi (or the likes of your company - perhaps you are in Citi? :) where you can get the talent, pay them handsomely, and keep them motivated.
- muzani 3y ago
  Interesting. I wonder why most of these are being sold by startups and not the giants that use them regularly. I do remember a cool thing that some foreign Huawei guys I worked with used to use. It would call a ride sharing service, pick the more cost effective one, and then handle the claims for that. Presumably it checks that the location is work/home and only applies for such conditions.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    Scale and custom stuff. It’s a lot easier to hardcode things than build stuff for the masses.

by muzani 3y ago

withinboredom 3y ago

Some of the things we built in-house because it wasn't worth buying at our scale: - data lake and supporting tools (we fired over 100 million analytics events in a single day). - a/b testing software (assignment and analysis) - support software - email sending tech (we sent over a billion emails a month) - hr tooling (the company hired in over 50 countries) - payments integrations - probably other stuff I don't remember Basically, due to scale, these tools were interesting in their own right. Paying for them was either impossible (no off-the-shelf solution would be able to support it) or prohibitively expensive or both.

HenryBemis 3y ago
It makes perfect sense to build when you are at a certain scale. I remember talking to Citi's C-suite some time ago and their mentality is/was "we are an IT company that is also a bank". But! you have to be Citi (or the likes of your company - perhaps you are in Citi? :) where you can get the talent, pay them handsomely, and keep them motivated.
muzani 3y ago
Interesting. I wonder why most of these are being sold by startups and not the giants that use them regularly. I do remember a cool thing that some foreign Huawei guys I worked with used to use. It would call a ride sharing service, pick the more cost effective one, and then handle the claims for that. Presumably it checks that the location is work/home and only applies for such conditions.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  Scale and custom stuff. It’s a lot easier to hardcode things than build stuff for the masses.