crdb

76 ms·

571.
by crdb 12y ago
Well, the simple answer is don't have marketing interns. Really, you should not have people in the company manually doing work that could be automated in minutes - I've even seen people manually do joins (yes, two Excel sheets ope
572.
by crdb 12y ago
Well, customer data isn't stolen by actual hacking, in my experience it's humans. So many companies, particularly younger ones, have zero interest in putting up barriers to access as the company grows because in the early days, ev
573.
by crdb 12y ago
I've seen only three ways to make decent money in a still-technical position: 1. management (deciding what gets done and supervising it), in this case being the interface between the pure managers with MBAs and the developers, like the
574.
by crdb 12y ago
The issue is picking a winner. As Warren Buffett points out, there are thousands of bankrupt airlines and car companies. If you pick a loser, you wipe out no matter how well the industry does, as consolidation is inevitable particularly in
575.
by crdb 12y ago
I wasn't a programmer (finance background), and I learnt enough SQL to be useful in perhaps 20 minutes. Reading just one Date book [1] took me a further 3 days and allowed me to solve pretty much everything I've encountered since,
576.
by crdb 12y ago
I'll take a different tack. In my world (data) there is a lack of developers - or just people of any kind - with sound understanding of the relational model and its (only relatively correct) implementation, SQL. SQL is a very declarati
577.
by crdb 12y ago
No, these moves are extremely rare. The last one was three years ago - the day of the peg. I still remember it because the seemingly unstoppable crawl of the pair did stop - with a giant jump. The funnier story was how the SNB chairman&#x27
578.
by crdb 12y ago
Don't forget: they're "almost always" not the lead investor. They specifically will only look at companies with an existing investor. When I asked, Khailee Ng told me they used that as a filter (presumably instead of &qu
579.
by crdb 12y ago
My first "startup" was a Rocket Internet company where I knew I'd have little career future, that my pay would be way below market, and that I'd get no equity (I was fortunate that the person who recruited me was upfront
580.
by crdb 12y ago
Considering these guys were working with petabytes/day scale web stuff beforehand (guess that narrows down the previous employer...), I'm sure they'd know, and that quote was for part time work, not 16 hours a day. I know bot
581.
by crdb 12y ago
It depends on your definition of "rockstar" but your pricing appears high. To share an anecdote: I was having a chat with a HNWI who wanted to "get into startups" about the cost of launching a product that he was thinkin
582.
by crdb 12y ago
I was just at a conference where I had a nice conversation with a new, but already profitable company that builds face recognition for advertisers. Their customer base basically all wanted the same thing: to be able to target ads to the peo
583.
by crdb 12y ago
Hard data on decision making, and a better understanding of the way people think. The historical insights (including snapshots of how people lived and thought three or more generations ago) is a welcome bonus. So is gaining a better underst
584.
by crdb 12y ago
His book "The Volatility Machine" was one of the best I have ever read on global macro. Perhaps due to publication timing, it's managed to stay under the radar.
585.
by crdb 12y ago
Regardless of industry, a non-technical founder can still offer many things, including fundraising (whether via connections or hustle), sales, admin, the boring research like talking to customers, dealing with accounting, legal... (I'v
586.
by crdb 12y ago
We created a "Data Engineer" job (inspired by Amazon's name for the position) for precisely that purpose. The core schema behind Zalora (we sell clothes online) had over 5,000 tables and well, some of the stuff could definite
587.
by crdb 12y ago
+1, reading this fine on my home Starhub connection.
588.
by crdb 12y ago
Well, it was a bit tongue in cheek, but I was specifically answering: "I don't think the market for $70k assets that lose 90% of their value in 5 years is going to be too hot". The COE loses 100% of its value in 10 years, but
589.
by crdb 12y ago
Actually, Singapore has proven it can be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Entitlement The right to own a car for only 10 years has been bid up to about that. You can find cars with COE with less than 5 year
590.
by crdb 12y ago
2 solutions immediately come to mind for the restaurant: - sell tickets instead of taking reservations (Alinea's solution, which saw no-shows drop from 8% to 0.5%; it used to be done in London in the mid 2000s, I remember giving my car
591.
by crdb 12y ago
I'm not saying it was the only predictor, but we did have a candidate who solved the application task with a quarter (1/4!) of the code submitted by the next best, whose submission was already beautifully succinct. So, number of l
592.
by crdb 12y ago
Maybe the lesson there is not to hire in SF, if you can make a global (or even national) workforce work.
593.
by crdb 12y ago
We pay the same (and offer a Singapore visa if they change their mind). The method is pretty simple: we pay X amount of money and get Y (or more) amount of code "value" back, and try and keep Y/X relatively stable. Works out
594.
by crdb 12y ago
Location: Singapore (PR, citizen or VISA) or REMOTE Zalora is (still) hiring Haskellers, DevOps engineers and data scientists. We sell clothing online in 7 Asian countries, are almost three years old and raised several hundred million dolla
595.
by crdb 12y ago
It is (out of 120+ applicants, we had 1 PR and 1 EP holder, rest foreign) but it's also incredibly easy to import talent. Pay them enough for an EP, and you get the EP approved in hours if not days. In one case, the guy was in Colombia
596.
by crdb 12y ago
Well, there's at least two of us (at least publicly) since last year :P
597.
by crdb 12y ago
The gist of it is: if you have residency, it's a no brainer. Incredibly cheap and easy, the only issue (as anywhere not the Valley) is funding, which is still not at Valley levels or with Valley culture. This is changing as more entrep
598.
by crdb 12y ago
Oh, on that I agree, but it's hard to fight with an ingrained culture of ownership ("rent is dead money!") and cheap credit, and the income/price ratios have been consistent at least since the 80s according to people who
599.
by crdb 12y ago
Really? Our applicants came from Perth, Brissy and even Tasmania as well. In fact, the Sydney ones were cheaper. But we target people with around 5-10 years experience. I would say if x is the market value of a Singaporean developer, Austra
600.
by crdb 12y ago
To nitpick: - Australia is only competitive against the Valley, but that's like saying New York super premium real estate is cheap because those penthouses go for 30m vs London's 100m. We hire globally with half the team being rem

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