dunkelsten's comments

dunkelsten | 2 years ago

As a founder, I have three levels of responsibility. A responsibility for every individual I hire, which I respect to the maximum I can. On top, a responsibility for the team into which I hire an individual. On top, a responsibility for the company which I am building.

I've lost teams. I will fire any individual who will endanger a team by sabotaging it or not carrying the same weight as the others.

I've lost a company. I fill fire any team who will endanger my current org.

dunkelsten | 3 years ago | on: I worked at Google for -10 days

The larger the company, the longer the process. We got into Amazon as a supplier only because they figured it would take them at least a year until they would have hired the first person starting to tackle the topic internally…

dunkelsten | 5 years ago | on: The SEC “Modernizes” the Accredited Investor Definition

> * The SEC can designate professional certifications from accredited institutions as a surrogate for wealth --- to begin with, FINRA Series 7, 65, and 82.

It seems like an oddly American thing to me that investors can actually use wealth as a surrogate for professional certifications.

dunkelsten | 5 years ago | on: Stories and lessons from working with Jeff Bezos on the original Kindle

This seems to really be a pattern with Amazon. Their sweet spot is doing Zero to One by watching what goes off and then leveraging their size for a Second Mover Advantage.

Once something sticks to the wall, they are absolutely ruthless at getting it to product-market fit and commercial success, but interestingly enough, they stop there and all further development is merely iterative. They usually have some of the first decent and usuable products in any market, but tend to go for full commercial exploitation and pure maintenance mode from there.

Redshift used to be an absolute game changer for the Big Data market (I still remember their 1 TB for under 999$/month claim to this day), but Snowflake or BigQuery are just much better products this day and they never made the architectural shift from the client/server based architecture.

Prime Video is an absolute success story despite their awful interface, UX and crappy metadata, just because they got a grip on the hardware, smartly cross-sold it and bought / produced some good & free content.

I could go on and on, but it seems to be company core DNA to stop at 80/20. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm still unsure.

dunkelsten | 7 years ago | on: How companies use fake sites, backdated articles to censor Google results (2017)

Interestingly enough, this Torrence Boone guy working now at Google seems to have had lots of success keeping his #1 SERP clean. His LinkedIN tells us he worked as "Global CEO" at an unnamed agency before, he got zero recommendations, but is now Vice President at Google.

Now comes the interesting part: Google won't even autocomplete "torrence boone enfatico" — Shame upon him who thinks evil upon it...

If you've been wondering about the moral decline at Google, this is the kind of people they hired as top management.

dunkelsten | 8 years ago | on: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising

> But I only want just the _legitimate_ ICO ads to remain.

I‘m sorry to bring you the news, but there aren‘t any.

Oh, and just in case there are, the crypto ecosystem implosion happening this year will drag them along to the bottom of the pool together with all the scams.

dunkelsten | 8 years ago | on: Jailed for a Text: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups

Sorry to be the party pooper, but Advertisers can and do target individual users on Snapchat by simple means of uploading mobile Ad IDs.

So while Snap takes the high road here and tells people they're not bleeding or collecting information on their users (which is true), what they don't say is that still all the info that has been bleeding from mobile users through any other of their weather and emoji apps can and will be used against them in Snapchat Advertising campaigns.

If they didn't play along, they'd be quickly out of any media planners' heads, and they're already struggling hard against Facebook in the ad ecosystem.

Source: I do this stuff for business. Throwaway obviously.

dunkelsten | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

I'm a founder too and had a story similar to yours. There's much more to working at a company than cash and equity: Learning fast, good people around you, climbing up the career ladder much faster, freedom and autonomy.

It's just when you've got neither of these perks that you should start searching - because if you don't have that side either, you could as well go to a high paying corporate job. And then I'm on the side of the employees: Loyalty is important, but it's not a one-way street.

dunkelsten | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

Soundcloud is out there for several years raising rounds with great expectations (meaning high valuations) and still hasn't found a business model yet. They've lost a lot of high class tech talent such as Peter Bourgon. Users stay stagnant, no exit in sight. If you have equity, count it as zero, as latest at the next round, liq prefs will be so high there won't be much left for employees. If I were you, I'd start looking in any case.

dunkelsten | 9 years ago | on: The WhatsApp suicide

So this is what happens, if exponential progress collides head-on with a medieval culture thad had no time to prepare. Absolutely scary - and to me it rather looks like it's helping fighting equality and human decency rather than fostering it.
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