fitandfunction's comments

Pretty common. At mid levels (senior manager, director), base is ~50% of total. At senior levels (VP, CxO), base is less than 25%. At the extreme (CEOs of major corps), base is negligible (e.g. Costello's base is $14k out of a total of ~$8.7 mm).

The stock price has been driven by share buybacks, and the appreciation of Alibaba.

It's more accurate to say that financial markets, past acquisitions, and activist investors have driven up the share price.

That said, the share-price uptick has extended her "honeymoon." Hopefully, all of these acquisitions, cultural changes, etc. add up to something.

Agreed.

The obvious move for FlightCar is to partner with nearby garages, and offer a valet service to drive passengers to their terminals. To sweeten the deal, FlightCar might offer to wash or do basic maintenance (oil change) on the car for an added fee.

The passenger gets

  - convenience of getting dropped off at terminals (vs. walking from airport parking)
  - convenience of taking advantage of car "dead time" to get cleaned / serviced
  - some money (from the rental), to boot

No need to point to projects that are based on tutorials. Lots of githubs are nothing more than that at this point.

If you're going to go the coding route, put up a working page, publish a blog entry about it, publish a working app, etc.

The key is to show effort (I spent time on this) and relevancy (I'm solving a problem that you might care about).

Technical skills aside, the best piece of advice in the article is "show them that you want it."

I've conducted countless interviews / hires where it basically went: candidates P & Q are the best on paper and in person, but candidate P said x, y, z or did a, b, c, and seems to really want this job and work in our company

x, y, z was sometimes as simple as enthusiasm, and other times was in describing what he/she did in their spare time. a, b, c was usually a project for work, school or fun that was highly relevant.

Intellectually, I think I know that "enthusiasm" is a poor / weak predictor of success. But, emotionally, it's a go-to tie-breaker.

It's not just small companies.

I worked briefly for a mid-sized tech company that took a >$70 mm round, but will likely be out-of-business before year end. Like Ecomom, it is helmed by a "visionary" / fanatical leader with a "grow at all cost mentality."

To me, a big red flag is when senior managers make plans without both revenues AND costs being openly discussed.

Exactly. Problems with production databases are inevitable. It's just a matter of time.

The guy who should be falling on the sword, if anyone, is the person in charge of backups.

Better yet, the CEO or CTO should have made this a learning opportunity and taken the blame for the oversight + praised the team for banding together and coming up with a solution + a private chat with the OP.

Why do you think past efforts haven't "panned out" yet? Is it:

a) they're working on it, but just not there yet

b) the major EHR do everything in their power to delay progress by providing token access

c) it's actually very hard to sync medical records across so many different standards / systems

d) not enough patient / doctor demand / use-cases, i.e. people don't transfer as much as we think they do, diluting the value of inter-operability

? or something else? all of the above?

This area of HIT fascinates me because I hypothesize that it's a necessary precursor to reform. But, knowing little about the space, I'm not sure where to start my investigation.

This is a dream for retailers. "Augmenting" the in-store shopping experience has been a non-starter. Want to get product reviews and more info about this item? Well, why don't you pull out your phone, turn on the barcode app and scan the barcode. Now, you could ostensibly look at a item and get relevant additional information on-screen.

Yeah -- It's definitely by design.

It's also by design that milk and bread are in the back corners of the store.

But, ecommerce makes this disdain for the shopper unsustainable. 10 years ago, if you're store sucks, you don't really have a choice. Now, if you're store sucks ... well I can buy a majority of the stuff I need through Amazon, Diapers.com, etc.

So, could HelpPing be a timing play? Helping change stores right when they need to change ... so that they can survive to 2020?

This sounds too theoretical even as I type it

The "prototype" you see in the video is actually a Staples Easy Button with a piece of paper taped over it.

You don't like the shape?

Ha! I like the second "story."

Btw, I think it explains the lack of user traction of apps like Aisle411, ShopKick, etc. They take too long to use and they don't "fit" well with a shopping trip.

What keeps us churning on this space is the magnitude of the $ spent. $1.4T spent annually in low-service stores (e.g. Walmart). These formats have minimal shopper-facing technology (lots of great supply chain stuff) and have evolved slowly.

So, that goes us thinking ... so far, still thinking

Yeah. Thanks for that. We've done some of this and we're seeing (a) or (c).

We've kept going because we "feel" that there's something to be "fixed" inside a store.

For example, discovering new products inside a store is really painful. Typical "big box" stores are >100,000 sq ft with >100,000 products.

Want to find a "healthy snack that taste like wheat thins and goes well with cheese"? Well, we have a wall of a 1,000 products. What you're looking for might be in there somewhere.

What do you think of this related problem?

You make a good point, and candidly, we're not sure. The crux of the problem as we see it is that:

- If you enjoy shopping, you're probably pretty good at it, and don't need a lot of hand-holding.

- If you don't enjoy shopping, then a store is a bad solution. A better solution is "don't go to the store at all, we'll ship you the stuff," aka Amazon

What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this? i.e. Willing to go shopping, if stores can just make it bit easier when you get there.

Thoughts?

One of the problems we're running into is that this problem (need for location and advice) does not seem to be an acute problem for users. In other words, most people are bothered by it, but not bothered so much that they pull out their phone to download an app.

What's HN's thoughts on this?

Should we keep searching for users for whom this is "a hair on fire" problem? or, try to find a different related problem that's more painful (for more people)?

There are apps that handle different parts of this, e.g. Aisle411 for product location, AisleFinder, etc.

But, in our early tests, what we found is that shoppers quickly move from "where is x?" to "what do I need for y?"

Our general hypothesis is that you need both machine learning / automation + human agent to create enough value for the shopper that they want to come back

Thanks. We've dropped the "OnStar" adjective.

What do you think about the "Instant Chat" analogy?

We've seen this to. Target has been particularly good about doing this.

Have you used the current solutions? What did you think of them?

1. Make it short 2. Add a link to your domain 3. Add getClicky to your domain

A large number of readers will click on your link. As a recipient of some of these emails, I almost always click on a company name just to get more info on the company. So, if you keep the message tight, you can usually see if they read the email because there's a hit on your website.

sobered, frightened, confused, sad.

I had a chat with Jody last month, and every indication was that he was "crushing it and loving it."

It could be that I'm really shitty at reading other people, but I remember thinking, "wow, someday, I want to feel what Jody is feeling right now."

I was drafting an email to him yesterday ...