cykho

Right on. It's the failure to build in the vacuum that is most upsetting to me. There is so much value in Twitter users' content that could be used in new and interesting ways. However, the company both fails to innovate on that front and prohibits its community from innovating. It's standing squarely in the way of progress :(

This is great advice - the socratic method is really key. It also helps to drill into the concrete details (aka facts) rather than staying at a higher subjective level.

I've also found it very helpful to write down the conclusion in a follow up email/slack. Writing helps people consider and rethink their commitments. It also helps serve as a record to self-correct in the future.

Big reason we have a broker is time savings - just have them handle it and get back to work. It took me under an hour to get set up with a broker. It took me longer than that to figure out what the Zenefits cost/benefit was.

The main driver of Microsoft's net income growth over the last few years has been all enterprise software (Windows Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint). Their CRM (Dynamics) is the #2 player in the market.

Acquiring Salesforce would enable Microsoft to dominate this sector (approach 50% market share potentially). Salesforce has done a great job of fostering an ecosystem of apps that rely on their data platform.

Microsoft can add value to the existing SalesForce product by replacing their cloud infrastructure. While pioneering this concept in the enterprise SalesForce's infrastructure is outdated and aging. Plugging the existing customer base and app ecosystem into Azure (or Microsoft's cloud at large) could be a huge win for both companies.

Net-net this makes a ton of sense in theory, but big mergers destroy value more often than not as they are extremely challenging to execute effectively (it's basically a multi-billion dollar corporate refactoring exercise).

An interesting outcome of the case discussion for this was that many king believed they needed to maintain control to be rich. This leads us to believe it's potentially a set of dependent variables rather than a choice between separate options.

My advice has always been if you're not willing to commit 3 years full time to coding don't do it. It just takes that long to be useful on a team. Instead, focus on whatever area you want to excel at and leave the engineering to the engineers.

I have no idea why they don't just move the control buttons to the bottom of the screen. The real estate is great - they just need to break the paradigm of sticking the most importance tap targets at the unreachable top of the screen.

1 - build an online portfolio of work (if you don't have one do personal/free projects to build it.

2 - go on elance/odesk to find some paying clients (pay is low, but easy to find). You can also use this to try different things and discover what kind of work you enjoy best. you can also call some technology consulting firms - they are always looking for talent.

3 - specialize in that area. tailor your website/blog to talk exclusively about that technology. between the inbound from your site and client base from consultant you'll easily be able to build an overwhelming referral stream.

Noone should sell to everyone :)

The cashflow amazing. A recurring license with a large enterprise means thousands of per-seat fees rolling in on a consistent basis. And larger enterprises are less likely to churn since they are more stable businesses and take longer to change either way. This creates a solid revenue stream which can be the backbone of your company's revenue.