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Yes. Lots of people have built successful businesses with just a phone.

Best shared content on HN in a long time. I love the thoughtfulness and thorough analysis of the winners and losers of each strategy.

You should try to join an established later stage startup. Think about the skills that you have acquired and the experiences that you have been through. Very few people are able to start with an idea an execute a product. If you have experience selling to customers that is also a big plus. Later stage B2B companies are always looking for good salespeople as well as creative problem solvers. Your experience with the start up is a plus if you can frame it properly. Many of the people who I know that are now successful actually failed with their first start up. They were able to bring their learning and determination to help their current company succeed.

Look carefully at the number of jobs created. Some companies have less than 100 employees with >100 million valuation. I believe that Heroku had just 40. It’s amazing how small these teams are and what they are able to achieve.

Humans

I think that the Whole Foods acquisition now gives Amazon a physical footprint to compete with CVS, Rite-Aid, etc. Imagine ordering online and picking it up at a Whole Foods. After this step, they will find ways to fully by-pass the physical store and ship you medicine directly via Prime. There is a lot of money in the pharmacy business and a lot of opportunities for Amazon to enter this market and disrupt it. I don't think that any of the incumbents have the technological capabilities to compete with Amazon's supply chain. The question is not if they will enter. The question is how and how fast.

Some things to consider from this article.

1. Olin gives free tuition or reduced tuition leading to almost no debt. There is probably a positive correlation with not having school debt and starting companies.

2. Olin has a very small population size. The best and the worst cases can always be found in small sample sizes.

3. Schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, etc. have a wide range of students with wide range of interests. Most people do not go to these schools with the sole purpose of being an entrepreneur. There are many people that become doctors, writers, researchers, etc. and benefit society in other ways. Measuring just one narrow dimension may be understating contribution in other places.

4. Olin seems like a great place. It's small enough and independent enough to take chances in how it educates its students. Most older and more prestigious are more conservative in their teaching methods. Since Olin is fully endowed by one person with an open vision, they are able to do things that other institutions cannot.

They won't do that. The current arrangement with Google is quite good for both parties. It's not smart to start another battle with Google unless there is some to gain. 3 billion in profits is quite good. It's hard to imagine how Apple can make that much profit from their own search engine.

Sounds like a terrible way of doing work. If you are expected to react to everything sent your way you never get to do any deep and meaningful work. Furthermore, running around and firefighting all the time does not give you the time and space require to learn, reflect, and improve. More people need to think about the long term impact of their work habits.

He helps resolved complex litigation issues out of court. Litigation can take 1 to 2 years in the court and cost millions of dollars. In a 1-day session, he can resolve 95% of these cases and help both parties come to an amicable agreement. People's lives and time are no longer wasted in long drawn out court battles.

Just a side note, most mediators are former lawyers. After many years of practice, they seek a better way to resolve conflicts. The pay isn't bad either.

One more thing. Randy is actually one of the best mediators in the world. After the 9/11 attacks in New York, Randy was called in to mediate and arbitrate the case with the insurance companies and tenants. After 2 years, they were able to come to an agreement and the resulting funds allowed for the area to be rebuilt.

>"My startup had to deal with payment processing (at least initially before I pivoted) so I thought I needed it."

You generally don't need a payment processor when starting out. The first ~200k in revenue can be done manually. Payment processing is something that takes time to do and most likely you will need to tweak it a few time as you figure out your business model.

>Paying for dev/design work by hour for a new startup is an insane concept to me now. There are always gonna be bugs, something that doesn’t work, something that needs to be added, etc.

Tech products are very complex. There are thousands of bugs and edge cases that needs to be resolved for a high quality product.

>And ideally, especially if you’re a non-tech founder like me, PARTNER.

One of the worst idea is to have non-technical people try to create a tech business without a strong technical co-founder. Imagine starting a dentistry office without any prior knowledge or a partner who is a dentist. Imagine trying to start a restaurant without a chef, etc. Creating a tech business is not a get rich plan. It takes a lot of skill, knowledge, and luck to get a business off the ground. Unfortunately, the media stories that we read make creating a great product or fundraising millions of dollars super easy. The reality is that running a start-up is probably one of the hardest things that one can do.

Depends on what you want to do. Each language has an advantage in its own domain.

If you want to build for the web then I would recommend learning Javascript. You really can't avoid Javascript on the web so it is a good thing to learn it well. You can even learn Node in order to make it easier to set up a backend for your web app. The quickest way to get started with the web these days is to learn Javascript and use it with a Node server on the backend. There is a lot of noise in the Javascript community with tools such as React, Angular, Webpack, Typescripts, etc. that are very good for advanced production code. For a beginner, I recommend that you just stick with Jquery until you have to write a large codebase (>50,000 unique lines of code).

Python is just a pleasure to work with. I personally use Python to write code that solves math problems and to build small personal projects. Some people say that there is a problem with Python version 2 to 3 transition. As a new programmer this should not be a problem for you. Just start with Python 3. If there is a package that you want to use, it will probably be ported over soon. If you start with Python 2 then you will need to update your codebase for the transition which is neither fun nor worth your time as a beginner.

Ruby is a great scripting language. I think that many of the things that you can do with Python you can do just as well with Ruby. If you are already good at Ruby or know some people who can help you then you should go with Ruby. If you are new to both Ruby and Python, I would recommend learning Python since there are way more applications for Python (i.e., data science and machine learning).

Meditation and exercise. Sometimes the best thing for you is to focus on other aspects of life. Mediation allows you to deeply examine yourself and helps you think more critically about your life. Exercise improves both physical and mental health.