moises_silva

The 'you are doing it wrong' argument cuts both ways. Having an office does not magically make you more productive. You also need to cultivate an adequate environment to allow makers enough focus time and not randomly interrupted any time.

I suppose I can only speak from my experience. I can see definitely how many corp onsite environments are awful. There are productivity killers both onsite and remote and there are no absolutes. If we assume a 'good' remote vs 'good' onsite environment, collaboration is easier and faster onsite. Yes, you need to be very careful, and in my case we are super conscious of 'maker's time' and respect it with discipline.

I'm not sure I follow. Endless meaningless meetings is an orthogonal problem. Regardless of remote vs on-site, I try to avoid meetings without a clear agenda, purpose and inviting only relevant parties. Not inviting people just to 'keep them in the loop', we have meeting summary/notes for that. I encourage team members to decline meetings they do not feel will be valuable, exercising their own judgement and with an explanation to the organizer.

Yes I did not parse that correctly. Thanks.

> People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true.

How is it obviously not true? I mean. I love remote work. I started working remotely way before it was mainstream and I'm advocate for it. I've managed remote teams for many years too. Even so, I can't claim there's no performance hit. I just think the performance hit is small enough that in most cases the benefits for people and businesses outweigh it.

> This is true. As a customer, depending on the good-will of leadership to counterbalance the influence of capital is depending on humans, and even really good ones are fallible and temporal.

Well, I dunno, you always are depending on the "good will" of leadership. They could decide to squeeze every cent and provide as little value as possible at any time, whether they have venture funding or not. If your alternative is a "non profit", look at Mozilla, plenty of people unhappy with a lot of their decisions and users feeling "betrayed". I don't think we can expect most services to run as non-profits regardless. It's an imperfect system, but is the best we've got so far.

> From a consumer's point of view, once an organization gets in the mindset of optimizing for value capture over value creation and openness, it's time to consider moving on.

I'd argue this comes after the IPO. When you have millions in venture capital, is easy to keep running the business at a loss and keep growing. When it's time to make a profit is when things start getting hard.

I suppose this is what some people don't like. They'd like founders/businesses that stay small and focused on a niche, make money but not too much and keep a good value product running. Without looking at 1Password finances though, even when it was a paid service, we don't know how profitable it was, if at all, and may be going after enterprise customers with this new funding is the only way to not only 'break even' and start making some good profits.

Yeah I get this, I'm a paying customer. Not overly worried, as long as I can export and move on to another service. I used to be a LastPass user until 2yrs ago. I was replying to the comment about LastPass starting to monetize users (e.g limiting the free tier functionality even more).

Make the ids free? I've been out of Mexico for >10yrs but when I became 18 I easily got my voting id in Mexico, free of charge.

> For an adjacent example, LastPass never took a dime of VC money (afaict), but their structure as a for-profit company pushed them to lock down their product and charge rents, where they had not previously. If they had taken VC money or went public instead, it may have delayed the inevitable, but it only would have been a delay, not a solution.

I do not understand. It's a business. Why would anyone expect important services to be free? during ramp up there's a benefit of providing free or discounted services while you grow, learn what users want, estimate your own costs, etc; It was a free ride and you can enjoy it while it lasts. Why would anyone expect a free ride to also last forever?

In my opinion great products need a strong balance of capital and ideals. Capital incentives unchecked by a counter balance of leadership actually believing in the mission of the company can lead to bad outcomes. Pure idealism without adequate funding has another set of problems though.

Same here, all relevant results.

> At a meeting with Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla asked if our whole team was the meeting. Around the table was myself, our COO, our CTO, the very famous head of the studio, our CFO, our head of cloud and a couple of engineers. Our COO proudly said "Why no, there are 35 more employees back in Los Angeles. Vinod told him that our head count was about 35 too many and went on to explain his reasoning.

Do you remember what was the reasoning?

I truly do not understand this attitude and I can only guess comes from repeated exposure to an unfriendly environment. We're not talking here about exposing your soul to the world, a few words to explain why you want the smaller box would actually save a bunch of time and misunderstandings. Given how society works today, it's just easier.

You can always explain in a few words why, even without stating your actual underlying reasons. The clerk doesn't need all the details. This person clearly struggled more than he had to if he would have just provided a reason the clerk could understand. I bet his lack of social skills and perceived "stubbornness" were a much higher contribution factor to the clerk being puzzled and may be even thinking he was being stupid.

> Moving to an another country isn't for everyone. If you move to a richer country, foreigners are usually automatically treated differently.

I'm sorry this was your experience. It sounds however like a very broad generalization. It is not my experience at all for me and other friends that have moved to richer and/or more developed countries.