tbrooks

Transparent in retrospect is not, in fact, transparent.

I'm shocked no one has mentioned Close.com

I've been using it for close to ten years and can't imagine using another CRM.

I believe they were an early YC company as well.

Yes.

What does Twenty do that Close doesn’t or can’t do?

(I’m a huge Close fan.)

I've long wondered why there are no college courses on sales.

Almost every company has a sales department and there are tons of careers in sales, yet there is no formal path to learning in higher ed.

Does RDS require a lot of maintenance and management?

No one on our team has DevOps or DBA experience -- we feel good about Heroku PG (even as inflated prices).

“Letting this narrative persist”

As if it’s in their purview to control. Ask the poor PR folks at CFA (chicken QSR)

I wonder if the author’s primary gripe is with

1. VCs funding a so-called “servant economy” or… 2. The fact that there are these businesses that perpetuate some form of servanthood (to use the author’s parlance)

If the gig marketplaces were bootstrapped, is there still an inherent problem?

I've thought about this, but I wonder what the UX is like.

You always show success? What sort of confirmation does the user get? If the card is declined, how do you notify them later? Would that notification confuse them?

So many things to think about.

You would have the same sort of downtime as Stripe today.

But the tokenization wasn't failing for us in today's Stripe downtime -- just the API requests.

This is where solutions like Spreedly and TokenX make a lot of sense. Once the payment method is stored in their vault, you can try (and retry!) payments on multiple gateways.

There also does not appear to be a front-facing camera on the display.

A lot of businesses don't have the luxury of positive cashflows that software businesses do.

There are a lot of factors that would contribute to running a business without a month's cash on hand. But I wouldn't say that the business owner is _seriously_ incompetent.