vnorby
Joined 18 years ago
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830
Submissions
176
Member since
Aug 14
YC Badge: 0x109cce29b051fd7360f99e34cf9cf1938c747e09
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Comment · 11 years ago
In 2013, Amazon had 65% market share of online book sales [1]. It wouldn't surprise me if this was 20% higher now.
When customers walk into a Barnes and Noble (or any bookstore) and browse books but don't buy (for example, because they found a cheaper price online), they are most likely to end up on Amazon to complete the purchase. B&N did the work but Amazon got the money.
Amazon doesn't have that problem. They don't need to sell books in the store to "pay the store's operating expense" - they just need people to come in and browse.
Currently, Amazon doesn't compete for a high percentage of books (50%) moved through physical stores [2]. They are in the enviable position of being able to create stores that don't leak sales to competitors. This is the final nail in B&N's coffin.
[1] http://www.thewire.com/business/2014/05/amazon-has-basically...
[2] http://www.dailydot.com/business/ebook-sales-2013-revenue/
Comment · 11 years ago
Stealth mode company | San Mateo, CA | Full Time
We're looking for our first non-founder engineer to join a small team backed by leading VCs and angels. We're working on something amazing and different from most software companies in a huge market. Our founding team of 4 is out of Nest Labs/Google. We're looking for a full stack engineer or front-end web engineer to lead our web team. Market compensation and huge equity stake for the right fit. We're a Ruby on Rails shop with single page apps built on Backbone and React. Please email me at vnorby at icloud dot com.
Comment · 11 years ago
I worked at Nest on their professional distribution channel for some time. The thermostat market is dominated by professional sales (80-90% are sold and installed by professional HVAC contractors) whereas Nest traditionally sold through to a consumer/DIY audience. Nest has a very steep uphill battle against Honeywell the way Apple has had an uphill battle against Windows in large enterprise. Nest just has more mindshare amongst the tech/early adopter community.
Comment · 12 years ago
Not to keep harping on the subject (see my comments above), but pre-warming or pre-cooling houses is actually a really great solution to solving our energy problems with algorithms. It's not strictly a "first world" problem.
Imagine a neighborhood of 100 homes where you know all 100 people will return approximately at 6pm in the winter, and they all want 72 degrees. Taking into account the insulation of each home, if you could pre-heat the homes on a rolling schedule (say, heat 25 of them to 75 degrees at 3pm, accounting for 1 degree of heat dissipation per hour, heat another 25 to 74 degrees at 4pm, etc.), you will actually in aggregate save a lot of energy and cost because of inefficiencies in the way we deliver and generate energy during peak times.
(@yitchelle - central data center)
Comment · 12 years ago
Wasting/saving energy is not as simple a calculation as that. When energy is at peak use (say in the winter, around 5:30/6:00 when everybody returns from work), it becomes more expensive for energy companies to procure the requisite energy needed. During these peak times, they often have to buy energy from other companies at a higher cost or find less efficient means of generating it (e.g. coal) to meet the demand. Getting an accurate picture of estimated energy demand can actually save a lot of money/energy for customers.
I work at Nest and it may be a little unclear at the moment (we're working on it), but The Nest API does not guarantee that if you send an ETA of 15 minutes (docs: https://developer.nest.com/documentation/eta-guide), the home will heat to the appropriate level in 15 minutes. It's actually filtered through our algorithms to determine the best course of action to not waste energy but also provide the appropriate level of comfort.
Comment · 13 years ago
I would be extremely cautious about #1 (replacing PNGs with CSS3 transforms and drop shadows). Your page load time may decrease but your website performance will suffer. For example, when we swapped out CSS3 box-shadows for repeating PNGs with the same color gradients/transparency, the scrolling performance on our page increased dramatically. I would also say from a design perspective, the 2nd Book of Mormon browser-rendered transform looks significantly worse. The edges are not being anti-aliased.
Comment · 13 years ago
This can turn out not to be a problem if the startup hits some reasonable growth (growth is usually a solution to such ails as long as it continues).
This is the important line in the article. Co-founder breakups probably happen more because the startup is not doing well, and not vice versa. I'm not sure if it makes sense to try and optimize for not running into co-founder problems as much as just optimizing for your company's success as normal.
If your company is killing it, and you're a co-founder and you've got 10% and you want to be the CEO and your grad school dropout grace period is ending and you'd rather be working on technical problems, you're most likely going to stick it out regardless.
Comment · 13 years ago
Mountain View, CA - Full-time iOS/iPhone/iPad developer on-site only
Origami.com (formerly known as Everyme) is a YC-backed (S11) startup building an online home for families. We are 8 people (5 eng, 2 design, 1 biz) that are passionate about helping families and loved ones communicate and store memories for generations. We are a subscription-based service that is launching soon and already has a passionate base of beta users. We also operate Everyme, a private social network with over 300,000 downloads.
If you're interested, please email me with information about yourself to [email protected] and I'll get back to you right away.
Comment · 13 years ago
I don't think it's fair to bunch all 400+ Y Combinator companies together like this. You'll probably find good and bad benefits packages with the same frequency across all small startups. Y Combinator certainly does not get their hands dirty in the operational, HR, or recruitment strategies of their funded companies; that's really up to the founders.
Perhaps what you want to say is that you don't like the benefits packages that startups with young founders provide, because they don't understand what a more senior engineer expects on that side of the compensation equation. That might be more fair.