wgyn

I’ll be interested to see how the merger goes. Although the products overlap, Fin <-> Agentforce and Intercom <-> Service Cloud, the Intercom/Fin stuff is mostly built for startups while the Salesforce stuff is much more enterprise. The play may be that Salesforce has the… salesforce… to bring Intercom to enterprises way faster.

really interesting direction! my company, assembled, builds software for customer support teams. i could imagine being on either end of this. on the one hand, we've built applications to run in the curated zendesk/salesforce sandbox. on the other hand, we get tons of requests to incorporate custom workflows or metrics natively in our application.

I think super highly of the Airplane team and what they've built. Startups are a tough journey, especially so over the last year. There's never a good way to shut down so the criticism isn't surprising and perhaps fair. But I doubt anyone's walking to the bank with glee. The best they can do is to try and do right by their team, their customers, and their investors. I hope they take another crack at it again in the future.

How feasible is it to build/launch your own probe? A la backyard astronomy.

Perhaps, but it's possible to invest in Google via the stock market. I'm not sure it makes sense to bake in the stock market performance of a public company when considering value of their "equity." It seems like you should be using whatever your standard discount rate (S&P 500 or NASDAQ)?

This is compellingly well-written but wrong, in my opinion. There's been a steady trickle of articles on the top of Hacker News that make essentially the same argument: your odds of choosing a successful startup are miniscule (2% in this one). I think this does people considering startups a disservice.

The conditional chance of picking a successful company to join is way higher than 2%, or whatever the median success rate of all startups is. In particular, I think really intellectually curious, ambitious, hard-working people can, for the most part, identify each other. This is really different from reading about valuations or what other people think in the news, which leads to a lot more noise. If you meet a bunch of people at the company, you can assess the their caliber for yourself.

While it's not a perfect predictor of success, it's at least the case that such people are usually working on cool, worthy projects. Based on this, it's possible to get conviction on a group before their likely success becomes common knowledge—granted it's getting harder to do this because of how much money is floating around.

To put it another way, there are a handful of companies out there right now at Series A/Series B with a dense accumulation of talent. It's probably a reasonable bet to try and join them before they hit unicorn valuations, when room for growth is smaller. And in these cases, you could be #10-#40 at a relatively de-risked company and have a really great outcome.

On the flip side, if you even remotely enjoy learning and autonomy, working at Google/Apple/Amazon/etc is probably a great way to set yourself up for existential frustration. It's not even a great financial proposition. Even at $500k/yr, it's 20 years—a whole working life—to make it to $10m, the hypothetical number from the article. Even if your first startup doesn't make it after 2-3 years, you can try again a few times and still come out ahead. This is a classic pg argument—I can't remember which essay—but the point of a startup is to compress decades of working life.

Caveat: I happened to join a startup whose success changed my life both financially and in terms of career trajectory. I'm very biased. But this is also why I feel passionately that this article's advice is bad.

Filling out questionnaires is such a time suck. It's extra painful because different companies use different standards (CAIQ, SigLite, VSAQ). Hopefully they solve the near-term questionnaire problem, but I'm also excited to see them eventually tackle the underlying problem—we want to prove to potential customers and users that we take security seriously, but right now it's prohibitively tedious and time-consuming to do so.

This was a great read. Allison Pickens is the former COO of Gainsight, so she definitely knows what she's talking about when it comes to Customer Success/Customer Support.

Think this topic doesn't get covered enough in the startup world, even though this is a direct quote from Sam Altman's Startup Playbook: "have great customer support."