zaguios

The offer was for $3 billion. They are worth $24 billion today…

In absolutely no world would have taking that offer been the right decision.

Uh, are we living in the same world? Javascript completely and fully dominates the web, he couldn't have been more wrong about how the future would turn out.

That's exactly my point, this makes the dark pattern calling the action "cancel" instead of disabling auto-renew? In general when I see the word cancel on the web it typically gets rid of something instantly.

I disagree about the point regarding "turn off auto-renew". This actually makes way more sense to me than "cancel". When I read "cancel" I am always worried that I may lose my current access that I paid for. When I know I am simply disabling auto renew I know that I will still have the remaining access that I paid for.

These companies do a lot of dark patterns, but you stressing things such as this and others really discredits your otherwise valid argument.

Devise does integrate with SSO, but you still have to set everything up yourself for all the main providers which takes a good bit of time with a lot of custom frontend work needed and a bit of extra backend as well. It would be nice to have SSO out of the box without the need for a bunch of manual setup which was kind of the promise of this bullet train thing.

This doesn't really have the types of features I would personally want as someone who has done a lot of rails development in the past.

The types of things I tend to need to set up in any modern app is SSO integration, React integrated on the frontend, etc... These are annoying things I have to integrate every time I build something and are more or less industry standard at this point.

I’ve personally had nothing but terrible experiences with Western Union. In contrast, sending money with crypto (not Coinbase which is a nightmare centralized layer which defeats the purpose of crypto) has had 0 issues for me.

The author is confused. The point isn't to have every little thing decentralized (though there are plenty of tools in the space to do this if you desire). The point is so that different centralized entities can build on top on the decentralized data in a way that can be trusted.

If I want to build my own decentralized exchange allowing people to trade their tokens I can without the permission of anyone. If I want to create my own NFT marketplace to compete with Opensea I can without the permission of anyone.

Yes, it costs money to do things on chain. That's the part you sacrifice, the benefit you receive is the fact there is no single point of failure. If a crypto exchange goes down it doesn't make the price of cryptos go to 0. Even if they were all taken down simultaneously you could easily spin one back up pretty quickly. Web3 is simply a tradeoff of cost vs openness & robustness. Most things have no need for Web3, but it certainly has it's place for certain types of projects.

Not OP, but I've visited several cities in China including Changsha and it's definitely one of my top 3 cities. The food and club scene there stood out to me in particular.

Employees are able to override the pin entering requirement. There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop this from happening if you happen to get targeted. (Speaking from experience)

SwiftDemand is a digital basic income where people can sign up, claim their daily stipend, and user their new currency to transact with one another. We earn a small cut of what each user receives as well as from transactions made through the platform.

A little more info on the revenue model:

There are 2 main streams of revenue, the first comes from transactions on the platform in which SwiftDemand receives a fee similar similar to that of Amazon. The second is that SwiftDemand receives Swifts for each identity that it manages (payed by the protocol itself). If we continue our growth we think it's more than possible to get 100 million users on the platform receiving $1-$10 per day generating around $0.10 to $1 a day in revenue per user that would put yearly revenue in the 10's of billions.

More details and justifications:

The first thing that needs to be understood is that there are essentially two separate pieces. There is the underlying Swift Protocol and then SwiftDemand itself. The Protocol is essentially a decentralized government with 3 components, Swift Citizens (regular people), Delegated Nodes (elected officials that have voting power and can forge new blocks), and Identity Providers (companies that can approve Swift Citizens and are responsible for preventing people from creating fake accounts). SwiftDemand is an Identity Provider that sits on top of the Swift Protocol.

SwiftDemand is incentivized to bring more people onto the platform since Identity Providers receive Swifts for each Swift Citizen that they actively manage. Identity Providers are also kept in check by the Delegated Nodes as they have the ability to remove Identity Providers that act poorly. If an Identity Provider did not have the motivation of profit, people would be less likely to create competing providers fostering less competition which would lead to a weaker ecosystem. We believe having a capitalistic system that is kept in check by the decentralized government is the optimal strategy to make the Swift Protocol successful.

To the numbers. We already have nearly 500,000 registered users with Swifts currently being value at somewhere around $0.001 to $0.005 based on transactions in the marketplace. User growth should remain relatively easy as our pitch to consumers is simply "sign up and receive free money" and we have achieved our entire userbase without any paid marketing. The trickier part is growing the economy part to the point where the value of Swifts can increase to $0.01 to $0.1 per Swift. We already have over 5,000 submitted products on the marketplace (mostly people that believe in SwiftDemand selling personal services), however our intention is to partner with bigger companies that can utilize our userbase essentially to give out promotional offers and consequently transition that into a larger economy over time. Based on our early adoption these numbers aren't unreasonable and should be more than achievable making SwiftDemand a strong investment opportunity.

To answer your other question:

- Why would people pay non-Swifts to buy Swifts?

Unlike most other currencies we're not really focused on getting people to trade between Swifts and non-Swifts. Our goal is to create a new currency with a fair distribution model. Our vision is to have people collect their Swifts, use their Swifts to buy goods and services that interest them, allow people to sell goods and services to receive more Swifts, and essentially create an entire economy without any need to convert their Swifts to non-Swifts or vice versa.

Other:

I'm curious if you have any suggestions on a better way to pitch the business opportunity to investors (YC and other). The consumer pitch is relatively straightforward as the value proposition is clear, but I do think I struggle on the investor side.

Here is the rejection email:

"Unfortunately, we've decided not to fund SwiftDemand. We were really impressed with the number of participants you have on the platform and the fact that people are doing transactions. However we struggled to convince ourselves that there was an underlying big business here. If this is going to be something that is economically meaningful to people to allow them to live on it, then it would be hard to for this to also be a billion dollar company and would probably be better suited to a non-profit."

The email shows two big misunderstandings in how SwiftDemand works. It's on me for not temporarily taking control of the interview once I realized the lens they were viewing SwiftDemand through.

This is meant as more of a disclaimer than a selling point. A small portion of users sign up, collect their Swifts and are then confused why they can't directly withdraw them in USD. We can probably change the language to be more positive while still conveying that point though.