Not OP but if I may, these numbers alone also does not necessarily indicate that you can successfully weather a downturn in near future or is well on the path to future success. Your headcount doubled last year and so did your revenue, maybe you doubled your sales team and the model won't scale further (I don't know what is your industry/product is so just speculating). Your revenue per employee is ~$114K, if most of these employees are in tech, maybe there is already too much bloat that you may need to shed soon if the growth does not materialize. If half of your customers just came onboard last year, maybe you are being too quick to boast a 117% NRR. NPS, Glassdoor and best place to work can also be dismissed as easily manipulatable stats.
I am not trying to dismiss anything or being cynical but just trying to point out that a lot of things goes into determining if you are a "good" VC backed startup. In my opinion, a smaller growth in headcount (compared with revenue growth) would have been a better indicator of a healthy startup.
For context the company is Floqast, accounting software SaaS. They raised $110M in July 2021 at 40x revenue (with an aggregate $93M raised over the 4 years prior). They’re proudly waving that Unicorn banner everywhere they can. 180 employees end of 2020 and 500 today on the way to 725.
CPLEX, XPRESS and Gurobi are the gold standard for solving an MIP of a meaningful scale (relative performance will depend on the specific problem but you cannot go wrong with either of these three). Unfortunately there is a big gap between performance of open source v/s commercial solvers in OR space. Type of problems I need to solve are usually unsolvable on open source solvers (very large scale supply chain problems). For smaller problems, OR-Tools or GLPK or CBC do work fine - but once you go commercial, there is no need to switch back to an open source solver.
My typical setup is using Pyomo for model formulation (gives me flexibility to switch out solvers with ease). I bundle multiple licenses using GAMS, it is more cost effective than purchasing individual licenses from solver companies.
The HiGHS open-source MIP solver is vastly better than Cbc now - and getting better rapidly - although we've got a way to go to be competitive with the best commercial solvers.
Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. Extremely well written history of Sackler family detailing their involvement in the opioid epidemic and inner workings of FDA.
Pretty much anyone you can pay to host a database, you can pay to back it up. Amazon rds, heroku postgres, google cloud sql... pick the service that works for you, and they have some affordance for backups. Backups are something I expect, rather than something I shop around for.
In my case I'm dumping + zipping the entire database at the application level. In my case is as simple as adding a library [1], scheduling the job and transferring to AWS S3 (my main application is on DigitalOcean)
Isn't this another blatant case of Google abusing its position of being the gate-keeper of internet and pushing its feature above the websites that exists with the same feature for years? Same as it has been doing for things like online calculators, weather sites, currency conversions and so on.
Worse is that they don't have to really play by the rules of SEO. Any other website with tuners or weather forecasts have to fill their content with keyword crap to get noticed even if they may not really add any value to end-user. But hey, Google can push it's nice little hobby feature to the top and bankrupt other legit websites. How is this legal?
I didn't downvote but I do disagree. I see this argument often, but in practice the Google widgets tend to be well implemented and allow me to get the information I want even quicker. That's exactly the purpose of a search engine. It makes me a satisfied user.
I really don't have a problem
with them denying traffic to other sites by providing users with information directly.
Agree that they are well implemented from user point of view, I use them all the time. What I do not like is that they do not have to compete with others, especially when it comes to search results. I didn't follow it in details but I believe they did get in trouble with Froogle in EU[0] for similar reasons. I guess in that case they were against big businesses who were able to fight it out but for snippets it's against hobbyist and small time one developer sites.
Not a downvoter, but I find this line of argument to be very poorly thought out.
Why shouldn't google be able to paste ads for its products on certain searches? Why shouldn't amazon be able to do the same with product searches? Why shouldn't apple be able to build feature X into the OS that's currently a category of app? It's literally their product!
We can't possibly have a conversation about "regulating algorithms" like google search until there are reasonable proposals about how to do so, and I've seen exactly zero -- so until then I feel I have to assume that people making this argument just want google to just stop changing, which is a death sentence in the age of the internet.
> Why shouldn't google be able to paste ads for its products on certain searches?
Because their monopoly in search business is an illegal advantage for the other business they are promoting. (Not my words - taken from [0]). I guess it ends up being what one thinks of one business v/s others. For me, content search should be a different business from content creation.
App bundling is another area where I side with un-bundling, something Google have had issues as well[1]
I have no intention of trying to have a conversation regarding "regulating algorithms" and such, just that Google should compete fairly with other content creation and keep search business separate from others.
So an EU commission thinks google should not be allowed to show you results from their specialized product search at the top of a results page when it thinks you're comparison shopping because rival comparison shop services can't do that? Because:
there would be a risk that a company once dominant in one market (even if this resulted from competition on the merits) would be able to use this market power to cement/further expand its dominance, or leverage it into separate markets
I mean -- yes. This is how many/most businesses grow. They leverage their existing dominance in one market to fund their entry into the next. Lather, rinse, repeat. I don't have a problem with that at all.
Is there kind of a slippery slope fear here? That if a business takes this to the extreme that they will swallow up all the other companies and then consumers will have no choice but to subject themselves to the abuse of this one company that has no incentive to treat their customers well?
Maybe that could happen, but we've never been close to that in the western world as far as I can tell. Until we get there, can we hold off on yanking the "government" ripcord? It seems to me whenever we've done that in the past, it's almost always lead to entrenchment of a particular business and not to more competition.
Also, have you taken a look at other comparison shopping sites? I mean, google shopping is far from great, but these other sites are just downright awful. Perhaps they should spend more time on bettering their product and less time schmoozing EU bureaucrats. And if they didn't do that, then certainly those EU bureaucrats have some more important issues to focus on that actually matter to the citizens they serve than inventing imagined "crimes of monopoly" that have zero victims.
The argument right now would likely be that it doesn't show up in the google search for "guitar tuner" and needs "google guitar tuner" to be found coupled with an assumption that this is how it will always be.
It's a fair enough argument. But they should make it in response not just downvote like so many google employees not wishing to engage with a discussion about abuse of market power at all. I think I tend more toward your point of view personally, what is now isn't what will always be in search engine rankings etc, but there it is.
Agree, I take back the specific example of tuner since it doesn't show up searching only for guitar tuner or such terms. But I still stand by other snippets.
You're assuming the downvotes are due to a difference of views, and not because your writing style hasn't found its home yet. It's not that most people disagree with the substance of your commentary - there's a comment with similar argument but with a different tone as yours, currently trending on this post - but that your writing has a natural resonance with the downvote button, similar to singing the perfect note to break a wine glass with sound.
> (From the article) I found that having a physical paper show up at my door made me more likely to read it.
So true. I had the same experience with magazines. Growing up, I would have a magazine in my hand all the time. Somewhere in between, I moved on to digital versions, but it just hasn't been the same experience. I also feel I retain information much better given that a physical copy has fewer distractions compared to 10 open tabs and banners and snippets and what not while reading online. I haven't bought a physical magazine in quite some time, maybe it is time to try them again.
I recently picked up a copy of a magazine from a Little Free Library and ended up reading it cover to cover.
It made me wonder if someone younger than me (I'm right on the line between GenX and Millennial) would have the same experience, or if they wouldn't be as interested in a physical copy because they weren't raised reading them.
Notion that supply chains are "old technology" is frankly part of the problem. That combined with the author's point of supply chains being emergent and not designed has made companies invest less and less in understanding and reacting to supply chain issues. It works fine during periods of slow growth and decline as that ensures enough time for supply chains to reach new equilibriums but we pay the price in disruptive situations like the one we see now. Hopefully, it motivates companies to invest in understanding the impact of uncertainties on their supply chains.
> [sic] Notion that supply chains are "old technology" is frankly part of the problem.
That is exactly it's fundamental problem, everything from bills of ladiing, to invoices to AR/AP is archaic and rigid, thus it's prone to severe strain under non-ideal conditions: couple this with the need for JIT everything to idealized forecasting and you can see why shortages are becoming the norm in a country run by an executive class that has benefited from making the World it's manufacture de jure via outsourcing for decades.
As a person that worked in supply chain for mega corps, I was lured back into the industry earlier this year, as some incredibly well paid jobs responded without solicitation as I applied to other non SC positions and to be honest SC management was never an 'easy gig' but swing shifts and 20-30 days with no days off are the norm now to catch up and I don't feel like burning out over something I tried to resolve in my own capacity.
Surprisingly, this is following Naomi Klien's shock doctrine fairly well and if this (in addition to it's egregious and belligerent behaviour in Xianjing, Tibet, Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan) is what it takes for the World to decouple manufacturing from the CCP then so be it.
I'm fairly certain I'm past the consumerist phase of my life as I find it entirely unfulfilling so I have no need for their trinkets, and I hope I can keep a stock of used computers and laptops around long enough to see the transition, phones are always going to fall victim to planned obsolescence so I keep that in mind and reduce my dependence on them when ever possible.
All in all, yes it's old, but only because it was made to remain as such and a certain contingent of people vastly benefited from this system as a result; I'm recalling the gas shortage in 2016 when oil tankers were anchored out at Sea waiting for the price to correct to make a profit, and this article of Seamen left and cast aside [1] with no pay shows just how remarkably foolish things have gotten during COVID for those hapless enough to need to be in the trenches when it comes to large scale logistics under this scenario.
Globalization gave us many benefits, a robust and anti-fragile logistics and supply chain network was not one of them, if anything it showed why vertical integration (or at least as much as possible) is a highly desired albeit costly expense, which won't always be seen as a priority to quarterly earning fixated execs and board members.
Amazon spent capital on building an efficient supply chain based on technology which is a huge entry barrier for any competitor. They did not use VC on exclusively providing any discounts. Uber, on the other hand, is using VC almost entirely on discounts hoping that users will stick around. Their product is essentially an app which has been replicated in every major economy with considerable success.
Agreed, except that it seems quite likely that users stick around. Where else would they go? The options seem to be an Uber competitor or taxis. Is there anything that will motivate Uber customers toward those?
Uber's service is more than just an app. They have operations teams in every market they operate in to onboard drivers, deal with local issues, etc.
How could it be the case that a traditional Uber competitor (eg. Lyft) could be cheaper, though? Only through venture capital. VC aside, Uber have the demand, which gives them the power to squeeze drivers.
Think of it from a driver perspective; if a competitor pays less than Uber and has less demand, why drive with them?
And if you think there will be a competitor capable of out-spending Uber using venture capital, think of it from the perspective of a VC; why pour so much capital into a business so unlikely to succeed against an incumbent when you could put it into the incumbent itself?
I think the primary risk to Uber's business is that of a self-driving competitor being capable of disrupting them; such competitors will have capital already, and will be capable of disruption through all the same ingredients that got Uber to where they are. Those companies would probably work with Uber at least at first, anyway. Uber will be at their mercy every time the contract needs to be renewed.
Sure, no one can compete with Uber now but Uber will eventually run out of VC money to burn and there is no indication that they will be able to maintain their market dominance once they are forced to increase their fares back to a reasonable level.
I am not trying to dismiss anything or being cynical but just trying to point out that a lot of things goes into determining if you are a "good" VC backed startup. In my opinion, a smaller growth in headcount (compared with revenue growth) would have been a better indicator of a healthy startup.