http://www.bhorowitz.com/what_s_the_most_difficult_ceo_skill...
I thought this sounded outrageous, but then it occurred to me: when was the last time anyone ever used telegrams? There can't be many uses of them - I've never used one in my entire life - and all the regular costs of a business still need to be paid and the couriers have to be paid and so on.
Thanks Justin (assuming you read HN) for writing these up.
My wedding website was hosted on the same server, so I thought I might as well delete it since the wedding was months before. Dropped that database. Visited my business website a few minutes later and it wasn't working. Apparently both sites were in the same database...
Called MediaTemple support and asked if they had a backup. They did! Support guy asked if I wanted him to restore it. Of course I do. He goes on hold.
He comes back on and says, "Sir, I'm sorry to say that the last back up actually backed up the blank version of the site so we don't have anything to restore. Is there anything else I can help you with?"...
After hanging up, I explained the situation to my wife and she just says, call back and ask someone else. The next support guy tells me that there actually is a way to restore an old archived backup, but there will likely be a loss of data and there will be a fee. Turns out the fee was only $15 and the backup was from the previous day, so no loss of data.
I'm still running the same site and I might soon be able to hire my first employee :)
My takeaways were to create backups, not monkey around on the database, and to call support back and ask for someone else to verify what the other person told me.
and then drive around the block a few times for their trouble.
- TaskRabbit: Post job, wait for bids, accept a bid, wait for driver to leave his/her house to deliver message, 2-3 hours later... profit?
- Uber: Place pin near address, request ride, driver less than 5 min away accepts, call driver with weird request. 10 min later... profit!
If anything, these are examples of why most of the stuff that you worry about in a startup turn out to be totally irrelevant in the final analysis. While we were stressing about the Jonas brothers, the "gaming" category was off languishing in its own little corner of the site....
"What happens when the Board Of Directors begins to panic?"
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-happens-when-the-b...
Score -1 for continued prudishness.
Which is just to say, there are reasons you might not want to have a policy of redirecting users to porn sites for money even if Techcrunch isn't shaming you.
And if you're getting 40% of your revenue from porn then you are an extension of the porn industry.
I've never heard this described so succinctly and perfectly!
> Because we were young and terrible managers, we had an “unlimited vacation” policy, which translated into passively discouraging people from taking vacation.
Let me give you one last example of improvising. The Justin.tv founders were having a lot of scaling issues in the beginning. One weekend their whole video system went down. Kyle was in charge of it, but no one knew where Kyle was. And Kyle wasn't picking up his cell phone. This was live video so it was pretty critical that this get fixed immediately.
Michael Siebel called Kyle's friends and found out he was in Lake Tahoe and got the address of the house. So here's a problem for you, you know the address where someone is and he's not answering his phone. How do you get a message to him right away? Michael went on Yelp and looked for a pizza place near the house and called them up and said, "I want to have a pizza delivered. But never mind the pizza. Just send a delivery guy over and say these four words: The site is down." The pizza place was very confused by this, but they send the pizza guy without a pizza, Kyle answers the door, and the pizza guy says, "The site is down." Kyle was able to fix it, and the site was down for less than an hour total from beginning to end.
So it sounds like they knew someone who knew where he was staying.
