I just went through it on my startup that has 3 people working on it.
>>You've got 276.5 out of a maximum of 330 points.
I think most startups with serious engineers on them will do very well on tech due diligence. I think most people complaining on here don’t really understand modern engineering or don’t fully lean into managed cloud services the right way. For example it is very easy to have geo-replicated database, automated backups/snapshots, auto scaling with functions.. on and on.
Then you try to do a 500k deal at some global 2k and you're not even in the running. Private cloud native (formation, ecs, ...) is starting to become a thing in enterprise, but for most of our enterprise accounts, even baby steps like docker swarm are a learning experience for them. But for some nonsensitive mobile + saas thing, maybe!
Yep, and yet, what a Californian knows is not what a Global 2000 does. We had a new Swarm user last quarter and another Global 2000 doing Mesos, both through their central IT. This month, a team trying us out with their new experimental Hadoop cluster.
I have seen the container implementations for hundreds of companies and I'm just pointing general out trends.
Swarm is used quite a bit on day one but generally phased out long before production. Mesos still has traction on very large deployments but fewer new initiatives start there these days --although there certainly still is investment here.
What is most interesting to me is that the longer a company has been using containers the more likely you see Mesos because three or four years ago kube was not the first choice like it is today.
... And those aren't ECS. I'm not saying ECS is unpopular, just what tech co's do 90% of the time is't what Global 2000 does 90% of the time, so know your customer.
It seems like these companies are fully over valued so now they need to come up with shit to push down people’s throats for the IPOs so the investors can get out at a profit.
This is what happens when VCs keep funding these loses for a decade. We saw the same thing with Uber, pushing Uber eats as if it’s going to take over all food, meanwhile there has been like 3-5 startups already doing that at a very easy to value valuation.
Anyway, I’m not buying.
Edit: I’m referencing the following from the article
>>”He is known for making bombastic pronouncements, like this one at an all-company event last year: “There are 150 million orphans in the world. We want to solve this problem and give them a new family: the WeWork family.” In L.A., Neumann told his employees that the newly formed We Company would now have three prongs — WeWork, WeLive, and WeGrow — with a single, grandiose mission: “to elevate the world’s consciousness.””
Thanks for the great posts and for responding to comments!
Would love some feedback on choosing to raise money or not. I read this post (and many others) about having those filters ready ahead of time. The filter on raising money unfortunately I don’t have, I keep going back and fourth on that.
I have been working on an app, cross platform iOS and Android, that lets people listen to articles from the web. It uses great sounding AI ML to convert the articles to audio you can listen to in seconds.
I have been working on it for a few months have some good traction and a few paid users, working on it part time as a side project. I can’t help but feel that raising money would allow me to go full time and really concentrate while still affording my bills. The issue is VC money comes with strings.
(Shameless plug for anyone interested, the product is here https://articulu.com )
Your website looks great. I didn't try the product. Can I ask how you did the design and UI of your landing page? Did you do it yourself or contracted someone to do it?
Hey listenandlearn. I like your site and app - I think they both look great. I tried out the app a few weeks ago and I liked it, although I didn't really enjoy the English accent of the reader's voice. Are you using Google's WaveNet? I slowed it down by 80% or something because I think the full speed is too fast. Amazon Polly's "Matthew" has been my favourite so far - less high frequency artifact IMO, although he sounds a little sedate.
I've been working blogreader.com.au, which has a very similar concept to articulu for the last few months, but I have recently given up trying to turn it into a business. I ended up stopping because of a pretty underwhelming response from potential users. Most people I've talked to in-person don't really care about it - they might say "oh that's cool", but they're not beating the door down to use it. My site has a _horrible_ bounce rate as well - but this could just be a problem with my landing page, rather than an intrinsic issue with the product. I've found the marketing really hard, which has been a positive experience. My primary concern is that our services solve a small problem for a large group of people. Don't get me wrong, I listen to an article every day using my own service, but my friends and family don't care enough to create an account, submit an article, etc. Meanwhile, people on Google don't appear to be searching for "listen to web articles", so finding motivated users online seems quite hard. I can't comment on your marketing because I found your service in my reddit thread or /r/podcasts. I will note that Audm and Curio are also both trying to get into the "listen to articles" space. I now look back at my napkin math of "if I can get 1000 users to pay $1/month..." and realise how naieve I was to assume that getting so many users was easy.
Another issue is that when a service only solves a "small problem", then people will only put up with so much bullshit - ie. the UX has to be pretty good. I struggled with this, although I found your app prety nice. In particular I like that you hijacked the "share link" functionality in chrome to allow a user to convert an article.
Finally, I've found that people hate paying for content - who knew right? Perhaps your freemium model will get around this, whereas mine was a little more aggressive about getting people to pay. I'm interested in the economics of your app though. If you're paying for the text to speech service (I assume you are - if not let's talk about that!), then you're operating at a loss. What's your end game? How many subscribers do you need in proportion to your free users to make this profitable? What's your model? I think it's a really interesting problem because you're providing a nice UX wrapper around a paid commodity service, and so if you charge too much you'll be undercut or lose users to free content, but if you charge too little you're losing money.
In summary I found the following problems with this kind of service:
- many potential users + small problem = lots of marketing effot required
- small problems = relatively high standard of UX, low friction required
- people hate paying for content, but the content costs money to produce
I'm really interested to hear your input on what I've said. Did you have the same issues? Do you agree with the problems I identified, or do you have a different perspective?
Things just keep getting better and better for AMD... it’s like once you have a little bit of luck things just keep snowballing from there.
They are on track to have an amazing year with CPUs that may take a very significant chunk of the cloud compute away from intel and then maybe even on the performance side.. it’s just fascinating that a company that almost died just a few years ago is now a big contender on multiple fronts.
This reminds me of AMD's launch of the 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird. People were shocked that benchmarks proved AMD dethroned Intel.
>The Athlon 1.4GHz is far and away the fastest PC processor you can buy. Well, OK, it's not that much faster than the 1.33GHz Athlon, but it's a heap faster than Intel's 1.7GHz Pentium 4. Through a range of tests measuring a variety of applications and abilities, every one of our Athlons from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz beat out the Pentium 4 with regularity."[1]
And history repeating again. It was a perfect Storm, Pentium 4 requires Rambus DRAM that no one wants and was expensive. The later Pentium 4 switched back to DDR but it was slower, which Pentium 4 in itself was already quite slow / not much of an improvement. Then AMD made Athlon Thunderbird, and later AMD 64.
It is happening again, Intel has been sitting on 14nm for 5 years, and now with many security issues and they won't be able to react with 10nm until early next year, and even the 10nm CPU will likely not have a hardware fix. Last time this happen Intel started a price war and FUD against AMD.
The timeline somehow always synced when AMD executed their plan to perfection and Intel somehow messes up at the same time. And then Intel woke up, last time it was Pat Gelsinger who saved them ( And later forced out of Intel ), and then somehow AMD make some missteps. This time Intel got Jim Keller, I hope Dr Lisa Su wont repeat the same mistake again.
Given that he was only at AMD for 3 years and now works for Intel, I wonder if AMD will be struggling again after Zen 2/3 -- I seem to recall he designed "multiple" Zen versions before leaving, but cant find any comments from AMD to that effect.
Regardless of who designed it, I'm concerned about how much progress Zen3 (and so on) can make. Zen was a massive leap, Zen 2 looks like it'll be a great upgrade, but can it go on like this? If not, what happens next? "AMD didn't absolutely blast Intel out of the water, so let's all go back to buying nothing but Intel."
Bulldozer was mistake that cost AMD years of advancements. They tried to do what Intel did a few years before. Design for clock speed and nothing else, figuring the 4ghz ceiling was easy to break.
Intel did this with P4 "netburst" architecture. They hit a frequency wall that made thier new deeply pipelined CPU worthless. This is when AMD caught up last time with the athlon series.
Intel actually went back to the design of the Pentium III!! With higher IPC, a few upgrades lifted from the P4, and new processes, it gave birth to the Core series.
The Intel processors we have today still share more design history with the P3 than the P4. And since then, Intel has focused on IPC over clock speed.
The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores.
The ancient Athlon/P3 IPC is amazingly good compared to today's chips if you scale them by clock speed and core count. Perhaps half, which is impressive for the age of the chip. All these bugs affecting over a decade of CPU design tells us these chips share a lot of the same logic, if not entire blocks unchanged for more than a decade.
I'm typing this on a Bulldozer system. It is still fine for what I need it for - mostly compiling software, and provided a lot more cores than the equivalent Intel CPU at the same price point.
Nobody's saying they were unusable. But like--I do video production and was pricing out my first live video mixer around that time. I was ready to throw down for a Bulldozer build immediately because of how wide the processor was and had to do the proverbial "hard pull up away from the mountainside" because of how bad the throughput was.
Instead, ended up going i7-875K -> i5-3570K -> Ryzen 1600 -> Ryzen 3700X (probably, this year). So like, I'm glad to see AMD back in the game, but Bulldozer was pretty rough.
I'm still using mine for gaming daily, obviously it's not high end, but it was $99 like...9 years ago? I don't remember when actually. I've been computing since I was young and it's the best value I've ever purchased. I can still do just about anything I want to right now.
> The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores.
I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz. So the only way to stay in the market was to hunt those GHz even if it meant some long term pain. After hitting the 3GHz/4GHz frequency walls consumers began to realise that processors are distinguished by more than frequency (obviously the lay person still doesn't quite understand but they're more likely to buy based on i7 > i5 than 3Ghz > 2.5Ghz these days).
> I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz.
No, AMD dispelled that long before Bulldozer, and even Intel had abandoned the GHz game years ago with the Core lineup.
You're thinking late 90s, Bulldozer happened in 2011. People got over the GHz mindset in the early-mid 2000s when the market told 'em we're now going to increase core count instead, and before that when Athlon labeled CPUs like 1800+ (it's not 1.8GHz but it's as fast as one!).
It's certainly not a great sign that less than 1 month before Musk is parading around screaming that they've got self-driving solved, the head of the project has jumped ship.
I would say that only the Instruction set is cross licensed, implementation techniques and hardware interfaces aren't (AMD CPUs shall not be compatible with Intel sockets, for example). Intel's SMT is known as hyper-threading, the patent has expired too but the name "hyper-threading" is still copyright protected and the property of Intel.
Yeah, once AMD was desperate enough to kick the MBA CEOs to the curb and finally put an engineer in charge, things started working better. Imagine that.
>My understanding is that they don't have the manufacturing capacity to ship this many processors, even if data centre operators wanted to buy them.
That is the current situation as they Fabbed on 14nm with Global Foundry, together with their GPU and APU. So AMD is completing against itself on capacity. Once they moved off GF to TSMC with 7nm Zen 2, things should [1] hopefully be a lot better.
[1] That is assuming the yields are good, and I/O chip's production will not let down by who ever is fabbing it. Current guess it would still be Global Foundry for IO.
I'm a fan of AMD, I hope they succeed. However, how do you figure things are getting better and better based on actual results?
Right now it looks like they're going to be reset back to 2017 numbers, losing the business gains they made in 2018. Their sales have fallen for the last three quarters in a row, quarter over quarter, and they barely turned a profit last quarter. Sales imploded by 23% last quarter year over year. When does the amazing year start?
You can't compare 2018 numbers to 2019 numbers without taking into account the intervening cryptocurrency crash. Setting that aside, their CPU and GPU sales have actually improved, even though both are nearing the end of a generation (and so are the console SoCs). The fact that AMD's still profitable even without cryptocurrency GPU sales is a pretty strong indicator of financial health, the likes of which they couldn't even dream of a few years ago.
Look at their own disclosures for 2019 H2 from their earnings statement - don't do your own estimate based on a linear projection of the last 3 quarters.
2019 is going to be an absolutely phenomenal year for AMD.
Once Rome and Ryzen3000 are shipping. They have been hyped so much & everyone is waiting for those releases, no point buying when it will be (probably) severely outdated in a few months.
> Things just keep getting better and better for AMD
I'm happy to hear that AMD does better with this. I'd already decided that I won't be buying Intel CPUs anymore, so I like that AMD is a reasonable replacement.
Persistent memory is going to a big thing in the cloud computing space in the coming years. Without an answer to Optane AMD is going to have a tough time competing with Intel.
That is assuming Optane is the only Persistent Memory solution. Micron, Samsung, all have something similar ( whether it is by technological design or function ) in the work.
Optane used to be very attractive when it promised all the performance at cheaper than DRAM price. But now DRAM price has sunk, and we will have to see whether 2nd gen Optane will deliver what Intel promised.
Persistent memory can greatly reduce application start-up time. In SaaS usage that's pretty important. Downtime during software updates is a big headache.
I absolutely love Audio Books, I think I went through maybe 25+ audio books, mostly non fiction, in 2018 alone. It is a fantastic way to maximize dead time, but generally I think non music audio is going through a sort of renaissance.
While the author of this post is really distraught about Amazons dominance with Audible I do think in some ways non music audio is much bigger than just Audibooks for example Podcasts are on the rise and at least for the moment they are totally open. I also think Amazons hold with audio books will be difficult to maintain especially as technology and AI gets better. Why pay them when a great sounding AI could read your book to you.
As a little shameless self promotion I have been working on a side project that does exactly this, it takes any Article or PDF from the web and converts it to great sounding audio so you can listen to it on the go. It sounds pretty good, and it’s a great way to maximize your dead time and stay informed on the go.
If you want to check out my project you can find it here:
I’ve been using your app for 2 months on the free plan after seeing you link it here.
The site dailymaverick.co.za which I frequent has built in AI-read voice for articles provided by a third party service. For some reason, Articulu fails to convert some of the articles, which curiously also do not have a converted audio for their third party service. The failure state is not very graceful.
There’s a couple issues with organising my recordings (there’s just a queue at the moment), the seek bar, continuing where you left off and renaming recordings.
Also why do I use up credits in the free plan when I listen to the same article more than once?
Thank you for using the app, sorry that your having those issues. I will look into all of those.
Any chance you can shot an email to [email protected], so we can see the account, and let us know if your on iOS or Android. Any of the Failed URLs will also be really helpful so we can make the scraping more resilient. We are working hard to add features that help organize articles better.
Sweet project! There's also https://curio.io which I stumbled across reading Aeon, and it's got high quality but pretty low volume of content so far (I'm sure they're working on that).
Sure I follow them but their issue is it’s human read articles which is why the volume is so low.
Articles unlike books are being produced in the millions everyday and so it’s really hard to find the best pieces to read over.. which is what they have to do.
I think there is room for letting people listen to anything and AI/ML advancements allow us to get pretty damn close.
>>You've got 276.5 out of a maximum of 330 points.
I think most startups with serious engineers on them will do very well on tech due diligence. I think most people complaining on here don’t really understand modern engineering or don’t fully lean into managed cloud services the right way. For example it is very easy to have geo-replicated database, automated backups/snapshots, auto scaling with functions.. on and on.