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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread, Jul. 20 - Jul. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There is an interesting startup that is about trying to turn cities into villages by trying to make neighbors help each other. You need to verify your address via a scanned document, a neighbor or a a code on a postcard they send you. I think the primary reason they find that verification important is that people are allowed to see the full name, picture and address of people in their own neighborhood. And probably they don't want to share that with people who are not actually neighbors. This seems to be key selling point of this startup - this is how it differs from any basic neighboor based Facebook group, that you really get to see each others face, name and address and people outside your hood really don't get to see it so you can be fairly comfortable about sharing it. Besides you can choose a few categories how you can help others e.g. babysitting, petsitting etc. and what kind of common activities you would be interested in.
Here is the bad news: the startup is currently only available in German and only in the city of Vienna, probably due to the postcard thing. They managed to find investors so it is likely they will have an English version and extend it all over the world, in that case they will probably change the name as well, currently the name is fragnebenan.com But I have no idea when will this happen.
Anyway, I was thinking primarily that Rationalists in Berlin may take an interest in this and help them extend fragnebenan.com to Berlin?
Why do you consider that to be a high leverage action?
I don't fully understand what high leverage means here, I just think it is cool and helps people to help each other and extending it another 3.5M people would be rather neat. I think they want to do it anyway, it could be easier if they have local contacts who have learned some methods of efficiency here and tend to like startups.
"Help them expand" suggests that you propose to spend time on energy on promoting it.
It seems to me like the website only accepts people from Austria anyway.
No, I meant helping them in programming or other stuff such as the postcard stuff to be able to offer it elsewhere. Sorry if I did not detail it, I thought it is obvious: if you like the idea, consider joining them as bit later co-founders (the whole thing just comes from Nov 2014), as part owners, investors, investing sweat capital mostly, that sort of stuff, the usual startup story.
Or maybe that is not so usual, I have no idea, but I was just thinking if someone calls them and tell them I will help you expand your customer base by 150% if you give me 10% or some other arrangement, this is fairly common for startups?
Actually helping them in programming and stuff like that is investing time and energy. I do focus programming time on things I consider high leverage.
You actually live in Vienna and there programming team is in Vienna and not Berlin. You frequently say that you don't feel that your job has any meaning. You can program.
If they just managed to find investors they are likely not looking to raise more money at the moment. Even if they would looking for capital there nothing specific about the LW Berlin group when it comes to providing Angel funding for an Austrian company. In that case it also makes sense to argue why that investment better than various other possible investments.
All good points. Also you think there is not much location advantage in extending the service e.g. negotiating a low postcard price with the German Post and so on?
I will not leave a safe job for a startup (I would have considered that before we had a child, now it would be irresponsible) but I do consider contributing in the evenings, this is seriously something I could believe in.
If there are meetings you buy a plane ticket. Vienna isn't that far from Germany.
When it comes to negotiating the idea is to hire a good salesperson. Most of the people at our meetup are coders who's aren't highly skilled salespeople. If I would hire for that role, I wouldn't pick a person from our LW group.
Today there's nothing like a real safe job. All companies lay off people from time to time. Working at a job that you like is very useful. It's beneficial for the child to be around a dad who likes his job instead of a dad who hates his job.
The difference between a job that pays a fixed salary already vs. a startup that may pay dividends or something i n the future if it does not fold is fairly big.
More in the direction of expertise than job. Do you know any SAP consultants? They can always find a job. I am not exactly that but in a similar industry. They cannot be outsourced to India because they need local knowledge like accounting rules and such software are so huge and the space of potential kinds of problems and industry practices and whatnots, also domain experiences is so big that in these types of industry experience never has a point of diminishing marginal returns. People who do it for 30 years are more valuable than people who do it for 15.
Abandoning that kind of investment to become yet another dreamy startup Ruby on Rails type of guy? They are a dime a dozen and young hotshots with 5 years of experience - because there is just not so much to learn - outdo the older ones. It is an up or out - you hit big and then become a Paul Graham and retire from programming into investorship or similar stuff, or you are sooner or later forced out. In that type of world there is no real equivalent of the 50 years old SAP logistics consultants who is seen as something sort of a doyen because he dealt with every kind of crap that happen in a project at a logistics company.
So it sounds really dangerous to abandon that kind of investment for a new start in something different.
But diversifying, using free time to contribute to a project, that could be smart - hedging bets, if the main industry (desktop business software based on domain knowledge and business process experience) somehow collapses then it makes easier to join a different one (cool hot modern web based stuff). That makes sense, getting a foot in in one's free time in a different industry..
Yes, if not for the risks.
This is an excellent example of the Fallacy of Gray, don't you think? :-)
That depends on how you think DeVliegendeHollander models the situation in his mind. Modeling people in situations like this isn't trivial. Given the priors I have about him, there's learned helplessness that provides a bias towards simply staying in the status quo.
In general most decently skilled developers don't stay unemployment for longer periods of time if they are in a startup that fails.
If you read his post closely then he says that he doesn't even consider it. The act of considering it would be irresponsible. I don't know enough to say that it would be the right choice for him to take that job, but I think he would profit from actually deeply considering it.