Really great job. Whether it’s legal for customers to share this info or not is really a gray area.
If the data is only shared in an aggregate fashion, I doubt they can do much without a subpoena. And then what? Sue the website? Sorry, no. Section 230.
John Doe suits against anonymous customers?
Nothing requires PriceLevel to retain the PII of users… they can capture the data, validate, and flush the PII. “Sorry, we have no information about the contributor of this data.”
My sense is this will be the primary innovation of this service— how to get this info and keep it useful to end users without very much ability to vet it. Worth the effort.
How many TalkDesk customers do you suppose there are paying $91,132 for 62 users?
I'd guess TalkDesk know exactly who that is.
(I doubt that makes it any easier to prevail if they try to sue them, but I wouldn't want to be the customer negotiating next years contract wit them.
"Hi, it's TalkDesk account management here. Just letting you know your contract expires at the end of next month. Here's a new contract for the following 12 months, with the special for you pricing of $425,762 for your 62 seats. Hope to hear from you soon, and have a nice day!"
The power of stories like this never fails to humble me. There are countless (less dramatic) incidents like this in every life. Your experience brings them back into focus.
Can’t speak for OP but I moved to Exploratory.io. And the beauty of it is, it’s a GUI for R so you can export your transformation steps to R if needed.
Even then, 500 years of daily data is less than 200k observations, most of which are meaningless for predicting the future. Less than 16B seconds of data. Regression might not handle directly, but linear algebra tricks are still available.
They cost $50-70 each on Amazon or ULine. Awesome for stackable storage. With some plywood and casters, you can easily stack 6-8 tall in the garage and move them around with ease. Highly recommend.
I bought Webvan stock on their IPO day. Lost around $5k. (I was 22).
Amazing service. Terrible business model: boil the ocean, premature scale, hire the head of Andersen Consulting as CEO. Every bad, nonsensical decision.
And yet, the core was valid: a lot of people want their groceries delivered. When I went to business school a couple years later, the CMO of H-E-B spoke to my class (later, President) and I asked when they’d offer delivery. His response: “we believe people enjoy the experience of walking the aisles.” Well, Scott, whose parking lot is now 50% curbside pickup? Who spent 9 digits to acquire Favor? You’re welcome, you rich bastard.
It’s a good thing the grocery business had enough margin for error for these people to come around to learn the correct lessons from Webvan.
Curbside pickup, and delivery are quite different economically, but I agree that "enjoy walking the isles" is nonsense.
I'm not sure the economics of delivery (in a general context) work. Sure, there are folk who are time-poor, and cash-rich, and for them it makes sense, but for the rest the price either has to go up to reflect the cost, or the delivery cost has to be subsidised.
Curbside pickup is a happy medium ground. Picking the groceries is cheap, and the expensive part (delivery) is handled by the customer using their time and their car.
i wouldn't say "enjoy walking the aisles" is complete nonsense. I actually do enjoy walking the aisles myself, but as I get busier in my daily life, I find that to be a huge time sink. despite that, i still do it because I still can't bring myself to trust a gig worker to do the shopping for me. sometimes, even buying something like crackers, you need to at least do a quick cursory check on the packaging to determine if they were crushed.
Delivery cost increases logarithmically (one package more in the same truck) while revenue increases linearly when more people order / people order more. Increase in revenue outpaces delivery cost even for low margin items.
Amazon makes more money with people on Prime, not less.
Except the model was flawed and carried much higher tail risks. Risks that the ratings agencies failed to catch when they gave them AAA ratings in the debt market.
I founded a startup. We raised $2.5M, not all at once. We banked at SVB. It sucked. Subpar online tools. $200/mo “analysis fee,” never once had a “relationship” with anyone. Maybe we were never big enough to be relevant. That’s fair.
My advice: use a retail bank until you have a few million in revenue, then shop around. Make the SVB’s of the world earn your business. SVB in particular was so incredibly entitled.
I’m glad they failed more spectacularly than my little startup.
My startup, which raised $1.2M back in 2015, didn't have to pay any monthly fee -- at least until the balance dropped below some threshold in the 5-digit range at which point they started charging $15/mo, I think.
After that startup failed SVB courted me for a personal account. They actually came to me in person, took me out for coffee and stuff. I didn't even have much money at the time but they just seemed really interested in signing up startup founders (even failed ones).
For comparison I tried talking to Chase Private Client at their Palo Alto branch, since my old 401k had gotten big enough to qualify for their minimum if I rolled it over to them. The banker there practically sneered at me, acted exasperated like I was wasting his time and he had much bigger clients to tend to. Also gave me a spiel about their high-fees wealth management in which he asked leading questions about my investments and then tried to make me feel stupid about my answers so that I'd decide to pay Chase to manage it instead. This was all obviously a marketing shtick and I found it incredibly insulting. I went with SVB.
Yes, SVB's web site was ugly. Weirdly they had totally different ugly web sites for their business and personal arms. It functioned fine, though.
It's not relative to the bank but to the bank branch. I have an account with Chase and I made it clear that I'll be depositing $2K to keep the account on, and I would not be using it for day to day transactions. The branch manager was cool with that and we chatted for an hour or so about different stuff and he actually gave me some real advice.
This is not about Chase, it's about the branch and the branch manager. I'm pretty sure another branch manager will be annoyed talking to a $2k client in deposits with no in/out flows and might not even consider them for an account.
If you want to bank with a specific bank, shop for the branch.
True, a few years later, I now live in Austin and the Chase people here are a whole lot nicer to me. Maybe there's just too many ultra-rich people in Palo Alto, heh.
> The banker there practically sneered at me, acted exasperated like I was wasting his time and he had much bigger clients to tend to
I had a partial version of this experience with Charles Schwab. (I've been a banking customer for many, many years and have been very happy with them). When I left my first startup after the many year run up to the 2008 crisis, I decided to roll my fairly substantial 401(k) balance to my tiny Schwab brokerage account.
Waiting for the rollover check to arrive was nerve-wracking enough, so I decided to deposit it in person at my local branch in a major city rather than mail it to them and wait again. When I walked into the branch, the reception person looked me up and down and was warming up to tell me that no, they don't have public restrooms. Once I gave my account information, they became very friendly and once I plopped the check down on the counter for deposit, it was all coffee, juices, and pastries from then on. ;)
we started at $0 revenue and $2000 initial deposit at citibank. over the next few years we put $millions a year through them, carried a balance of $millions in combined checking and mmf, and sold our company for $millions. now my personal accounts at the bank are in $low-thousands, and my post-sale money is in investment banks.
nobody from citi ever called, or cared, or said anything when i went to the branch other than one time a teller asking me what our business did because he thought we were a tech company and he really liked cloud computing stuff. i was happy to talk to him about it, and that was it.
99% of banking is boring and uneventful, it's just numbers on a screen, especially if you live in an area where big bank accounts are common (certain areas of big states like ca, tx, ny, etc.)
anecdote on an anecodte: when we sold our biz, i tried to transfer ownership of the account to the new owner, and the branch manager couldn't actually make that happen. he said i needed to write a letter (a physical, printed and signed letter) to the headquarters of citi. l-o-l obviously we didn't do that, so we just shut it down and cashier check deposited the balance to the new owner's account at chase - and they happened to have a branch literally 2 blocks away. i just walked in and deposited the check into his account #. the teller seemed like she did this sort of thing on a regular basis.
> 99% of banking is boring and uneventful, it's just numbers on a screen
I wish my bankers would shut up about building a relationship, and just process these numbers. They are the car dealerships of holding money, such employees should be working on instagram not in the real economy. Human in the loop costs huge amounts of money and they only interfere.
Last time after a bank transfer that required log in, login confirmation by phone, bank transfer UI access by digit card security, bank transfer confirmation by SMS…
…she just called to check it was me. For $650.
I wish banks would just shut up and process our money.
$650 is a lot of money. Yes, definitely have those checks. I'd rather they call and check and everything is fine, than they not call, and things not be fine.
650 dollar bills is a lot of singles, it could feed a man for a month or more, or provide enough gas to drive across the US, it must be a lot of money, but it's quickly lost when it comes to basic needs like housing, healthcare and education.
For those saying it's not a lot of money, I shall gladly accept your donations.
$650 would allow me to buy myself a new office chair, or sort out a DIY project. Sure, I can save for these things, but if it's an inconsequential amount for you - it's an amount of consequence for me.
My favorite experience at Citi ironically was closing my checking account. I forgot why but anyway I went to the counter and they just said, 'ok'. I put in my debit card and pin to prove identity, then showed them my license as a second form of identity, then I signed on the electronic pad and received an envelope with my balance in it. Done. No, 'Why are you leaving?' and high pressure tactics - didn't even need to go to one of the desks in the back.
I'll bank again at Citi if I ever need to based solely on how easy it was to leave them.
Not that easy. My experience, I was a client for a long time (>10 years).
One day I was unable to log in. After logging successfully a message popped up demanding debit card activation. Every time I pressed 'cancel' I was logged out. That lasted for months. Effectively they locked me out of online access. By then I moved everything to another bank, so it wasn't a big problem. Then I visited their branch in person and requested all my accounts to be closed. I repeated 'All of them'. They did it, or pretended. I left being sure I'm done with Citi forever. But no, they kept debit card account open, without telling me. For charging purposes, as they don't provide any services, and they know it.
If locking out (they did build and activate this functionality in their system) was the bottom of banking. Silent not closing on request and demanding money for 'service' is a scum. My recommendation: Stay away from Citi.
When you start a startup, especially a venture-funded one, you really only want to be innovative in one area: your core offering. It doesn't make sense to spend an innovation token on your bank. So you go with something tried and true, that's done it a million times before with a million other startups. That was SVB.
Going with something else has potential downsides that you may not even be aware of (as the OP describes).
Seems like this conventional wisdom about innovation tokens was actually very poor in this particular area. Makes me wonder what other bad decisions might be lurking behind that best practice.
Yes, and the FDIC brokers those sales rapidly and with vigor.
If someone doesn’t want to buy a small regional, it’s because the FDIC didn’t care to make it happen. Which isn’t surprising if there is no systemic risk involved.
If you think there has been no damage to startups since Thursday... well, you're wrong. This episode just made us all poorer. There will be more regulation, there will be exponentially less goodwill (and our industry was already struggling on this front). Any remnant of an image of "tech" being smart or special somehow is totally shot.
So yeah, spending just a bit more time thinking about how to manage risk would have been a more wise approach.
I didn't know about this until reading things throughout this weekend (which is somewhat telling), but evidently there are a number of approaches that businesses use to avoid having essentially all of their money held as uninsured deposits in a single bank. Those approaches are the seatbelt that we seem to have largely chosen not to wear.
Sounds more like you are describing Chase bank. It’s tried and true and millions of businesses from small mom and pops to fortune 10 companies use them. They’ve seen it all and could even be an underwriter for your IPO. They can take you from idea to exit.
Brex is way better compared to SVB. SVB had these weird mountains of paperwork when I had to use them for my startup back in 2017. Brex onboarding was instantaneous for my small business.
If the data is only shared in an aggregate fashion, I doubt they can do much without a subpoena. And then what? Sue the website? Sorry, no. Section 230.
John Doe suits against anonymous customers?
Nothing requires PriceLevel to retain the PII of users… they can capture the data, validate, and flush the PII. “Sorry, we have no information about the contributor of this data.”
My sense is this will be the primary innovation of this service— how to get this info and keep it useful to end users without very much ability to vet it. Worth the effort.