Hacker News: Gaessaki

Bond rout starting to sound market alarm bells

Gaessaki — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 06:30:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/markets/global-markets-tariffs-bonds-2025-04-09/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43629442

Points: 94

# Comments: 108

New comment by Gaessaki in "Mondragon as the new city-state"

Gaessaki — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 16:58:52 +0000

Mainly debt instruments (loans, lines of credit, etc.) and occasionally preferred shares.

New comment by Gaessaki in "Mondragon as the new city-state"

Gaessaki — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:42:33 +0000

Quebec probably has the single best cooperative financing ecosystem in the world (1B+$). There’s a need for more risk-driven investment instruments in the sector however to seed early stage ventures. Most of the funds end up getting reinvested in existing cooperatives who can already access traditional funding.

New comment by Gaessaki in "LTSE shutters cap table management business (formerly captable.io)"

Gaessaki — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 04:07:37 +0000

Welp, there goes another SaaS platform in our corporate ops toolchain. Anyone have a recommendation for a tool to handle the cap table for an early-stage cooperative with several hundred members that won’t cost us an arm and a leg? Excel?

New comment by Gaessaki in "Can a worker-owned restaurant work?"

Gaessaki — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 05:29:58 +0000

This was a fundamental question for me before taking the plunge into starting a coop. Long story short, I did a lot of research and there wasn’t anything that really compensated risk in early stage startups hence the dearth of platform coops.

We ended up structuring our coop to have equity split from voting rights to allow employees to have ESOPs and investors to invest as they do in traditional corporation minus their control of the board. In theory we would be able to IPO down the line, and perhaps become the first coop to do so without demutualizing or a separate investment vehicle on the side.

New comment by Gaessaki in "Can a worker-owned restaurant work?"

Gaessaki — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 23:23:45 +0000

Our coop took part in start.coop. Open to answering questions from anyone interested in starting a cooperative startup!

New comment by Gaessaki in "Mental Liquidity"

Gaessaki — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 18:33:35 +0000

This is good feedback though, as I had the same issues. It shows the value of launching and iterating quickly with user feedback, rather than building in the dark in the guise of perfection.

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: Who else is working/on call over Christmas?"

Gaessaki — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 04:19:36 +0000

Managing the dispatch of our delivery drivers and monitoring our infra over the holidays.

Wish there was some way to bond with others that are on-call while being on-call. It’s lonely with the rest of the company being away. I guess this thread is a close as we get.

Best of luck to you and anyone else with generator fires and Happy Holidays to all!

New comment by Gaessaki in "Being on a board as an employee"

Gaessaki — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 23:40:27 +0000

Our venture-backed cooperative startup board has 1/3rd of its seats reserved for its employees, which incorporates both corporate staff (devs, marketing, etc) and operational staff (drivers, support).

The other 2/3rds are divided equally between our restaurant and consumer members. Each member class votes exclusively for their portion of the board seats.

We’re nearing year three, and this arrangement has been working well for us. We’ll see if it can continue to scale as we expand geographically.

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: Thoughts on No Equity “Accelerator”?"

Gaessaki — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 13:26:42 +0000

IMHO as someone who participated in a lot of these non-equity corporate accelerators, both as a startup and as part of the technical teams supporting the initiatives (at two different companies), it’s primarily cheap PR for both the parent company and the startups. There are some perks like the product and service credits as well as the opportunity to network with relevant teams at ParentCo, but I find the experience hardly comparable to a more traditional accelerator like YC. It’s a question of incentives.

If your partner has the bandwidth, I would consider applying for the perks, but I would be mindful of getting distracted by things that don’t entail building product/solving the core problem and selling to clients.

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: Does Hacker News still do in person meet ups?"

Gaessaki — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 03:08:09 +0000

Send me an email (bio), organizing something with a couple of others!

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: Does Hacker News still do in person meet ups?"

Gaessaki — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 03:05:20 +0000

Send me an email (in bio) and I’ll schedule a time!

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: Does Hacker News still do in person meet ups?"

Gaessaki — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 03:04:20 +0000

Shoot moi un courriel (bio) et je m’occupe du doodle !

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: Does Hacker News still do in person meet ups?"

Gaessaki — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:47:09 +0000

Montréal, anyone? :)

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?"

Gaessaki — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 17:03:50 +0000

Didn't mean to imply that they were necessarily doing anything wrong or right (and I tried to clarify that with the last sentence of my post).

In my book, "taking down a notch" means to humble someone. Companies like Apple and Google can make uniliteral decisions that move markets (for better or for worse), in a way that other companies can't. The crux of the question is whether they'll be able to hold onto this liberty.

On the same vein, I think it's totally fair to ask whether a non-tech company like Nestlé could be taken down a notch.

All that being said, I buy your point. As long as their core offerings remain undisrupted/maintained, it's hard to envision things being different.

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?"

Gaessaki — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 12:24:13 +0000

I could include another dozen or companies that I would target in this question. FAANG is simply a stand-in. I guess we could go with GAMA instead.

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: How to migrate between payment processors?"

Gaessaki — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 11:51:32 +0000

It seems like Stripe has an article on how to migrate data to their platform without business interruption on their site. I would imagine others would have similar instructions available.

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/account/data-migrations/pan-import

Ask HN: When will big tech be taken down a notch?

Gaessaki — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 11:26:49 +0000

For the average person, it’s hard to imagine a world where the GAMA are not so utterly dominant. However, there’s clearly a precedent of “nothing lasts for ever” in tech with former incumbents such as IBM, Intel, Yahoo, AOL, Oracle, to a certain extent Microsoft, and many others losing their grip of their quasi-monopolistic market positions. Do you see a near future where today’s GAMA shuffle to become a different acronym (or doing away with big 4 acronyms altogether)? If so, what are the events that will lead up to it and who will be the first to go?

Note, not arguing that they should be taken down a notch necessarily, but rather more interested in the economic arguments of whether it’s possible or even likely.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32822914

Points: 22

# Comments: 39

New comment by Gaessaki in "Ask HN: Which books do you consider real gems in your field of work/study?"

Gaessaki — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 13:19:29 +0000

Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister.

No longer doing consulting, but found it invaluable as a tech person building a consulting team and trying to break into enterprise. Probably useful for any professional consulting through a firm (lawyers, accountants, big 4, etc.)

Someone mentioned Designing Data Intensive Applications which I’m partial to as well.

New comment by Gaessaki in "A small Stripe fraud story"

Gaessaki — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 03:39:36 +0000

Thanks for the tips. We’ve implemented some of these measures already and it has helped. We’ve had phone verification from day one for example. we try to balance the opportunity cost when possible.

For example, we lose a lot of potential clients due to them being turned off by the phone verification, though we rationalize that by saying that the support and operational costs are a lot lower this way as the driver can get in touch with the clients should there be any issues.

I think the next steps as you outlined are to build additional flows for fraudulent users and regularly verifying some heuristics on our data. We’ve haven’t gotten there yet due to it not being that pressing, but it’s clear we’ll need to do so as we keep gaining traction.

I’ll definitely keep your contact in hand when we visit this issue further!