Am I missing something? It's a nice set of thoughts, but I can't imagine paying to have read somebody's personal blog, and would have been vaguely weirded-out at him having ads on it.

I'm just about to start his most recent book, "The End of Power," which is about how hard it is to establish and maintain political control as technology decentralizes. It's not going to be the kind of book Maduro (the Venezuelan president) is going to read, but seems pretty sure to be the playbook of how that regime will end.

https://www.amazon.com/The-End-Power-Boardrooms-Battlefields...

Losing to a competitor would mean you're not failing because you didn't find a market need. So you would screw up managing it, or by not spending to market/hire/add capacity fast enough. The only other reasons I can think up seem idiosyncratic (maybe well-funded competitor got regulatory approval or a big partnership from a VC intro?).

In the original post from the AgileBits team quoted at the top, that team tried Basecamp, which to me seems to do a good job of separating thoughtful/long-form discussion from chat, along with the weekend-pause feature.

I haven't yet found a Chrome extension which does Hemingway-esque linting on all text input fields, like Gmail or (god forbid) comment sections. Somebody (maybe me) should make this.

Having been involved in LP reporting at a seed fund, I can say that it happens regularly but infrequently (quarterly, or at most monthly) and at a 30,000 foot level. I've really never seen LPs interact with portfolio companies at a seed stage, beyond chatting at a cocktail party after the annual meeting.

Besides, given the nature of the platform, if they're looking into trends and products, isn't that information publicly available (this is just adding money behind the top syndicate deals on AngelList)?

If somebody can take the same data, package it up more nicely, and make the economics work to eliminate fees, I actually don't think we're worse off?

However, I think the target audience is probably more likely individuals rather than financial advisors, unless you're going to be running it as a SaaS. I can't see the overlap of small advisory firms and those familiar with Vagrant.

Will give it a poke with a few hundred dollars in Vanguard ETFs.

However, this looks to have been the result of concerted corporate effort and training (every clerk knows how it works, etc.). Can't see it catching on in a small business.

I'm actually curious why broader community effort hasn't sprouted up around web scraping for banks, given how horrible API support has traditionally been. Plaid (plaid.com) purports to make this easy, but it's not very mature yet and will be a paid service.

We were just recently using it in business school to look at cycle times in assembly line output.

I bet a lot of us hit this moment, over and over again: "We didn’t obsess over it and we didn’t love it. We loved the idea of it. That hurt."

When you're on the brink, remember why you're doing this at all; to build something that you think is really cool.

I'd be interested to see what partnership companies like IGG, who builds the popular iBank for Mac, have pulled off to do this (http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibankforipad/direct_access.php).