That said: A good market will become crowded quickly in either way.

Also - I use the term "coach" broadly here. Many people react very poorly to the term "therapist", and "coach" is a much broader term encompassing both therapy or just people that have significant experience in a field. Or just an older relative or acquaintance that is willing to provide regular advice/feedback.

There's definitely charlatanism, particularly when people advertise themselves as "business coach" or "startup coach".

And if there are liquidity pressures a few years into the process, and you have traction at Series B or C - don't hesitate to think about a small secondary.

The point is: For anything you build, you can find 1 customer. It's only when there's multiple customers that like the product and want to improve it where you move from "consulting" or "custom development" to "product".

Investors who imply you shouldn't take a salary are no bueno.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643137

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

I'd imagine you lose the ability to have the coding agent do the commits for you? E.g. if you just mount the code directory, then an agent running on the remote side can't commit anything, right?

So you'd have to mount the .git directory from the remote side to then push?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513092

Points: 1

# Comments: 3

There's so much history here, touching on all sorts of insanity including selling 0-day to the US government that was then used to apprehend high-level Al-Qaida personnel, random warez busts leading to people taking oversea jobs, etc. etc. etc.

If anyone still has old .NFO archives from 1990-2000, I'd be very interested in getting as many as possible.

If you look at an org chart of the DB these days, the most fascinating part is that DB consists of almost 600 separate corporate entities that are all supposed to invoice each other.

Speaking with insiders, it appears that when the privatization happened, the new corporate structure took what was essentially every mid-size branch of the org chart and created a separate corporate entity, with cross-invoicing for what would normally normal intra-company cooperation. I think the (misguided) goal was to obtain some form of accountability inside a large organisation that had been state-funded and not good at internal accounting.

This fragmentation lead to insane inflexibility, as each of the 600 entities has a separate PnL and is loathe to do anything that doesn’t look good on their books.

Add to this a history of incompetent leadership (Mehdorn, who also ran AirBerlin into the ground, and who was also responsible for the disastrous BER airport build-out), repeated rounds of cost-cutting that prioritized “efficiency” over “resiliency of the network” etc. etc.

DB is currently undergoing a massive corporate restructuring to simplify the 600+ entity structure, but there has been a massive loss of expertise, underinvestment in infrastructure, poor IT (if you see a job ad for a Windows NT4 admin, it’s likely DB), etc. etc. — it’ll take a decade or more to dig the org out of the hole it is in.

There's multipronged benefit for them: Access to company infrastructure to potentially cause harm or ransom in the future, access to technology / intelligence, but also simply foreign currency.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46243037

Points: 3

# Comments: 0