Thanks for sharing! You’ve talked about your ontology, can you explain a bit more about how you build it?
Readit Newsmichokest commented on How we grew from 0 to 4M women on our app, with vertical machine learning medium.com/@aldamiz/how-w... · Posted by u/aldamiz
michokest commented on How We Hire: Compensation and Hiring in a Small Startup micho.biz/post/1170833195... · Posted by u/michokest
Holy shit...I read this:
"Remote work penalty: -25%, to account for the loss of communication and productivity"
And nearly choked. Apparently you're expecting your remote employees to just be complete / utter slackers.
Good point. That's attracted a lot of criticism to the post.
The rationale behind that is: We want a strong company culture. As a fitness startup, that involves things beyond work, which include working out, brainstorming over walks and lunch, etc.
The way we see it is, we want our team to be based in Berlin. If somebody isn't, that isn't ideal, and thus we offer a lower compensation to discourage it.
I agree with most of your decisions but:
> Completely forget about the price tag when buying small-ticket things: a taxi ride, asking for an extra plate, an occasional flight, paying a round of drinks
Needs a little asterisk, you're changing your lifestyle to one that you probably can not yet afford, be careful with that, these 'little things' really add up over time.
Other than that: Congratulations :)
True :) that probably deserves clarification: I made a clear separation between "spending money" (rent, travels, food, leisure) and "investment money".
Anything spent is either an investment, where I try to keep returns over 5% yearly, or just everyday stuff. I've found that everyday stuff ends up not being very different than my previous spending levels.
EDIT: I also live outside the Bay Area, which definitely helps.
Last year I sold some stock from my last startup, a little over $1m after taxes, and I can say it's definitely changed things for the better.
In this period of time, I have been able to:
- Quit my founder position at that startup (thus avoiding potentially being tied to vesting or retention clauses, in case of an acquisition)
- Own my house, and invest in a few other apartments, which turned into a little side business with great margins
- Start a new company investing my own money, and not requiring a salary
- Travel and live in a few different cities as I build the new startup
- Completely forget about the price tag when buying small-ticket things: a taxi ride, asking for an extra plate, an occasional flight, paying a round of drinks
It's not as it money made me happy by spending it, but it did remove a lot of the constraints I had before. It's made me feel like the default state would be to be carefree and happy, and as long as you can keep the worries and the stress away, everything will go alright.
As a new worry, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how to reinvest it wisely and continue living like this. It's not overwhelming, and it's not very different than what doing my finances felt like before, but doing it a larger scale adds a new dimension to it.
michokest commented on Google Fit: An effortless, comprehensive view of your fitness officialandroid.blogspot.... · Posted by u/lmedinas
That's my main problem with the fitness app industry at large. They are much more focused on steps, running and calories than actual fitness.
And don't get me wrong, cardio works to a good extent. For most of sedentary folks, doing anything will be better than doing nothing, and their fitness level will improve.
But real fitness is about a lot more: strength training, interval training, sports, etc. Bodyweight workouts and HIIT are a much better return for your effort than "just tracking". And so will shifting your diet towards something like paleo or low-carb, instead of just tracking calories.
Part of my frustration with the fitness ecosystem is what made me start up http://8fit.com. It's a mobile app that offers HIIT do-it-at-home workouts and low-carb meal plans.
We don't track your steps. We don't integrate fancy wi-fi scales or wearables. But you know what? If eff-ing works, and our 60k-strong userbase loves the hell out of it for the results they're seeing.
And you can see that strength training or HIIT are completely left out from the announcement. Strava, Withings, Runtastic, Runkeeper and Noom Coach: all of them tracking apps, with very little emphasis on the prescriptive aspect of fitness.
People need a coach, not a tracker.