I'm sorry but there's no correlation to AMZN's stock price reaching all-time highs. 1) The entire world was caught in a two-year pandemic and caused e-commerce to exceed retail spending virtually overnight (See: SHOP, BIGC, etc)... and 2) The fed printed an asinine amount of money that dislocated the market from reality.
Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.
Sure, but was the company tanking because we were all working from home?
No?
All I'm saying is that the company was operating just fine despite everyone being remote. There wasn't a financial reason to do it, and probably lots of good financial reasons not to (sell the offices, reduce overhead that way).
Yeah, it strikes me as odd that Amazon is a company whose success is absolutely predicated on having a minimal physical presence, yet their leadership has become obsessed with getting their employees to work in a physical office.
Like, what if we could do all this over the internet?
I can understand they want it. What I can't stand is their doublespeak and complete inability to openly address the issue. "Yes, we understand you prefer remote work but we prefer to have an eye on you and control you more" is a fair statement. "We know you all want to come back" just makes me furious.
One of my first startup experiences was working on the multiplayer platform that supported Quake Live. We eventually licensed it to Riot Games for what became League of Legends but both games were significantly delayed and we ran out of funding.
The fact that you assign innovation purely to science/engineering is why many startups fail. You don't seem to recognize that innovation happens across all segments of the business. Plenty of ingenious products never reach critical mass because engineering founders dismiss all other aspects of business building. Facebook's toe-hold that helped them beat MySpace and Friendster wasn't an act of innovative engineering as much as it was their go-to-market plan starting in Universities.
Engineering will remain flexible because of all the virtue signaling big tech is doing in order to retain their talent. It's almost comical that they are struggling to bring people back to the office after being the biggest promotor of work-remote while the rest of the service-economy had to show up every day to their Walmart jobs...
This is a pretty odd comment given that I EXPLICITLY mention science, engineering, and innovation as three separate categories.
Look at how I used the slashes in the earlier part of that science ("sales/marketing"). Do you think I think that sales and marketing are the same thing? If not, why would you think that I think engineering = innovation? It's the exact same grammatical structure.
What I did say is that an NFT startup probably isn't doing anything innovative, and also is probably doing mostly sales and marketing, and that this combination of factors means that their in-person stance makes sense. I stand by that. My mental image of an NFT startup is that it's a boiler room of the sort that pump-and-dumped penny stocks in the 90s. That type of work benefits from rapid feedback loops among staff. The boiler room structure makes sense for a business trying to generate revenue from the NFT ecosystem.
The rest of your post is an odd rant that has almost nothing to do with how I think about businesses or the world. It's not even a strawman... just kind of a completely off topic rant from my perspective.
I have no idea what stereotype you're projecting onto me, but I'm not even an engineer.
This is exactly how I feel as an end-user over the same time period to the point that I don't even login anymore except for work. It's exhausting and it's no longer about the projected vision of "connecting people", it's about connecting people to content and other monetizable assets as a first-order priority in everything they do and touch.
This is why Facebook/IG is unrecoverable to me as a destination for connecting with the people I care about. Instead, it's become iMessage and I'm quite happy about that. No ads and the conversations/photos are a lot more authentic compared with social media.
I still love social media as a form (I think), it's just become more media and less social.
In my experience working in finance and healthcare as a founder, education and cash flow needs box out poor people from conventional banking; they live check to check, public schools in poor areas are below average, et al. Poverty feeds on itself, unfortunately.
KYC/AML ensure our online applicants are who they say they are. It's a very straight forward regulatory requirement to safe guard the movement of money by US citizens and not foreign entities. This is one of many anti-fraud measures we take because fraud is a massive issue and capital loss is exceptionally hard to recover -- especially for internet banks where attacks come from all over. Fraud networks are extremely sophisticated and based on your remark about KYC/AML, I don't get the impression you appreciate the depth of it. It has nothing to do with low-income citizens except to the degree to which social determinants (lack of transportation) may prevent someone from getting their identification renewed, but this is a much bigger issue for that individual than just opening a bank account. Online banking is more accessible for low-income for this reason vs. brick and mortar who avoid branches in those areas.
For a startup or even a crusty old bank looking to improve margin and slim down their back office, services like Alloy make KYC/AML a very simple request/response component within our application. There's really nothing complex about it. I'll take KYC over HIPAA any day of the week.
I may be misunderstanding your question but I'm a big fan of Denon (or Marantz) receivers w/ HEOS. Their AVR line can support up to 3 zones and can be paired together. I have 11.2 and 9.2 powering 18x speakers and a sub in my house. You can use a single receiver to play music outside by our pool and simultaneously play 5.1 over the living room for sports or movies. It also handles the connection to Spotify (et al) directly so I can take a call or leave the house with my phone and the music will continue to play.
This is probably the option I would (like to) go for. I just want a stereo receiver that lets me control all the same “dumb” speakers I own in multiple rooms from my phone.
I use Personal Capital and love it. It's just better when you have a variety of 15+ assets and supports things like Carta. Admittedly, it's been a long time since I used Mint but I now need a much broader view. I don't really care about my individual transactions; I'm more focused on turning a different set of knobs at this point in life.
My biggest complaint about Personal Capital is the frequent phone calls from their financial advisors despite asking them to stop. I'd be happy to pay $10+ a month just for their aggregation services but my private bank is leaps ahead in terms of sophistication and access to alternative investments not typically available to the public.
I don't know if it was the cause of it, but I scheduled a meeting with the PC advisor and all of the calls stopped, presumably because I was going to talk to someone on the phone. Fortunately, they didn't have any validation on the dates so my appointment is scheduled for June 2076 or something. This has a slightly different annoyance since there's now an overlay on the top of the body that says "Prepare for your upcoming call" but at least no phone calls.
Their sales calls are the reason I deleted my PC account and (reluctantly) returned to Mint. I, too, would be willing to pay some small subscription amount.
Same experience here. Tried to switch from Mint to PC, got like 5 calls from them in the first week or so, cursed the caller out over the phone on the fifth one, and then immediately deleted my account after. It's predatory and it completely destroyed any trust I reluctantly gave them in the first place.
I really wish there were self-hosted options for seeing all of your finances in a single spot. Even paid options. That's what I really want.
It took me calling them out in a tweet to get myself off these calls. The only place I used my phone number was for two factor auth, which they then decided they would use to up sell me. There's also no way to opt out on their website. Very shady practice but love the product otherwise
I didn't fully appreciate the value of our data room until it mattered. Since the last deal, we've kept our data room impeccable and exceptionally granular. We're also way more sensitive about the timing of what we share and what we black-box for as long as possible. There's a strategy for managing your data room in situations like this, so I encourage talking with mentors/advisors if it's your first time.
This is also true for general communication to the team about offers like this. It's way too distracting and too high of a risk to morale if the deal falls apart.
Your work-from-home team had nothing to do with either of those two massive tailwinds.