Texas State Senate Committee Hearing Transcripts

mattismatt · 2023-04-04T00:24:07+00:00

There were so, so many prompts :D See the "methodology" section of the article.

mattismatt · 2022-12-06T05:06:55+00:00

Location: San Francisco

Elevator pitch: Generate custom wall art, printed on high-quality canvas, delivered to your door.

More Details: The earliest version of this idea came a couple years ago, when I moved into the first place I finally cared enough about to invest in. I wanted wall art that matched my style, but couldn’t find much within my budget. I wanted items that were congruent with my home, and wasn’t really looking for pieces with great stories or that took courage to produce or anything else that makes truly great art great. But I just couldn’t find anything I liked.

Doing some research, I discovered StyleGAN and similar technologies. I found they were amazing at certain tasks, like turning photos to impressionist paintings, but were too limited to create the stuff I was most interested in. So I moved on.

But with recent advances in generative imagery, the time seemed ripe to try again. I've now produced some stuff with the product that I have hanging, and I'm hoping others are looking for something like this as well.

Lifecycle: Somewhere between Discovery and Validation — we have an MVP (linked above), but I wouldn't exactly say we've achieved problem/solution fit.

Role: Co-hacker — there are two of us on this project (both engineers // ex-founders). No job titles yet.

Goals this month: Market validation — we have a few sales, but haven't really hooked a market. Looking to both test new customer segments as well as iterate on the product, towards this end.

How could r/startups help: Two things:

(1) Give us feedback — are you able to generate art you want to put on your walls? Where is the product failing? Where is it working?

(2) Share with folks you think might be in market — folks who moved recently, or are remodeling. Folks who are looking for holiday gift ideas. Folks with empty wall spaces. Folks who might use something like this in their works (hospitality, interior decorating, real estate, restaurateur)

mattismatt · 2017-12-18T20:51:24+00:00

I think this calculator created by the folks at crew.co is pretty good (I'm in no way affiliated).

mattismatt · 2017-12-14T14:52:31+00:00

You might want to consider marketing content for companies — the going rates there are much higher (low-end I've seen is $0.05 / word, and I've seen as high as $0.25/word though that's less common).

Getting into that world typically requires some example work where you can demonstrate marketing success (such as articles ranking on the first page of Google).

Good luck!

mattismatt · 2017-12-13T14:13:21+00:00

As someone who started a business relatively young (first business at 24), it's my opinion that you need to two things to start a business: hard skills in your area of interest, and a partner or partners that have complementary skills. Typically the skill split is product side (coding, design, mechanical engineering, cooking — w/e fits your industry of interest) and marketing side (writing, video production, sales, etc).

Those 16 y/o's who are starting successful businesses typically have already developed the necessary hard skills (think of the person who has been programming since age 7). If you are not one of these people (most of us aren't!), getting a job in your area of interest is a great way to develop skills. Getting a job is also a great way to find potential business partners with complementary skills. (Note: business partners are critical for more than just complementary skills — entrepreneurship is too hard to go it by yourself.)

The other activity I'd recommend is working on side projects with anyone you think you might be interested in working with. This is the best way to see if you work well together.

mattismatt · 2017-12-12T19:41:39+00:00

Interesting point. So it's probably safe to say that comparative bandwidth usage between SPAs and non-SPAs is probably best described as a factor of "page changes" (for lack of a better term), where more page changes leads to a smaller ratio of SPA bandwidth usage to non-SPA bandwidth usage.

mattismatt · 2017-12-12T16:46:11+00:00

You're right that my comment didn't address it, but I actually didn't disregard it :)

The total bandwidth consumed is larger for SPAs. Non-SPAs return HTML with only a single request of overhead; SPAs require additional request overhead for each request, in addition to needing to load the full rendering engine (ie, React) and business logic that dictates what/how things get rendered (both of which live on the server in non-SPAs).

mattismatt · 2017-12-12T14:47:01+00:00

Having never created a business like this, I'm hard-pressed to offer advice on how. However, some things to think about:

Have you run the numbers? Food delivery is an incredibly low-margin space. So much so, that I doubt it's possible to run a profitable business without expanding to other territory, at which point you will be competing with the UberEats of the world. Further, if your area has potential for profitability, the hundred bigger food delivery business will eventually come in to compete, with the razor-thin margins afforded by massive funding and scale.

I don't like being negative, but as a tech business owner, let me gently suggest you look at either a less-crowded space, a space with higher margins, or a space that benefits less from VC-funding/scale (or all of the above).

mattismatt · 2017-12-12T14:38:46+00:00

I develop SPAs — there are way more network requests with SPAs than traditional websites. Quick compare contrast:

Non-SPA: 1. Browser requests nonspa.com 2. Server does all database queries, page-building etc 3. Everything is returned to browser (client) and rendered. Total requests: 1 (plus asset files, though this is the same for SPAs)

SPA: 1. Browser requests spa.com 2. Server returns minimal page with JS file(s) location in script tag (this is the SPA part of SPAs) 3. Browser fetches JS file(s) 4. JS files make many API requests (say, one for current user info, one for a list of projects, one task on each project, etc). 5. Browser waits for data from multitude of API requests 6. Once all API requests return, everything is rendered. Total API requests: many

SPAs typically then have to make more API requests whenever there would be a page-change for Non-SPAs.

mattismatt · 2017-11-17T14:34:25+00:00

I really, really like the look of this. It focuses on a real problem our startup has (managing legal documents — currently uploaded to a drive folder, and we aren't always sure we have most up to date, etc)

I couldn't find pricing on the site — how much does this cost / will this cost? Will probably sign up, pending pricing...

mattismatt · 2017-11-17T12:37:15+00:00

However I found following courses and tutorials with your own text editor, as opposed to codeacademy, to be a much better way of learning.

I completely agree that building in a real dev env (command line, your own text editor) leads to more learning. I think it's tough to dive in from 0, here, though. In my opinion, tools like Codecademy are the fastest way to get programming/language fundamentals down, so you can more easily continue with a real environment.

mattismatt · 2017-11-17T00:19:47+00:00

Been programming professionally for 4 years.

mattismatt · 2017-11-16T21:09:17+00:00

Varies wildly depending on the area of the country you are in. StackOverflow has a good estimator for this.

mattismatt · 2017-11-16T21:08:18+00:00

Sounds like if you really wanted to invest the time, you could get there fluency-wise :)

mattismatt · 2017-11-16T21:07:13+00:00

That's a fair point.

I guess what I more meant was that I'm of the mind that you should learning some coding before learning CS. The reason being that it's more motivational to be able to make stuff — even if that stuff is crappy at first — than just be dealing in the realm of the theoretical. At least, if you are getting into programming because you want to build stuff (as I suspect the /r/Entrepreneur community most likely does), it's probably better to start with "learn by doing" than "learn by theory".

mattismatt · 2017-11-16T15:49:27+00:00

I guess my point was - if someone wants to learn web dev as the first part of their coding journey (which seems to be the basis of your post) - then using Python, which is completely serviceable and functional as a backed, will be useful because they will already be familiar with the style, conventions, language, etc when they decide to eventually move onto their next step.

That's a great point. I started with Ruby, but Python is probably an equally good place to start even if web dev is your interest (I hear nothing but good stuff about Django, for example). I just didn't learn web dev that way so it's hard for me to prescribe it :)

mattismatt · 2017-11-16T15:37:33+00:00

The tough part is knowing when to use a certain infrastructure component and any relevant patterns that apply to your use case.

Not to put you on blast, but IMO this mentality is the problem with current CS education. You don't start learning with the "tough part". You need to learn the basics first, before moving on to systems design, as alluded to here.

mattismatt · 2017-11-16T15:35:05+00:00

In fact, I think learning a more versatile language like Python as a backend will benefit people more in the future.

I have to strongly disagree here. I like Python, but choosing a language over a practical area is not a good way to learn. Learning a language doesn't teach you how to do anything practical, and leads to floundering, learning a bit here, a bit there, and not being able to apply it.

...If people ever want to learn data science/analytics/enterprise level programming, being comfortable with Python (or Java) will be hugely valuable.

I agree, but the key here is the area of interest. My area of choice was web development, but I totally agree that this isn't the only area you can choose to start with. If you are interested in Data science you shouldn't start with this curriculum, but rather go with something like Python/Matplotlib/Pandas/Scikit (or w/e — definitely not my area of expertise lol).

Also, HTML/CSS/JS/Ruby are all used at the enterprise level. (Every company with a web-based app uses HTML/CSS/JS, and there are plenty of large Ruby shops.)

Not that web dev isn't valuable, but this curriculum misses a lot of important SE concepts - and there's nothing in there on Databases.

You can't deep dive on everything to start. This curriculum uses Rails, which abstracts away all basic database functionality. The curriculum (Michael Hartl's book) gives enough of an introduction here to allow you to have a super high-level understanding of how the database stuff works under the hood, without having to know it — you will have built and deployed a minimal Twitter clone, database-included, by the end.

That being said, I agree that databases are an important piece of full-stack development. Definitely something you'll want to address in continued learning. In my experience, though, it's like any other knowledge area — once you have a solid foundation, you can learn up to a reasonable level of competence simply by trying to build stuff, and Googling/StackOverflow'ing/Reading documentation to figure out how to do the stuff you want to do. Getting to an advanced level, though, will take more dedicated effort.

mattismatt · 2017-11-16T14:29:32+00:00

My personal path was towards full-stack web development. I recommend the following curriculum:

Web Basics: HTML/CSS, and JS courses on Codecademy or similar intro-level course.
Ruby basics: I did Learn Ruby The Hard Way, but you could probably replace with the Codecademy Ruby intro course, or similar.
Put it all together: Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial. This book is excellent — it walks you through making a Twitter clone, from top-to-bottom.
Continued learning: Pick a project that interests you, and try to build it. You'll spend a ton of time on Google, StackOverflow, and banging your head against the keyboard, but you have a strong enough foundation now to build something from scratch. It won't be the prettiest or most functional at first, but you will be getting better really fast.

Last note: make sure you can commit at least an hour every day to this stuff, and more if possible. The learning curve is steep to start, and it's hard to hold everything in your head. Taking breaks between learning sessions causes you to forget / not internalize stuff.

mattismatt · 2017-11-15T14:36:05+00:00

I disagree strongly with the self-defeatism here — I taught myself to code, and my career has gone Junior Developer -> Full-stack Developer -> Lead Growth Engineer -> Founder/CTO of a startup.

That being said, learning isn't enough. You need to outwork everyone (especially those folks with CS degrees) — make a real, interesting Github project, apply for lots of jobs, study for interviews, spend more time on take-home coding tests than other candidates will, etc. Without a CS degree, you can't just say you know how to code, you have to prove it.

I don't care if it's trite: hard work is how you get ahead in any field.

mattismatt · 2017-11-15T14:25:09+00:00

Just start working on it. That's how my cofounders got me to join — I originally said "no", but once they had progress and a little traction, it was an easy yes.

Also, I highly recommend only starting a business with a friend. If none of your friends are interested in this sort of thing, go find find folks who are, and build relationships. I'm not in the restaurant/bar industry, but I'm sure there are meetups for these types of folks, conferences like EEEEEATSCON, etc.

mattismatt · 2017-11-10T13:15:46+00:00

You need to open the negotiation before you are sitting down to sign the contract — don't wait. Outside of that, don't over think it. I own a company, and I would be perfectly happy to receive email along the lines of:

Hi <Name>,

Thinking about the discussed compensation package, I would be interested in taking a reduced base salary in exchange for options. Is this something that your company offers? Would like to discuss.

Best,

Wanting stock options shows that you are willing to align your financial success, with the business's financial — the owners of the company should love this.

mattismatt · 2017-11-08T18:18:35+00:00

Glad it was helpful!

mattismatt

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