I spent time looking into this a couple years ago as a startup founder with this problem. We are in the finance space so I saw how bad the treasury options were with our bank, given their fee cut versus plain T-bonds at the time. I looked into which brokerages allowed us to setup self-directed accounts (many banks don't offer that for businesses at all). I found the "correct" approach. But then there would be more paperwork and back and forth to set up that new account, then manage transferring money around when we needed it, logging into a different system. On a ski trip a friend in finance told me "you're being dumb, if your bank offers you a treasury plan with a one click button, even if it's not perfect, click that button now!" So I did.
Then, the benefit of saving 1-2% extra versus spending my time trying to actually running the business and doing things with our money in the real world, has meant I have never looked back. 1-2% on millions of dollars is significant but it's not nearly as impactful as finding Product-Market-Fit in your actual business.
All this to say: I'd be in your target market but I'm simply not interested in a "marginally better" treasury system versus just going with my bank's options that make it easy for me.
We totally agree! And that's why we specifically designed Palus to be as easy to use as possible. It's a one-time setup that takes five minutes. We optimized our UX for founders to spend as little time using it as possible, so they can focus on finding PMF instead.
Even for a Series A company, putting $5M into Palus should yield an extra $50k-75k per year, just for having your money sit in a smarter place. Put another way, it should cover six months of a junior engineer's salary for free.
For five minutes of setup, we think most founders will find it worthwhile.
That's fair. But to your point, the problem we see is that banks' treasury products take advantage of founders who (rightfully) don't want to think about their treasury yields.
That's why we designed Palus to be as simple as possible to use. If you check out our demo video, you'll see it's super straightforward. Setup takes <5 min and then you don't have to think about it anymore. We're also building out automatic sweep functionality, so then you REALLY won't have to think about it.
Given the significant increase in returns on a large treasury, we think it's worth the small amount of effort.
> Given the significant increase in returns on a large treasury, we think it's worth the small amount of effort.
Isn't that the point he was making though? It's a large treasury in aggregate, which is why it makes sense for a new entrant to come in, but it's only a 1-2% problem for founders, which is why they don't bother with it much (why fix what's not broken, etc.).
By the time founders raise significant sums of money (which is usually Series B onwards), they might be better suited to deal with a fractional CFO service which provides the full spectrum of services instead.
Even for a Series A company, putting $5M into Palus yields them an extra $50k-75k per year, just for letting their money sit in a smarter place. It's a five-minute optimization which essentially gets you half a junior engineer's annual salary for free.
This is mathematically possible, but not for certain (market performance et all). Moreover: practically -- onboarding and taking on the risk of a new system and having to manage that is definitely not worth the 1-2 weeks of the founder, or an ops person's time. That 50-75k is more like $5k/month out of what is typically a ~200-400k monthly burn, within which there are almost definitely other ways to save more than 5k if you pay a similar amount of attention (e.g. cloud costs, wrong go to market strategy wasting time, etc). But optimizing deck chair placement on a burning ship is ultimately a distraction anyways -- everything should be focused on growing revenue. Startup founders need to think in 6-month increments to get to the next rung.
I'd totally agree, if it took 1-2 weeks to onboard and manage! But it really does just take a few minutes.
And it'll get even easier once we add our auto-sweep features in the next few weeks, and you'll be able to just set it up once and truly never have to touch it again.
We certainly don't claim that Palus will transform your startup. But it's a worthwhile piece of very low-hanging fruit.
I also know many professionals who have a work computer and just want a personal device for occasional things like personal web browsing/shopping/occasionally watching videos -- things that would be inappropriate on a work computer and inelegant on a phone. These people already basically use their phone for everything -- many of them have never upgraded from their college laptop, which is now obsolete. They'd value a well-built (design, feel, screen) computer but have no performance needs.
This commitment by Lenovo must have been driven by customer demand -- in this case, the IT departments. I wonder how much of that demand may be attributed to questions about comparisons to Framework. Even if Framework is not mainstream, it has mindshare among the IT-crowd.
Lenovo has long had a separate board for the power connector you could separately replace. This is likely a continuation of that idea. I had an X220 Tablet (Released in 2011) from eBay that was sparking when I plugged it in. IIRC I just unscrewed and rescrewed the charging board and then it worked again. I guess there was some short, maybe it was loose. It would've been easy to replace just that part if it had failed completely.
For me, Framework is super cool as a brand, both for the quality of their product and the ethos that backs it. When everyone else in the coffee shop has an apple or another brand so widespread that you don't even notice it, the gear is something different. I like that.
Framework is a great concept but they will die due to poor execution. If I hadn't already recently bought a Framework (and knew what I do now about them) I would've held out for one of these new Lenovos. I don't think Framework can compete if one of the established players joins the game.
Perhaps a hot take, but I'm glad for electron apps because that also means they will be well supported on linux, which is almost never the target of native development.
Conversely, an app using native toolkits (at least the Windows ones) will have better chances of running fine under Wine. I've recently had the (dis)pleasure of trying to run some .Net monstruosity with Wine, and oh my got did it not work for obscure reasons.
But overall yeah, from a compatibility perspective, nothing beats Electron. I'm not sure we'd ever get an official Discord client on Linux otherwise.
I doubt it. I predict in a few years, maybe sooner, one/some of the AI companies buying up the supply will either have achieved their goal or collapsed, and then the market will be flooded with a glut of memory driving prices low again. Or, conversely, the demand stays high for a sustained period of time and the suppliers just increase supply. There's no hard bill of materials/technical reasons for the memory prices to be this high, unlike 20+ years ago.
And in the meantime, major buyers (government, big orgs) adjust by extending the planned lifespan of their computers, and upping the IT wage budget a bit to support that. That adjustment probably won't go away after supply returns.
Im always shocked how much good IT equipment is shoved into the trashbin:
At a lot of companies I could make a great deal - either for using it on my own or selling it on Ebay later on.
Big Corporations offen trash IT equipment thats only 3 - 4 years old. And there is no recycling etc. Very sad.
Big corporations tend to send old hardware through the surplus marketplace. There's lots of 3-4 year old corporate computers for sale. Often, the company leases the computers and then the lessor will sell them when they're returned.
As long as it's working (and not gross), why do you need a new monitor? My current monitor is a 2010 model, I think I got it around 2013. I don't know what a new monitor would do for me, other than have a worse aspect ratio, cause Dell stopped making 30" 16:10 monitors.
In theory, yes. However a lot of these monitors are still 2560x1440 and are 30”+. The ppi is quite low. I’m looking for 4k and something that looks similar enough to the M4 MBP I’m working on. A lot of these just don’t look good as they used to.
1440p is good enough that you aren't going to see individual pixels - just sit far back enough from the screen and use reasonable font hinting (Mac users are sadly out of luck here, but even then 2160p/4K is overkill).
> A machine from 5 years ago feels just as fast as a brand new machine.
Except you can't install Windows 11 on it, and the org has to trash it anyway to keep up with security requirement (I know people on that line of work, they're all angry about it)
AI companies aren't buying RAM, they are buying the Wafers themselves. Then they are making special AI stuff. So the RAM never exists, and there will be no glut memory coming. Maybe some DDR5 will dribble out, but HBM isn't something we can use (at the moment).
from wikipedia:
"ALGOL 68 (short for Algorithmic Language 1968) is an imperative programming language member of the ALGOL family that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously defined syntax and semantics.
The complexity of the language's definition, which runs to several hundred pages filled with non-standard terminology, made compiler implementation difficult and it was said it had "no implementations and no users". This was only partly true; ALGOL 68 did find use in several niche markets, notably in the United Kingdom where it was popular on International Computers Limited (ICL) machines, and in teaching roles. Outside these fields, use was relatively limited.
Nevertheless, the contributions of ALGOL 68 to the field of computer science have been deep, wide-ranging and enduring, although many of these contributions were only publicly identified when they had reappeared in subsequently developed programming languages. Many languages were developed specifically as a response to the perceived complexity of the language, the most notable being Pascal, or were reimplementations for specific roles, like Ada.
Many languages of the 1970s trace their design specifically to ALGOL 68, selecting some features while abandoning others that were considered too complex or out-of-scope for given roles. Most modern languages trace at least some of their syntax to either C or Pascal, and thus directly or indirectly to ALGOL 68"
My guess is someone took the 'no implementations' saying as a personal challenge.
Also, most languages trace back to ALGOL 60 (the C family tree goes ALGOL 60 -> BCPL -> CPL -> B -> new B -> C -> ANSI C -> ..., though there was some influence such as the idea of "casting", but apparently C only has a castrated version of what ALGOL 68 had) and Pascal is if anything negativly influenced by ALGOL 68 due to Wirth's disagreements with van Wijngaarden: https://dcreager.net/people/wirth/1968-closing-word/.
Yes, I've played a lot of indie hobby-tier niche games and I will say that AI assets are a big help for solo hobby devs who wouldn't otherwise be able to finish the game. At the same time, the AI art is noticeably inconsistent in an 'uncanny valley' way that breaks immersion, making the game quality poor.
this type of resource is actually super useful to idea-stage founders, as it can often be hard to research failed attempts at a domain (typically the websites and assets disappear over time). Even just an index is helpful.
In glancing through this list, some of these make me go "hmm." For example, MySpace is an entry. While it did eventually die, I'm not sure I personally would count myspace as a startup failure -- it got to huge scale, got acquired, and still had niche activity for many years of gradual decline post-acquisition. Certainly, the startup founders and investors had a successful exit.
In their books (e.g. "No Rules Rules" Netflix seems extremely attractive to creators because they pay top dollar, as a general policy, and have the internal decision-making processes that support making bold bets on art without committees that push "safer" creative choices.
And this is precisely because Netflix doesn't have to hit the jackpot with each new movie. They just have to keep people hooked on that subscription. It's one of the few times where the subscription model works best.
Then, the benefit of saving 1-2% extra versus spending my time trying to actually running the business and doing things with our money in the real world, has meant I have never looked back. 1-2% on millions of dollars is significant but it's not nearly as impactful as finding Product-Market-Fit in your actual business.
All this to say: I'd be in your target market but I'm simply not interested in a "marginally better" treasury system versus just going with my bank's options that make it easy for me.
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