Pretty common. At mid levels (senior manager, director), base is ~50% of total. At senior levels (VP, CxO), base is less than 25%. At the extreme (CEOs of major corps), base is negligible (e.g. Costello's base is $14k out of a total of ~$8.7 mm).
The obvious move for FlightCar is to partner with nearby garages, and offer a valet service to drive passengers to their terminals. To sweeten the deal, FlightCar might offer to wash or do basic maintenance (oil change) on the car for an added fee.
The passenger gets
- convenience of getting dropped off at terminals (vs. walking from airport parking)
- convenience of taking advantage of car "dead time" to get cleaned / serviced
- some money (from the rental), to boot
That's already what FlightCar is doing: their facilities are all off-airport, in another city 5 minutes away.
The valet drop-off/pick-up service (and air-travel-related marketing) is what SFO thinks entitles them to the rental agency fees... even though the drop-off/pick-up is indistingushable, in terms of impact, from having a friend drive you.
Technical skills aside, the best piece of advice in the article is "show them that you want it."
I've conducted countless interviews / hires where it basically went: candidates P & Q are the best on paper and in person, but candidate P said x, y, z or did a, b, c, and seems to really want this job and work in our company
x, y, z was sometimes as simple as enthusiasm, and other times was in describing what he/she did in their spare time. a, b, c was usually a project for work, school or fun that was highly relevant.
Intellectually, I think I know that "enthusiasm" is a poor / weak predictor of success. But, emotionally, it's a go-to tie-breaker.
Should I start putting every substantial R/Python script I write, even if they are based on some tutorials, on the Github/Personal-Website? Is that how I "show"? I missed the Github bus for all my previous projects.
I worked briefly for a mid-sized tech company that took a >$70 mm round, but will likely be out-of-business before year end. Like Ecomom, it is helmed by a "visionary" / fanatical leader with a "grow at all cost mentality."
To me, a big red flag is when senior managers make plans without both revenues AND costs being openly discussed.
Exactly. Problems with production databases are inevitable. It's just a matter of time.
The guy who should be falling on the sword, if anyone, is the person in charge of backups.
Better yet, the CEO or CTO should have made this a learning opportunity and taken the blame for the oversight + praised the team for banding together and coming up with a solution + a private chat with the OP.
Why do you think past efforts haven't "panned out" yet? Is it:
a) they're working on it, but just not there yet
b) the major EHR do everything in their power to delay progress by providing token access
c) it's actually very hard to sync medical records across so many different standards / systems
d) not enough patient / doctor demand / use-cases, i.e. people don't transfer as much as we think they do, diluting the value of inter-operability
? or something else? all of the above?
This area of HIT fascinates me because I hypothesize that it's a necessary precursor to reform. But, knowing little about the space, I'm not sure where to start my investigation.
In San Francisco, Kaiser could electronically share patient data with every other system running Epic with very little technical work and price. We're talking hours of work here. That would let them share data with UCSF, PCMH and every other Epic site.
They don't. Why not? It's because sharing patient data makes it easy to poach patients, and that's bad for business. There are similar situations in other cities too.
I don't blame them because the government hasn't made data exchange required yet. It's coming, with some of the requirements for Meaningful Use Stage 2 & 3 and the work done by the S&I framework. APIs will help too, because HL7 is confusing to newcomers and costs money. Vendors could make this easier too, but it's not like Epic or Cerner could compel anyone to share patient data.
I would think HIPPA is one of the issues here. Federal law says it is a big no no to freely share health info without a raft of signed paperwork, basically.
Typically customers handle this through some type of waiver system. Generally at the initial visit in an organization a patient signs a ton of releases that state that the parent organization allowed to share patient information as needed through the course of treatment. Most people want to share their information, but there are systems in place to restrict access as needed by law/best practices. Patients can opt out of data, and some data sharing systems support this through various technical choke points. If you were a nurse at one organization, you may not want people snooping through your medical records at another medical organization. The Direct Protocol supports this through pseudo-anonymity of accounts.
I worked at an insurance company for five years. Part of my job was to get authorizations so I could request medical records. I had annual hippa training. I was not allowed to read any medical records or request any medical records that were not directly involved in doing my job. One standard of hippa is "minimum necessary." That means I am only entitled to as much information as is absolutely necessary to do the job and not more. So I suspect that some system to share records has serious challenges.
This is a dream for retailers. "Augmenting" the in-store shopping experience has been a non-starter. Want to get product reviews and more info about this item? Well, why don't you pull out your phone, turn on the barcode app and scan the barcode. Now, you could ostensibly look at a item and get relevant additional information on-screen.
You make a good point, and candidly, we're not sure. The crux of the problem as we see it is that:
- If you enjoy shopping, you're probably pretty good at it, and don't need a lot of hand-holding.
- If you don't enjoy shopping, then a store is a bad solution. A better solution is "don't go to the store at all, we'll ship you the stuff," aka Amazon
What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this? i.e. Willing to go shopping, if stores can just make it bit easier when you get there.
> What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this?
Yes. Go do that. Like, right now. Find people you don't know who you think are your target demographic and ask them. They're probably in the grocery store right now.
You'll come back thinking (A) that nobody really this problem, (B) that everybody has this problem, or that (C) nobody thinks they have this problem and you need to show them that it is a problem and that, once you do, you'll change their life forever. B is probably a little delusional. C sounds really time-consuming and expensive.
Yeah. Thanks for that. We've done some of this and we're seeing (a) or (c).
We've kept going because we "feel" that there's something to be "fixed" inside a store.
For example, discovering new products inside a store is really painful. Typical "big box" stores are >100,000 sq ft with >100,000 products.
Want to find a "healthy snack that taste like wheat thins and goes well with cheese"? Well, we have a wall of a 1,000 products. What you're looking for might be in there somewhere.
I'm no expert, but I'm very sure that the difficulty in finding items in a retail store is by design.
If every customer walked in, grabbed exactly what they needed without looking at anything else, paid and left, the stores would probably make half as much money. It's common knowledge that "big brand" items in a grocery store go on the eye-level shelves because the distributors have paid more, and I remember reading that the ends of the aisles ("caps" maybe?) are super-primo real estate - that's why the ends always have Pepsi and Tostitos and big-name items. It's probably the same reason there are "impulse items" in the aisle when you check out. Oh, hey, yeah, I do need some gum, why not buy a pack.
It's also by design that milk and bread are in the back corners of the store.
But, ecommerce makes this disdain for the shopper unsustainable. 10 years ago, if you're store sucks, you don't really have a choice. Now, if you're store sucks ... well I can buy a majority of the stuff I need through Amazon, Diapers.com, etc.
So, could HelpPing be a timing play? Helping change stores right when they need to change ... so that they can survive to 2020?
One of the problems we're running into is that this problem (need for location and advice) does not seem to be an acute problem for users. In other words, most people are bothered by it, but not bothered so much that they pull out their phone to download an app.
What's HN's thoughts on this?
Should we keep searching for users for whom this is "a hair on fire" problem? or, try to find a different related problem that's more painful (for more people)?
If you're thinking of making this an app, consider two processes:
Mine:
1. I realize I need something and don't know where to find it.
2. I look around for a person who looks like they work here.
3. I ask said person.
Yours:
1. I realize I need something and don't know where to find it.
2. I magically and suddenly remember, "Oooh, there's an app for this that I downloaded last night when I was looking for apps that would improve my shopping experience."
2. I pull out my phone from my pocket.
3. I unlock my phone.
4. I navigate around my phone looking for the app which takes a while because I can't remember the name of the app or the icon.
5. I open it and wait for it to load.
6. I wait for geolocation to warm up while it tries to figure out what store I'm in.
7. I finally get a button that says "Ask now."
8. I click the button and wait.
9. A squawky voice attempts to help me, but by now I've forgotten what I'm looking for.
I'm really not trying to shoot you down, but I think you could find a bigger problem to work on. :)
Btw, I think it explains the lack of user traction of apps like Aisle411, ShopKick, etc. They take too long to use and they don't "fit" well with a shopping trip.
What keeps us churning on this space is the magnitude of the $ spent. $1.4T spent annually in low-service stores (e.g. Walmart). These formats have minimal shopper-facing technology (lots of great supply chain stuff) and have evolved slowly.
So, that goes us thinking ... so far, still thinking
This reminds me of how price scanners are now placed around retail store chains. I can't remember ever feeling like it was a big pain doing without them when they weren't prevalent. It was inconvenient when a shelf was missing a price, or when I forgot how much an item was once I changed aisles. But it wasn't "hair on fire" important because there was no solution yet. Nowadays, of course, when I need a price check and the nearest scanner is 20 feet away (if there is one at all) I'm feeling quite inconvenienced.
So to answer, I wouldn't abandon the idea until I had bounced it off of several customers and potential clients. It could be solving one of those problems we never knew we had.
