founder alloy.co (Techstars NYC '15)
made coffitivity.com with friends (Time Magazine top 50 of 2013)
tommy @ website
- The key - for us - is to be not just a routing layer, but a huge value add in addition to being a routing layer.
We provide workflow management, decisioning, analytics, etc and those are things that all clients need. Underlying providers of various things know they will need to be integrated into something like that (whether homegrown or built by a vendor), so being part of an ecosystem like ours that ensures success is critical. Homegrown implementations of the same vendors vs. using those vendors in Alloy stops less fraud, causes more manual work, is more opaque, approves fewer good customers, takes longer to get live with, etc.
Importantly, we don't pitch either side (vendors or our clients) on using Alloy to compare vendors - rather to make the most of them (now and as their needs change). It's not just
"I can switch this at any point"
it's
"I will have a best in class system now and the peace of mind that I will have a best in class system tomorrow as my needs change, without needing to engage in 5 enterprise sales cycles to get there"
- There are many hyper-local issues like this where the real solution involves:
- actually wanting the problem to get solved
- finding out, at a very micro-level, how to solve it
- deploying those seemingly unscalable resources towards solving the problem
I suspect it will be more challenging to roll this out in a wider pilot and then city/state/nationwide because of bullet point #1.
- The only stat they cite is that some employers are raising prices. There are no other stats cited - only anecdotes.
In the ideal pro-minimum-wage world, prices go up slightly but the impact on those who get the minimum wage bump is bigger than the impact on those people from price changes OR the impact on other people for those price changes.
That's the tradeoff pro-min-wage people would expect and want so if that's happening, no news there.
The tradeoff they would not want would be massive hours cuts, businesses going out of business (although some would want that - not me!), or this turning into an excuse for the businesses to cut costs and/or automate. We would need data of some kind to understand if that's happening.
- There is an audience for "minimum wage kills jobs" articles and you can't write an article without a source. It's sad but true that the majority of the service industry is in perpetual failure mode, therefore, you can always find multiple business owners (they're "experts" right?) who will blame their failure on whatever the latest bogey man is.
Again - I genuinely believe hyper-local minimum wage hikes are especially stressful to the service industry. But articles like this make me almost more skeptical of that belief, because if this is the best they can do to make the case.....
- I just can't stress this enough: if you're reading an economics article that relies on anecdotes from owners in the service industry, DO NOT READ IT!
You can find a service industry business owner to shit on literally anything local government does. If there aren't hard numbers in the piece, into the trash it goes.
In the city where I grew up, they implemented a Bus Rapid Transit system that has definitively helped the businesses on its corridor. However, from the moment it was announced, article after article would come out where business owners would blame the BRT for their declining business or even failure. The evidence never backed these claims up.
The case that the minimum wage hurts the service industry, in particular, makes sense to me. In fact, I'm sure it's somewhat true. However, when the best an article can do is a 2018 survey saying that the majority of businesses have increased prices (curiously - no numbers about any negative impact on their bottom lines) - toss it in the garbage. No thanks.
- It's not intuitively clear to me what the point of this article is. Is it challenging the premise that building more housing stops the growth (or reverses the growth) of housing in urban areas? It seems to be but then most of what is talked about is not that.
The evidence for "more housing = slower rising or shrinking housing costs" is so strong in places like Brooklyn and Seattle that it seems almost impossible to really to challenge it.
- As a founder on the ground even in late 2015 (NYC), it was very hard to get a single angel check when we were trying to raise $500k. Ended up raising $2m from funds instead - which was the right thing but also very weird.
Fellow founders with companies that would have traditionally been at more "angel" friendly stages have had a similar experience recently - either funds invest or they can't raise more than $150k. Less true in smaller markets.
- The electric vehicles item here is disingenuous without including how massively subsidized their oil-based competitors are. I understand why urban transit people target electric cars to counter the "electric cars will save the world!" narrative but it falls flat to me in an otherwise compelling list.
- I said the multiple is based on the margin of the revenue, aka, how profitable the revenue is.
Revenue is the proper starting point as it is the thing that can or can not be optimized and grown. Profitability of the revenue (now vs. future) is obviously a huge driver but it is not the right starting point.
- revenue * multiple
let's say $10m in ARR * a 23x multiple
The way you get to the multiple is a combination of how fast the revenue is growing, how long you think that will keep up, and the margin of the revenue.
Craftsman Tools, for example, was probably not growing much or shrinking and likely had low margin revenue but I don't know.
- First of all, the idea that companies exist only to create profits does not mean that companies need to seek profits above all else. PEOPLE run and form companies and get to make decisions about how they run and form companies based on their own decision criteria. There's nothing about starting a company that excludes you from society and moral thinking.
Second of all, even thinking of the profit motive, people want to do work they feel good about. If you must make a profit argument, it's important for companies to draw lines about what they will and won't do and stick to them, to earn and keep the trust of their stakeholders (especially employees).
- Exactly! It's not about "tainted" vs. "untainted", it's about setting some limits and trying to be a part of the solution. Doing so puts in progress something that WILL start to shift things. You don't have to be money trail inspector, you just need to be your own ethical link in an otherwise ethically unknown chain.
You're responsible for making a reasonable effort where you think it's important not for the actions of everyone who has ever touched a dollar you're now touching.
I think routing layers need to be super thoughtful about this. How will I architect my system to ensure this isn't the case? Or doesn't matter? Or just doesn't happen?