Distributed startup founder here. We love Figma, keep in touch with Gather.town, and have been very happy with Flat.app for keeping us from Asana/Slack hell.
"Ticketing. Our Ticketing segment is primarily an agency business that sells tickets for events on behalf of our clients and retains a fee, or “service charge”, for these services. We sell tickets for our events and also for third-party clients across multiple live event categories, providing ticketing services for leading arenas, stadiums, amphitheaters, music clubs, concert promoters, professional sports franchises and leagues, college sports teams, performing arts venues, museums and theaters. We sell tickets through websites, mobile apps, ticket outlets and telephone call centers. During the year ended December 31, 2015, we sold 69%, 21%, 7% and 3% of primary tickets through these channels, respectively. Our Ticketing segment also manages our online activities including enhancements to our websites and bundled product offerings. During 2015, our Ticketing business generated approximately $1.6 billion, or 22.6%, of our total revenue, which excludes the face value of tickets sold. Through all of our ticketing services, we sold 160 million tickets in 2015 on which we were paid fees for our services. In addition, approximately 297 million tickets in total were sold using our Ticketmaster systems, through season seat packages and our venue clients’ box offices, for which we do not receive a fee. Our ticketing sales are impacted by fluctuations in the availability of events for sale to the public, which may vary depending upon event scheduling by our clients. As ticket sales increase, related ticketing operating income generally increases as well."
$1.6b of revenue selling 297m tickets. $5.79 per ticket. So you are paying $20 fees on a ticket, who do you think gets that money if it isn't Ticketmaster?
Well something is going on. I used to go to concerts all the time when I was younger and they were far far cheaper than what they cost today even when accounting for inflation.
I am aware of that part, yeah. It's a shitty change, one hundred percent, and I'm glad to see folks like Wyden trying to unwind it. At the same time, I've owned small software businesses before, and I've started/not started new ones based on whether I thought it would work out. Where I am unclear is what sorts of business plans, on day zero, would be suddenly nonviable when it was viable before, so suddenly overwhelmingly difficult, as to cause such discouragement.
Is there a good chance of recategorization pushing a very marginal business off the cliff? Sure--that Twitter thread, where there are enough details to read in, has a lot of examples of marginal businesses having trouble (mostly because of not being able to plan in the change, which really sucks). But you don't have that on day zero, and going in with the aim to be that very marginal business is probably not the best of ideas. It's not a day-zero problem, and I am struggling to see where a small business with a business plan that was previously worth executing on is now not worth it because of this change.
It fundamentally changes the cost structure and investment risk profile of business plans without changing anything about the intrinsic economics of the business by requiring much more capital to achieve the same outcome. A perfectly reasonable business plan can suddenly become non-viable if there is a huge new overhead to doing business. Suddenly needing to pay $1M to the IRS on "profit" for a company that is barely making money is rather large change to the financial assumptions that make the business viable.
Affected small businesses suddenly need to increase revenue or cut costs by 20% just to keep their business solvent. Most small businesses do not have the structural elasticity or capital reserves to absorb that, nor do many business plans. In the very long term it notionally all evens out but most small businesses don't survive that long and these large new costs of doing business will reduce the survival rate even further.
> imagine in year 1 you grossed 100k, spent 200k on salaries, but the new irs rules say you owe taxes on 60k of profits.
For a clearer picture on this it’s helpful to include the actual tax amount. With a corporate rate of 21%, the tax would be about $12K.
Now that’s not zero, but it better shows the actual cost born in year one under this plan.
The later years are important as well. As profits continue to flow in, the rest of the cost can be deducted from it. So it doesn’t disappear.
Though you do lose a bit from the nature of present nominal being inherently worth more than future nominal amount. With todays higher rates, that’s an even larger factor.
Right, this is exactly why I'm confused about the all-is-lost framing of this. $12K isn't nothing. It's a pretty shitty thing to have drop on you and I think it should revert. But if you're starting a software business that isn't a solo shop--so you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in payroll--I would expect a $12K difference to not be the needle-mover between "start a business" and "don't"; we're not talking a hot dog stand here.
I understand where you’re coming from but the thing to understand is: most startups are incredibly marginal to begin with. If you tilt the field such that the entire distribution is now ~5-6% lower expected value for any given outcome, you can easily wipe out 80%+ of the startups that might’ve been “worth trying” but don’t make any sense now on a risk-adjusted basis. The entire asset class can become unfundable because the same money taking the same level of risk simply generates more returns elsewhere
Are we talking "startups" or "small businesses" here? I could see this blowing up startups for sure, but the conversation was about small businesses and I'm not sure I see the connection there. In my conception of the universe, you're not rolling out multiple hundreds of thousands of salary when you're hanging out your small-business shingle. You might grow to it, but that'll be over a long period of time.
Having to amortize salaries mean that a freshly starting company has to include any salaries paid as (software devs salaries)4/5(corporate tax rate) extra thing to budget - if they don't have access to necessary reserves up front, it might be enough to turn a marginal business out from starting at all.
When twitch was acquired by Amazon the rumor was that they were the single biggest AWS customer and they were going to go out of business because they didn’t have the cash to pay the bills. It would have been bad for AWS and Amazon was investing in games. If you read between the lines that’s basically said in this article from that time. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/26/6067085/amazon-twitch-tv-video...
"Niche" is very different. Lower membership and higher premiums, usually. I don't suppose you'd like to offer anything further about your niche or your membership base, would you?
They might pay creators a fraction of what they make on ads or other extras (digital bullshit like emotes), but none of that is in exchange for the content. The content is still being developed, written, produced, performed, and provided to the platforms entirely for free.
Unless there's some kind option where youtube or twitch signs a contract with select creators and then hands them huge sums of cash upfront for the costs of future content production, or to license the creator's existing content to distribute via youtube/twitch then the cost of getting that content is still just as free for youtube/twitch as it is for the pirate streamers that upload bluray rips.
Ad revenue is money gained from advertisers at the expense of viewers, it's entirely separate from the cost of the content being viewed.
> Unless there's some kind option where youtube or twitch signs a contract with select creators and then hands them huge sums of cash upfront for the costs of future content production, or to license the creator's existing content to distribute via youtube/twitch
That’s exactly how it works. And the fractions (on Twitch) are between 50% to 70%.
>Unless there's some kind option where youtube or twitch signs a contract with select creators and then hands them huge sums of cash upfront for the costs of future content production
For the record this exact thing does exist for bigger streamers. See Ludwig for example, he switched to YouTube exclusively because it was a better deal than his twitch offer.
I've seen paid exclusivity deals from youtube before (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/youtube-reportedly-paid-usd160...) and while I'm surprised they paid a streamer like Ludwig to defect I'm pretty sure those kinds of deals don't exist for 99% of the content that gets uploaded to the platform.
> The content is still being developed, written, produced, performed, and provided to the platforms entirely for free.
No, it is developed because the creator expects the platform to pay them for the views. Which the platforms does. Most big channels wouldn't exist without that money.
The flaw in your logic is that "S3 is front-and-center the source of your business" is never true with AWS.
To do anything in AWS there's at least 3 or 4 vaguely connected services, including IAM and RAM as a completely separate UIs. Usually with S3 you also have Cloudfront or some other CDN. You probably also have Cloudwatch logs and CLoudtrail event tracking. You might have VPCs involved. Some or all of these things, in an org like Twillio, could have entirely different teams managing them.
The problem isn't that S3 is hard. The problem is, as OP suggests, the UX of actually doing anything non-trivial across half a dozen services is somewhere between abysmal and war-crime.
Might be a war-crime, but people at the enterprise level like twilio, don't do anything at the UI level, and if someone was to do something at the UI level, AWS blocks public access _by default_
AWS console was only complicated as a complete noob. Once you understand how services work you actually realize is decent.
Each of these services are highly different concerns and don’t belong together, and are honestly not _that_ hard to orchestrate together with the liberal application of Terraform.
If you’ve got one team managing your logging who don’t talk to whatever team who manages your s3/cloudfront setup, then that’s your problem.
> and are honestly not _that_ hard to orchestrate together with the liberal application of Terraform.
I love Terraform, but the fact that you require an entirely different company's orchestration tools to make AWS "not that hard to orchestrate" is evidence of how poor the UX of AWS is.
But terraform is using the aws sdk behind the covers.
Most of the stuff available with terraform is available with CloudFormation minus a thing or two. (takes them a minute to catch-up to other teams new services/features)
You can use Cloudformation. Like, what do you want here? Some super console that nobody asked for because anyone who knows what they are doing knows why you want infrastructure as code?
These only seem “vaguely connected” if you haven’t studied them together. IAM and S3 are intricately intertwined and you should understand both at at least an intermediate level to work with them in sensitive environments. (Note that IAM has permissions specific to each Amazon service, all documented in detail.) None of the rest of the systems you mentioned gate write access, though certainly if they’re in your production flow you should study and review them as well.
If you have CloudFront in front of your bucket, the bucket shouldn't even be world-readable, let alone world-writable. Permission should be delegated to CF to read out of the bucket.
