I'm shocked no one has mentioned Close.com

I've been using it for close to ten years and can't imagine using another CRM.

I believe they were an early YC company as well.

What does Twenty do that Close doesn’t or can’t do?

(I’m a huge Close fan.)

Close is a strong source of inspiration for their opinionated approach. We hope that we can make the difference with the User Experience in the short run (For instance you can uses blocks in notes). In the mid run, open source sounds like a big differentiator as you will be able to customize Twenty to your needs.

I've long wondered why there are no college courses on sales.

Almost every company has a sales department and there are tons of careers in sales, yet there is no formal path to learning in higher ed.

Does RDS require a lot of maintenance and management?

No one on our team has DevOps or DBA experience -- we feel good about Heroku PG (even as inflated prices).

So far, not really. You need some basic AWS experience for security/scaling/setting up alerts purposes, but beyond that the only "ops" I've done in two years has been manually triggering some upgrades (paranoia on my part) and we ran out of disk space at one point as I forgot to set up an alert but this was very easily fixed.

“Letting this narrative persist”

As if it’s in their purview to control. Ask the poor PR folks at CFA (chicken QSR)

Chick-fil-a? You can say that here without getting sued.

I wonder if the author’s primary gripe is with

1. VCs funding a so-called “servant economy” or… 2. The fact that there are these businesses that perpetuate some form of servanthood (to use the author’s parlance)

If the gig marketplaces were bootstrapped, is there still an inherent problem?

I'm not sure many of these businesses are bootstrappable, as they tend to require massive infusions of cash to make the economics work at start-up. See ride-sharing companies' years of multi-billion dollar losses.

Mike Perham from Sidekiq (OSS Ruby background worker) has office hours every Friday for an hour. I've gone before and he was really helpful.

https://sidekiq.org/support.html

I've thought about this, but I wonder what the UX is like.

You always show success? What sort of confirmation does the user get? If the card is declined, how do you notify them later? Would that notification confuse them?

So many things to think about.

"Thank you for placing order number x. Check your email for confirmation."

Email is somewhat immediate if the gateway was up, somewhat delayed if it was down. Regardless, it then offers order confirmation and shipping info, or it offers a card-declined-try-again flow.