>$1k/month is by wire/cheque. Below that is credit card.

I wonder if pre-launch Slack would have got in to YC.

I bet they would have. Impressive team with big ambitions.

Not to mention Grove / Convore was in a few years before Slack.

The section on "BETTER EMPTY STATES" is really helpful, and populating that type content in-app is easy to forget about.

This is incredible. I have shown a few people, and they just keep playing and trying to fix their buggy "spells". Nice job guys!

It's interesting that in the same article they also mention they are hiring for new positions. I can't imagine how this feels for both departing employees, and the ones who remain. I don't know much about the situation, but I am interested in how flash sales staffing requirements differ so much from standard catalog-based eCommerce hiring needs.

I think there a few specific differences for them:

-Flash sales rarely have any inventory, and usually low enough quantities that they just sell through 100% of their buy and close the sale -Inventory-based store models require significant planning months in advance to source the right amount of each product, color, size, etc. They also then have to deal with the extra (you can't just leave products with one size all over your site b/c people will be frustrated) -Typically flash models need more focus on buying/sourcing (ie finding the cool new products to sell) and store models need more focus on planning (ie figuring out how much/when to buy, then managing inventory).

I'm not sure what their EU team was focused on, but from Jason's comments, it sounds like there was a lot of redundancy in buying/sourcing, which would need less resources as they pivot to a store model.

In terms of their open positions, it seems like a a company growing as fast as they have would want to keep the door open for hiring any position they might need - their open positions look like a broad range of resume collectors...

Would they have been able to retrain existing employees to fit those new positions?

This is what I would have assumed, too.

I know it just isn't possible in many situations, but transparent support goes a long way in avoiding situations like this. Zendesk has tried this out with fully visible support chat, and it's worked well for them.

It's always interesting when a common theory for an occurrence or a causality is overturned. It reminds us to keep questioning accepted beliefs/axioms/rules.

If that's well known then I wonder if they've actually done an "expected value" of cargo lifted into space by these rockets. For example, 0.9valueofcargolifted - 0.1costofcargoandfallout

Yes, many large businesses do some kind of expected value calculation when deciding what course of action to take.

Great, level-headed outline of the key steps in this situation. Clear communication seems to be a common theme among people who handle these situations well.

A temp way around this is to enrol in a university for one credit, and then drop out shortly after. You'll have full access while you're an official student.