Disqus - Latest Comments for superstrong

Re: Introducing One, Ten, One Hundred—A Wistia Original Series

Robbie Mitchell — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 09:34:48 -0000

Incredible to see my two favorite video people in the world -- Chris L and Adam L -- together in one project. 🙏

Re: 10 things to know about Oscar Health: A view of the company 6 years after its founding

Robbie Mitchell — Sun, 01 Jul 2018 22:19:45 -0000

It makes sense, you're still upset they dropped Sloan Kettering, Weill-Cornell, and New York Presbyterian in favor of a network concentrated on the Mt. Sinai hospital system. What you may not realize is that each of those hospital networks charges insurers wildly different rates for care.

More generally, Oscar wants to do two things:
- lower the cost of healthcare
- make it a better experience

A narrow network allows a smaller player like them to (a) negotiate the rates they need to make progress and (b) integrate more tightly with the providers to ultimately help members.

No denying your own frustrating experience in 2016, but your argument that the Mt. Sinai system is led by mediocre, sub-par providers cannot be taken seriously.

Re: The Theranos Story and Education Technology

Robbie Mitchell — Wed, 30 May 2018 15:25:44 -0000

> In ed tech, schools are the customers, but students are the users.

Students and instructors are always the customers. In many cases, yes, schools are the buyers. Just as parents directly buy educational products for their own children. And in the Jose Ferreira era of Knewton, publishers were the buyers: they licensed the technology to help their products better serve instructors and students. Unfortunately, their desire to maintain strategic leverage over both suppliers and schools trumped their commitment to serving students by developing next-generation products.

> In the start-up world (including in ed tech), the true customer is the investor, who merely needs to be convinced the project is worth taking a flier on.

Investors need to be convinced, yes, but to characterize them as the customer is misleading at best. That's like saying a non-profit's true customers are its donors.

> In this world, a technology “works” as soon as someone will buy it, but that’s not the same thing as it actually helping students learn.

In the case of Knewton, this is simply not true. Selling was important to business, but not nearly as important as internal recommendation QA, incredibly complex and collaborative integration planning with partners, ongoing data analysis, etc.

More to the point, however, I'd suggest you explore how this works with publishers themselves, not just recently launched technology startups. Do the products that major publishers sell "work"? Are they evaluated in some objective way, or against each other? Why do they require multi-year commitments?

Re: Gender Diversity

Robbie Mitchell — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 09:41:28 -0000

Godwin's Law holds yet again

Re: Gender Diversity

Robbie Mitchell — Thu, 09 Mar 2017 09:38:57 -0000

"Its hard to believe that one of the core characteristics of a great VC is female."

Unless you believe both of these things:
1. Women are inherently less capable at technical roles, investments, company leadership, etc.
2. Women are capable, but there aren't available any to hire.

... then the fact that they are so severely underrepresented in those roles should tell you companies are already failing to hire the best performing people, and are instead prioritizing convenience, familiarity, network, etc. All of which are self-reinforcing.

There is also plenty of research to support the strength of teams composed of diverse viewpoints. Gender is one strong way of diversifying a team's DNA.

Re: E-mail Alerts for Hacker News Comments

Robbie Mitchell — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 23:52:12 -0000

Just found your HN post (via Google) and signed up. Thanks for building!

For those who wish it had RSS, Slack notification, etc. -- just encourage them to hook it up to Zapier. You can create an email receiver that triggers tons of other actions, and you can chain them together. hook.io is a free, 100% code alternative.

Re: 4 Lessons from Experimenting with a Canon 800mm Super Telephoto Lens | Wistia Blog

Robbie Mitchell — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 16:32:18 -0000

"Hellllllo!" classic.

Re: Saying goodbye to Carousel and Mailbox | | Dropbox Blog

Robbie Mitchell — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 14:25:44 -0000

CloudMagic is working well for me, though it lacks snooze.

Re: Don't Allow 300-Person Nightclub Planned for Dyckman Street, Petition Says

Robbie Mitchell — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 10:42:29 -0000

It's easy to say "No," but do you have an alternate proposal? Are you willing to open your own business instead? In the meantime you have a vacant lot and people willing to invest in the area.

Re: Two Charts

Robbie Mitchell — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 14:07:10 -0000

I'd love to the averages broken out by sector or business type. Social media and content businesses vs. hardware and heavily regulated verticals (edu, health, energy).

Re: The New Yorker’s WordPress regeneration

Robbie Mitchell — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:21:12 -0000

Couldn't agree more. Even the tools needed to host/deploy/rollback/cache a professional, high-load WordPress site are free. I know because we commissioned this deployment framework years ago by one of the WordPress core developers and released it open source: https://github.com/markjaqu...

Re: The Costs of Big Data

Robbie Mitchell — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 09:54:25 -0000

"I don’t believe they think very seriously or deeply about education and the role it plays as part of our humanity."

It's unclear who "they" is in this statement, as "ed-tech utopians" is a slur that can apply to anyone you want for the purpose of any argument, but questioning the character, motives, or quality of edu employees simply because they work for an edu company instead of an institution is a terrible foundation to build on. It's a variation on this: http://www.knewton.com/blog...

Re: Microsoft under pressure to patch IE bug for Windows XP

Robbie Mitchell — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 19:01:26 -0000

Upgrade the OS? it stopped being sold ~6 years ago, was originally made 13 years ago.

Re: Knewton Raises $51 Million

Robbie Mitchell — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 13:52:32 -0000

So far we have partnered with Macmillan Education and Cambridge University Press, who are integrating the Knewton API into digital ELL materials. Stay tuned for their product launches!

Re: Making Remote Work Work: an Adventure in Time and Space

Robbie Mitchell — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 22:31:54 -0000

Is it really _creepy_? I don't see Sqwiggle as much different from being in front of people all the time in real life. Remote work and distributed teams save you from having to relocate your life, but that doesn't need to also mean complete visual isolation. The added friction of having to dial/answer can be more distracting than something that's always on in the background like Sqwiggle or Perch.

Re: Announcing WP Stack

Robbie Mitchell — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 22:02:03 -0000

You'll have to ask Mark about that directly. Also check out https://github.com/10up/var...

Re: My Idea for Higher Ed Reform: Do Nothing

Robbie Mitchell — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 13:17:58 -0000

John, we are certainly not very good at exchanging information with each other (yet). As a planet we can barely educate people to a high school level, let alone college. Education since BC has been incredibly exclusive and costly. Maybe you don't see a need for technology to help humans teach each other, but I see an incredible human tragedy that 4/5 of each generation is lost. You could triple the amount of teachers but it wouldn't make a dent; our basic setup is prohibitively expensive for others to replicate.

We're not going to do any better by arguing about whether the internet will advance education--it's obviously a matter of how we will use the opportunity. In some cases, it will provide students with access to something that is better than nothing. In other cases, underlying technology will help sophisticated, in-class teachers differentiate much more frequently and deeply for every student.

We're educating more people than ever, but it's still a small fraction of what's possible. Don't let bad actors ruin our imperative to do so much better.

Re: Dashlane Office New York

Robbie Mitchell — Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:10:25 -0000

I guess I'll be a hater, here.

In terms of ongoing costs, the office is in SoHo (location perk) and they order FreshDirect (food/drinks perk). They have multiple Doubles ($2500 each plus iPad) and an espresso machine. Running water is not a perk; the lack of sink just means they can't wash their hands or use anything but disposable dishware, which is a waste. It more likely means they're sub-leasing space that doesn't include the kitchen. I'll bet they'd take the sink if they could.

In fact, a kegerator is likely less expensive than buying bottled alcohol, and a ping-pong table is a one-time investment in endless stress relief and cross-team bonding.

In the photos I see beautiful hardwood floors, expensive chairs, formal desks, and huge monitors. Pretty sure curtains are a good investment in work conditions once you've invested that much in a good setup.

Re: No, Google did not say that there is no privacy in Gmail

Robbie Mitchell — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 13:50:04 -0000

Aside from scanning emails to use contents for ad targeting, how does everyone think Gmail blocks spam so effectively?

Re: HipChat is now free for teams of 5 users or fewer

Robbie Mitchell — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:54:13 -0000

Why cut your productivity so dramatically for $10?

Re: Getting Started with Video Testimonials

Robbie Mitchell — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:52:44 -0000

Heyyy

Re: What is Adaptive Learning?

Robbie Mitchell — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:01:22 -0000

Knewton's platform is currently in use by different content providers and being used to help over 600k students, a number that will exceed 2 million later this year. Our business development team is ready to talk with anyone who wants to work with our adaptive learning tools.

You can start the process on this page: http://www.knewton.com/sign...

The expansion of that technology into tools that an individual instructor can use directly is still in the works but not ready yet.

Re: Sara's wedding prep — Breakfast - steak and egg enchilada. Only taste...

Robbie Mitchell — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 11:54:11 -0000

Filling enough?

Re: Two Thumbnails Up: Play Rate Test Results

Robbie Mitchell — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:02:26 -0000

Meet the Hands

Re: Sharing (Your Stats) is Caring | Wistia Blog

Robbie Mitchell — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:11:44 -0000

Love the way I discovered this feature rollout: Wistia alert box, which launched a popover video, which has a post-roll message leading to this blog post. So smooth. Made a screencast and sent to our team.