I remain surprised by how much better my life got by the really simple expedient of making batteries a pervasively available utility, even though I'm not often away from an electrical outlet during coronavirus compared to more typical life pattern.
The dominant use case for me is "Drop daughter off at school, would really like to go to a cafe and enjoy breakfast but cannot justify it if cell phone is off, see I only have 4% and think about going home... pop into konbini, rent battery for ~$3, get to enjoy coffee."
And it's such a good business for all parties that the local konbini moved the station, which both handles payments (with the app on your phone) and fulfilment of the battery, away from the register because frequent transactions were blocking foot traffic to the checkout.
(Japanese 7/11s have very tight margins, both in the financial sense of the word and in "We have *exactly* 3,600 seconds per register during the lunch break and if you waste 7 of those seconds you better have a darn good reason for it because that's half a marginal sale!" sense.)
I also think I will never, ever again have to do something I've done at least 20 times in my life, which is buy an entire battery for $20 and then later bin it because I need ten minutes of juice to navigate to a meeting and realize while en route that I will not have enough.
You haven't seen panic until you've seen a salaryman realize that while he knows the neighborhood e.g. his accountant is in he does not actually have their address memorized, the device with the address and all available communications channels is currently a brick, meeting in 10
"How would you go from their address to their actual physical location given that that is non-trivial in Japan?"
Walk into any convenience store, ask them if they could please look up the address for you, they will pull out the neighborhood map that they keep around for this.
I always feel super awkward asking for this but it is definitely a thing which convenience stores understand customers will ask for, which is why they have a laminated map (and sometimes a stack of take-with-you maps) within 4 paces of the register.
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"What would the grown-up financial economy do if it lost $70 million?"
It is difficult to answer this question because it should be nearly impossible to lose it to anonymous counterparties. Everybody you're connected to has a name, an address, a phone number, etc.
That’s probably not “Rails create” but very well could be “Here’s how we deploy on Rails and why we made these choices.”
Or in banking not “Here’s what net interest is” but “Let’s talk about funding sources available to banks and the relative costs and limitations of them.”
Also there is culturally more willingness to grind a bit on marketing and sales where a lot of us back in the day reaaaaaally wanted to make a software vending machines, put it on Internet, and never have to talk to anybody.
An interesting thing from the crystal ball: a lot of what has historically made this form of software entrepreneurship attractive is that most founders of it live somewhere where they are the best game in town for a software dev.
One of many articulations of the thought, though I wouldn't use the word "bubble" these days; in core tech (ex-crypto) degree of investment seems extremely rationale to me.
Software takes money to build, and that money has historically been raised by professional money people.
Software makes software people money.
It is very not obvious that professional money people add value other than the money, and to the extent they don't, why have them.
A very useful thing to know, if you sell things that could be used by a company that would have need for a hundred pretty nice workstation GPUs, is how this calculation gets made in practice:
Technologist: Residual value is $4k contingent on sale.
Manager: Do we have a buyer on the approved vendor list who will do The Usual with less than one phone call required?
Technologist: No.
Manager: Trash them.
Technologist: Why?!?
Manager: We’d only spend hundreds of dollars of staff time, I.e. yours, if this was a simple matter of boxing them up and giving them to vendor. That might or might not be worth it given typical ROI on your time given current workload/priorities. However.
(Not wholly descriptive of things I’ve seen in my career but really important to understand broad strokes of how large software-oriented orgs operate compared to small shops and large non-software orgs.)
(And while there are lots of differences between and within companies it is, unsurprisingly, trivially true that e.g. eng team randomly picked at Google is more similar to one at Amazon than a randomly selected writer of code at Washington University or the IRS.)