Redash is amazing. I used it for a little while on a retail analytics project. Arik, the lead developer and founder, is awesome and super responsive to emails.
tl;dr - YES
I have hired personally self taught programmers several times.
But I wouldn't suggest you to quit college and seek for a sw developer job. In most cases those (usually talented) developers have knowledge gap when it comes to algorithms, data structure or deep understanding of the HW / OS. Thus, you might be able to find a job right now, but in time you will need to catchup or you will have hard time to compete other developers with formal education.
I'm using dropbox + google drive (due to google docs) both home and for work and I get all of your claims. But what's the alternative? Besides google drive that has it's own issues all other solutions are less than dropbox or same with something missing (proper mobile app etc)...
I don't think there's a great opportunity there. Cloud storage is at this point a commodity product, so a new business would be differentiating entirely based on user experience and would be at a competitive disadvantage in storage costs compared to the big hitters.
"With that kind of money raised, the founders didn't get "nothing". They got a salary, probably a decent one, for however long they were running the thing. Which is more than many startup founders get out of businesses that fail. If they don't have personal debt, or didn't lose relationships or friendships, they came out ahead of many startup founders who started a business that failed."
Well, you should always consider the alternative cost. I don't know the founders but I can assume that if they would have work somewhere else they had much higher salary/ benefits etc
"I don't know the founders but I can assume that if they would have work somewhere else they had much higher salary/ benefits etc"
I think you'd be surprised. The A-round term sheets I've had come my way over the years specified a salary for founders bigger than any I've ever received working for other companies. It was more of a suggestion than a requirement of the deal, I think, but it gave some clues about the salaries the investors would be comfortable with the founders being paid. It was always generous. Not "C-level at Google" high, but certainly better than "low or mid-level developer at almost any company in the US, including good ones".
By the time you are raising millions of dollars, you are drawing a decent salary. Maybe you could make more somewhere else, but I believe it's more likely you'd make less.
AWS asks you to design your architecture for failure and work across multiple availability zones. Its complicated and expensive but you can avoid that. With google from the other end you can't. and that's the price you pay when you choose PaaS over IaaS
Google Compute Engine is also an IaaS. You can also design your architecture for failure and work across multiple availability zones by using GCE. GCE is not GAE.
imho its an app. You should start giving it for free, get some traction, learn why/how ppl are using it and what they love about it before introducing monetization.
Currently the pricing page is deterring potential users...
The plans page is to see whether the app is something that people would consider paying for in the future. Any initial release would be completely free.
How come everything is so dramatic this days? " The Best Business Book I’ve Ever Read". What happened to: "Recommended reading book! you should add it to your reading list"
The former sentence (assuming true) communicates something more than the latter.
Contrast:
"We're going to get some snow" versus "The biggest 2-day snowstorm in recorded history is bearing down on us!"
"A man died" versus "World's oldest man died."
Yes, a lot of times superlatives are used for the purposes of pure link-bait or advertising hooks, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate their usage entirely.
