Alfred has had a busy year. The company has raised $12 million+, set up shop in NYC, and tripled the number of employees on the team. But at Disrupt NY, a little over six months after winning Disrupt Battlefield SF in September, the company announced that it would be introducing a new service called Hello Alfred across the country. Okay, it’s technically not “middle” America, geographically speaking, but it is a small chunk of suburbia on the outskirts of an even smaller urban center. A place where people don’t rush right out and buy the latest new gadget simply because it exists.

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain.

These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.