HN user
Every article about Block should begin with the context setting that this is a company that spent $300m to acquire a failing music streaming startup simply because the CEO likes hanging out with celebrities. It’s impossible to take any of Block’s statements about operational efficiency seriously when clearly their leadership has never been serious about running a business.
The way OpenAI and Anthropic are positioned in public discourse always reminded me of the Uber vs Lyft saga … Uber temporarily lost double digit marketshare in the US during a viral boycott over their perceived support of the Trump 1.0 admin. Heads did roll at the exec/founder level but eventually the company recovered.
If you bought Stripe at a 95b valuation in 2021 your returns are barely keeping up with the SP500 after this latest round. Not exactly an elite capital growth machine.
Genuinely curious - what’s the comp package like for 72 hours of interim CEOing a 80b company?
Also the article claims “800 million riders” which is astounding for an app that is currently #36 in the navigation category (iOS App Store). Unless this app is more popular than TikTok everywhere outside of the US they’ve gotta be playing fast and loose with those usage statistics.
I think it’s actually a very savvy strategy to protest from within. It’s too easy for Google to shrug off or ignore public criticism. They’ve done this for decades with virtually no repercussions because they hold a monopoly on their core business - very few people are going to ‘delete Google’ no matter how much you disagree with their policies.
They do not have a monopoly on talent and they are actually fearful of being no longer seen as the #1 workplace option for top candidates. Protesting as a Google employee gives you much more leverage than an outsider will ever have (unless you have the $$ to buy off a handful of senators).
Not sure where you got the idea that Waymo doesn’t value hardware development - their whole lawsuit saga against Uber was over lidar trade secrets (google “laser is the sauce”). Maybe you were thinking of Tesla who has insisted their existing video/radar stack will be competitive with enough ML? For all the other major SDV companies I’m familiar with, affordable and peformative lidar is a huge focus.
Also if the tokens can be used for 3rd party “Sign in through Facebook” authentication this just compromised millions of people’s entire digital identities for everything from dating sites to financial logins.
If you open the link SMPLC is actually Zipcar’s NGO and basically every mobility startup signed this proposal. Full list of signatories: “BlaBla Car, CityMapper, Didi, Cityway, Jetty, Keolis, LimeBike, Lyft, Mobike, Motivate, Ofo, Ola, Scoot, Transit, Uber, Via and ZipCar”
Does anyone else find this whole thing more than a bit hypocritical?
Lyft is always telling you they are the better/ethical/woke ridesharing option - now their employees are reporting a culture of abusing customer privacy. I wish they had taken a look at their own practices before running million dollar ad campaigns full of celebrities celebrating their ‘wokeness’.