HN user
bayesian optimist
Agree. We have seen this before.
What if someone reverse engineered Twitter's services and built a separate client and tried to monetize it. What would Twitter do?
What if someone reverse engineered Reddit's services and built a separate client and tried to monetize it. What would Reddit do?
What if someone reverse engineered Instagram's services and built a separate client and tried to monetize it. What would Instagram do?
It is interesting to see that employees of Convoy aren't saying bad things about the CEO. But people on the outside who don't know the CEO are saying bad things.
Usually it is the reverse.
They got caught in the same thing that happened to Flexport and others in the freight industry.
Price per shipment cratered -> Revenue cratered. (They make a % of each shipment) -> Losses spiked up. (Because they had fixed cost)
Flexport had a burn run rate of $600M a year. Convoy had less burn but also less in the bank.
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/flexport-revenue-dr...
Not clear that slander is in play here. Neo used a framing that made themselves look better and others look worse. YC refuted it. I am assuming YC has the receipts for broader insinuations.
To be clear these are not random people inside the respective organizations. These are the CEOs of the organizations.
I trust that they had the judgment to decide that they needed to defend their reputation.
As I understand it, the beef is that Neo compared themselves to YC claiming to be a better incubator because they have comparatively more mentors.
YCs contention is that the number of mentors on the website is not the right way to compare. For example, the YC mentors are working full time at YC helping startups while Neo’s mentors have full time jobs elsewhere and only spend a % of their time mentoring startups.
So the contention is that Neo is directly calling out YC and making dishonest comparisons.
There are other things as well about the ethics and behavior of the Neo founder, Ali Partovi, but it is only hinted at. Not explicitly stated with examples backing up any claims.
Steve Jobs hired John Sculley III. And then came back to rebuild the company.
This is the scariest part of the whole article “during a presentation they said took months to prepare.”
This sounds like what I would expect in the federal government or IBM. Not a fast growing startup changing the world.
I hope Ryan can change this part of the culture or they are dead.
Don't trust the company. Trust the business model.
Eventually a company with great intentions will be dragged to do terrible things if it required to serve their business model.
Google will ruin their user experience (e.g. YouTube, Google) and push the boundary on user privacy in the interest of more clicks & higher CPM.
Oracle is one of those companies like Microsoft which many in the tech industry wrote off years ago.
Neither one qualified for the illustrious FAANG acronym.
Ideally, when these things happen people would examine their blindspots.
“Immigration support: We will set the termination date for March 1, 2023, giving those with visa applications (and a desire to stay in the US) as much time as possible to find a new job”
Every company should do this to help employees on H1B that are laid off.
The standard terms are one of the horrific things about US immigration policy; suddenly uprooting families including kids attending school in the US.
The timing is interesting.
The job market has finally softened. Employers have been waiting for a moment to kill off the WFH movement.
Expect other companies to follow suit.
Is your take that Microsoft should offer this for free? Or if they are not willing to do it for free, Microsoft should cancel this service and we should wait for Apache or someone else to offer the service?
Or something else ?
It depends on what the goal of the exercise is.
There are substantially fewer CEOs relative to SWEs. If your goal is to help the most impoverished, you are better off reallocating salary from SWEs than CEOs.
You might be surprised. I suspect people will be quick to identify the problem with CEO pay but not use the same logic to identify the problem with SWE pay.
If you feel like your salary is too high compared to Cambodian workers, why don’t you do something about it? For example, donate 50% of it to a charity in Cambodia helping poor people?
I find these articles lacking any nuance.
“CEOs pandemic greed grab has sparked outrage among Americans across the political spectrum”
Guess what the wage gap is between a software engineer in the US and the average worker in Cambodia? About 100x. The average salary in Cambodia is about $2000 per year.
Is that wrong? Are engineers too greedy? No. Supply & demand for specific skills drive the rates in each market.
And all companies that focus on selling to other startups. Like Brex. They were the first to pop during the dot com bust.
So far. We are early in the cycle. Hiring freezes and layoffs are just starting.
If this keeps on for multiple years (like the dot com bust) then it will get very painful.
I am fairly sure Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk would have failed this test. Are you better off having them at your company or not?
That is true. But you would expect that they would have found something really substantive to show after 25 years of investing in technology.
I am not sure what the lesson is. But something seems to have gone really wrong for Netflix. Not just on the content side, but also with their technology investments.
The most perplexing thing about Netflix is that even though they have a reputation for hiring the best, I can’t think of a single way that the experience is better than Disney, HBO or Apple TV.
And this is after 25 years of investing in technology.
You can just read the statements from Ballmer and others on what they were excited about. I wasn’t on the deal team, but I worked with them on parts of it. The statements below are reflective of the belief.
Occam’s razor would suggest that Microsoft and Yahoo’s exec teams both talking about the value of the Yahoo Internet services as the rationale for the deal probably is the truth. And Microsoft would have paid much more than 10% of the $45B to get it.
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Microsoft sees Yahoo as a way to compete with arch-rival Google Inc GOOG.O in the Internet search and advertising arena, but it has limits to what it is willing to pay to get a deal done.
“We’re prepared to move forward without a merger with Yahoo,” Ballmer said. “We think the best way to move forward quickly (and gain critical mass against Google) is to come together with Yahoo.”
100% agree. I believe Microsoft would have made a mess of the acquisition. Microsoft had the same issues internally with their MSN/Live strategy at the time. Integrating Yahoo + MSN/Live was unlikely to succeed.
That is separate from saying that Yahoo shareholders would have benefited from selling to Microsoft.
That is fair.
However I don’t think that applies here. if the board truly believed it, they would have sold the “pure Yahoo” piece to Microsoft for far more than $4.5B and spun out the Alibaba stake. They didn’t and ended up losing billions in shareholder value.
No.
Yahoo got lucky with the Alibaba stake. That wasn’t what Microsoft was after. Microsoft was desperate to be relevant in Internet consumer services and compete with Google.
Yang and the board believed they could fix Yahoo. None of their predictions came true.
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“In an email to Yahoo employees after the board's rejection of the Microsoft offer was made public, Chief Executive Jerry Yang maintained that the company is well-positioned to grow, citing the Internet powerhouse's efforts to improve its standing in online advertising and build an alliance with newspapers.
"We have accomplished a great deal in a very short time," Yang said. "Yahoo is a faster-moving, better-organized, more nimble company well on its way to transforming the experiences of its users, advertisers, publishers and developers."
He said the company aims to "grow visits to key Yahoo starting points and properties by approximately 15% per year over the next several years."
https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/yahoo-rejects-bid-micr...
Twitter reminds me a lot of Yahoo about a decade ago. A company that lost its way. Cycling through lots of CEOs, re-orgs and visions and a culture that atrophied along the way.
Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $45B in 2008. The board of directors declined, believing in much more upside. Yahoo became increasingly irrelevant. They later sold to Verizon for $4.5B
https://www.onmsft.com/news/its-finally-over-yahoo-is-acquir...
Yes! We finally found a good use for the blockchain.
If that's the core lesson, it doesn't seem like very helpful advice.
How many resources should I have? Don't have too few resources and don't have too many resources. Have enough resources!
Presumably one of the reasons people have too few or too many because they think that is the right amount of resources at the time.
It is only in retrospect that you can tell whether you have enough.
I have seen this a couple of times. The only reason you wouldn't do an equal split is:
(a) if they have substantially more experience or have a more valuable skillset. For example, prior to this role they could command a salary that was twice what you could make in the market.
(b) they have substantial traction already. Revenue, customers, funding, team momentum, etc.
Neither of these seem to be true. "I came up with the idea" is not enough to warrant a difference in equity.
Honestly, the fact that they didn't offer you co-founder and equal equity is the first flag. Working with his brother is the second flag.