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Yeah and in the very next paragraph, he gets intimidated by a truck driver being annoyed that they are driving 63 mph, so decide.... to slam on the accelerator and go so fast they no longer see the truck's headlights on the flat desert highway. Much better alternative then just letting him pass you.

It's almost like they wanted the trip to fail to write this article.

It's patently false the claim that individual investors generally don't beat the market, or that the ones that do only do so by chance.

Warren Buffet, a very famous investor you may have heard of, even mentions that he knows plenty of small individual investors who follow many tenets of the philosophy of value investing and they have consistently beat the market.

I, personally, have been individually investing, following the principals of value investing, knowing the companies I invest in, and asset allocation, diversification across industries, and I have slaughtered the market for over 20 years.

All the points he raised in the article are valid, but they read like pop culture one liners. If you are serious about investing I recommend reading Ben Graham's Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, and follow along with Buffet's letter to shareholders.

Understanding the stock market takes time, and you won't find the answers in a 1000 word blog post.

Sure, it's something the CFO thinks about, but it isn't really something that plays a factor into decisions about how to run the business for other C-level executives.

I would say his industrial design experience at Segway (and Deka) was more relevant to Apple.

Let's not forget history here. Musk had a very hard time releasing the Roadster, and it was one of the most painfully delayed automotive launches in history. They were close to running out of money numerous times in the launch, and needed key loans and cash at key times (including a huge cash infusion from Musk himself) otherwise they would have failed. At least some of that based on the public information at the time can be attributed to Musk's inexperience in the car world.

They made it, but it wasn't without a lot of luck. I worry about decisions like this because if there's one thing Tesla really needs to execute on, it's getting new car models out the door in a very timely fashion.

Another example - Nardelli was also a brilliant leader at Home Depot, but he couldn't do enough to save Chrysler.

The car industry is a very different beast then building wheel chairs and segways. Personally I would prefer someone in the new car development driver's seat with a bit more experience. Putting someone without that experience is such a leadership role seems like a reckless move by Tesla.

This is all just my opinion. I'd be happy to discuss further and share opinions.

I missed it the first time through, although I'm not surprised as in the article his previous automobile engineering experience seems downplayed.

Equating his segway experience to all of transportation seems a stretch.

According to his linked in profile he was a development engineer at Ford for 6 years and hasn't worked in the car industry for 20 years. Certainly he does not seem to possess any executive experience in the car industry or related to car development.

As a TSLA investor, it makes more sense to me to have someone in that role who actually has experience getting cars to market (ie. someone like Bob Lutz).

It seems like the trend lately is to float a tiny amount of shares to the public. From my perspective this creates an artificial supply problem for the stock and makes higher valuations easier as you need less institutional buy in to maintain the price, and a few good quarters can result in disproportionate gains in the market.

Can anyone comment on that or shed some light? As a potential investor, those factors make me shy away from these investments as it makes the stock more volatile to changes and puts the fate of the stock in a few large holders hands.

Interesting move. While I can see some overlap in experience leading large technical projects where industrial design and battery life are of paramount importance, I wonder how much of that experience will translate into actual car development.

From the outside looking in I'd rather fill that role with someone with car industry experience bringing actual cars to market, because battery life and industrial design are somewhat fungible, but if Tesla is late on bringing car models to market that has a serious effect on their timelines.

I agree but it's inevitable. The creators are busy creating, and the fact that there is no shortage of "non-creators defined by their taste" (who also have an abundance of free time) - means it is a bit of a hopeless battle maintaining the integrity of the comments.

Also be wary about anecdotes from previous employees who feel slighted by the company, because they are usually passionately vitriolic and have a bone to pick :)

Tesla Roadster's have been on the roads now for 6 years, and I think you'll find it is pretty hard to find one at any significant discount off it's MSRP.

Tesla also offered a $12000 replacement plan for the Tesla Roadsters, so you could get a fresh set of batteries if there was a failure.

Sounds like you just had a bad manager. At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers. I'm sure your opinion would be different if you actually made it to the AWS group like you wanted.

You're turning a bad experience with a single manager into a personal vendetta against the company as a whole. I have friends who work there who work normal hours (and have for years) and they even said they feel like they are more respected employees as engineers then the business owners.

CEOs in general tend to be hard to work with. There are also anecdotes about Gates being rude.

Further, I would say the people who want to judge a character by a few anecdotes are being lazy, small minded, and short sighted. Jobs, Gates, and Mayer are all different people with their own styles. I'm not sure if Mayer's style will be what Yahoo needs, but I wish her the best of luck.

No one's lunch was eaten by Wii. I think by now it's pretty much been concluded that Wii was an alternative to the PS3/XBOX demographic (that is, people interested in PS3/XBOX also bought Wii), and that Wii itself brought a lot of new players into the console gaming world. Not much if any actual cannibalization of sales occured.

Also besides ignoring game sales, it also ignores the fact that Wii sold the most during the early part of it's release. This year Xbox 360 and PS3 are on pace to massively outsell Wii and have been doing so for a while. This is the part in the cycle where hardware sales are most profitable, so who really has the last laugh?

Besides, with the PS3 it was mission accomplished for Sony as they used it as a large bargaining chip to win the blu-ray format war.

Looking at 10 year stock trends, you can see the real story. Nintendo had a massive stock surge after the release of the Wii, but now they have fallen to pre-Wii levels. Sony has been steady throughout.

It's good to hear from YC founders that they don't see the negative impacts.

I can certainly understand why the hype machine is, at least in the short term, valuable to both Sequoia and YC. It helps raise the profile of YC and causes valuations to rise for all involved companies. Both Sequoia and YC are in the business of making money after all.

But when you have a situation of "frenzied investors" and these "exclusive limited events" designed somewhat to cause a situation of artificial scarcity, the waters get a bit muddy regarding the motivation of connecting companies with investors. It's the difference between having genuinely valuable partnerships, and those quick liquidity events designed to make a quick buck.

The original mission of YC involved developing companies that build things that people want. I hope the Sequoia influence doesn't change that.

I'm sure Sequoia has a laundry list of valuable connections for any YC start up.

I just wonder whether contributing to an atmosphere of "frenzied investors" like the original article alludes to is helping or ultimately could wind up hurting in the long term.

Might be unrelated but I've noticed an awful lot of YC "hype" (press, news, coverage) since the Sequoia investment.

I hope Sequoia is not being a negative influence to YC by dis-proportionally "banging the drums" and ultimately being a distraction to the goal of building and developing lasting and meaningful companies and businesses.

Another common aspect of human nature: Interpreting people in the worst possible way.

My opinion of Google has turned from positive to negative in the last 5 years, and it has nothing to do with how big or successful they are.

Pretty relevant example, as Eastman Kodak just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection just last week.

This review is pretty over the top negative. Not saying it's wrong, but the product has over a thousand reviews on Amazon.com and the average is four stars.

You can always take a trip out to best buy/target/etc. to play with it.

In my 3 or so years as a Netflix subscriber I have noticed an extremely disturbing trend of Netflix killing useful features simply because they aren't good for the business.

I can think of 2 off the top of my head:

- You used to be able to easily access a page of latest release DVDs. They killed this page because "too many people were using it" - and they had a pretty audacious blog post assuring that now it is a better customer experience claiming "it caused contention to ship" - although I never had a problem and sorely missed the feature when it was gone

- You used to be able to see the top 50 streaming movies. It almost always had the top new hollywood blockbusters which I really wanted to see. This feature vanished one day with no explanation that I could find.

The new site redesign is also a good example, making it harder and harder to find the movies you actually want to watch.

For these reasons alone I was a relatively happy customer but I would never have invested in them as a company due to their lack of customer focus. This latest price fiasco was the nail in the coffin. I cancelled my membership.

For the price of the streaming plan, I will just watch one or two movies a month on Amazon Instant Video with a much bigger selection and much stronger customer focus. All the nice features which Netflix killed for no reason are featured prominently on the Amazon web page for starters.

Agreed. It seems for all the vitriol against AirBnb, there seems to be a vitriol against the criticism of AirBnb as well.

Either way, all the articles, from TechCrunch and on Hacker News, have been useful to me in understanding both the issue, the reaction in the press, the sentiment on hacker news and among tech circles, and beyond. This one in particular does add some new information which I found useful.

I will keep upvoting stories I find interesting about the whole ordeal and I encourage others not to be deterred by the extreme comments in either way.

Google has a support problem. I'm amazed after almost a decade of offering services like email and advertising, they still haven't done anything to develop a reasonable support system for customers to address issues like this. Maybe they have a few open lines with their top 1% of customers but the attitude that "it's free, you are a meaningless statistic in our giant revenue stream so too bad" for the rest of their customers in unacceptable.

Your data in Google could disappear in an instant, and you may never know why. That is just scary to me. Advertising, email, - everything - with no one to call and no recourse to get it back.

I will be actively trying to move all my services off of Google starting today.

One decade is great. Plenty of companies have had their one decade in the sun - Microsoft, Cisco, IBM... Standard Oil.

I think your comment is a bit of hyperbole, the success of a company like Apple is not unprecedented in history. Apple could continue doing "big things" over the next decade, I just seriously doubt their ability to continue their growth and justify their market cap over the next 5-10 years. That's all. Possible, yes, in my opinion extremely, extremely unlikely.

And also like clockwork, I had a comment explaining why I thought they would fail, and have downvotes.

To be fair, people have been predicting both sides of the coin for a while. People predicting success on hacker news tend to get upvoted, and people predicting failure tend to be downvoted, regardless of the reality of the situation.

Right now Apple is doing great. I would still question the sustainability of this business as an investor. What's next after ipad?

Long term, 5 years say, ipad/iphone margins will evaporate and Apple will need a series of "big things" to fill in the gaps to even have a flat growth curve to justify their market cap - that's my prediction.

MySQL and PHP were terrible technologies even in 2005. Maybe if Facebook started in 1999 they might have an excuse (even then it's debatable) but 2005?

Also, architecturally there's no reason to do a massive re-write of any software all at once, and it usually ends in tears. They can do it piece by piece and they should be making those investments now if they hope to last another half decade.

There is a great many lines of text written about tech giants like Google and Microsoft, but at the end of the day the reality is more simple then interesting. I remember Wired ran a similarly article about Microsoft some years ago (Linux, Gooogle, Firefox, etc. - war on all fronts).

At the end of the day, Google gets most of it's money from advertising, Microsoft from Office/Windows lock-in, Amazon from e-commerce, etc.

The one company that really turned it's self on it's own head was Apple, but I don't see any of the above companies (needing to) do anything so radical any time soon.

To answer questions about stock - most employees won't care. As far as I know - the last time they were planning to go public only the senior executives were issued any options/stock grants. There was no standard practice of issuing stock to 'regular' engineers.

Congrats to Bob Parsons, GoDaddy is pretty much the poster boy for bootstrapping (although Bob was already quite wealthy from a previous business). Apparently many people don't agree with how he ran the business and you are free to have your opinion, but I think most of the controversy at the end of the day was isolated to a few legally pressured decisions (regarding shutting down web sites, such as rate a cop) and a few bad apple executives (buying/selling domains at their own auctions). On the whole, I've been a happy Go Daddy customer for 10 years now and haven't had a single issue.

This seems night and day to GroupOn's S-1. A solid sustainable business, plenty of cash on hand which is growing every quarter, and a clear path forward to continue their phenomenal growth.

There are plenty of risks of course, not the least of which is Facebook turning off the lights, but that is something that seems like it could be baked into the IPO price for a 1 billion dollar company with these financials.

Not saying I will invest in few months after the IPO, generally it takes time for investor hype to cool down and heat back up again (see LinkedIn, the only people who made any money so far were the investment banks) - but it might be a good post-IPO lull buy.

Really throws the future of Hulu in doubt. If the big three media companies are no longer part owners, and they already see Hulu as undermining and upsetting their traditional partners, what incentive do they have to continue providing free content?

If anything at this point Hulu will be a talent acquisition.

SFBay average is about 76K:

http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm

Equating 86K a year to penniless is a statement very very far removed from reality.