HN user

dangxiaopin

125 karma
Posts1
Comments44
View on HN

I am long on Uber: taxis are dead, it will not go anywhere. The only problem is that the board made a strategic mistake that felt good short term. They tried to retain users by pushing the founder out, and hiring a diversity CEO. This failed long term as any populist board move does. But they still have a chance to have their NeXT moment and bring Travis back.

It's not a company. It's a university, for God sake. If no free speech there anymore, then where? In the kitchen, like in the USSR?

Now if he was a pedophile, he should be in jail. But he is not, he is exersizing free speech, no matter how disgusting it is, he is entitled to it. Should Nabokov have been made unemployable too for writing Lolita?

I can only interpret that they are talking about logged in users with accounts. The users were logged out during the pre-IPO and that resulted in some double counting in their second post IPO 10-Q.

I was researching this because I asked myself a general question: "Why is the stock price of non dividend paying companies correlated to the performance at all?"

insiders must already be aware

The lockup period does not expire till mid-october.

I read their 10-Q and found this gem about "user re-authentication":

"Users

MAUs at quarter-end were 300 million, representing growth of 30% year-over-year. This represents an acceleration in user growth, in part due to one-time changes to SEO algorithms and user re-authentication that impacted Q218. International growth drove the majority of global MAU expansion."

The newest trend in banks is to migrate to AWS. See recent Capital One hack. They view it as a combination of commodity hardware with cheap software.

Even though it does not look this way now, I think this is a seminal legislation that in time will move small startup scene out of California for good, due to what you have described. I have the same experience, bootstrapping a software company that initially could not afford an employee payroll and administrative/legal burden. Where do we go next to start non-VC companies? Oregon? Texas?

They have to pay payroll tax and administer payroll. I ran a bootstrapped business, that initially had several contractors, till a day I could afford to replace (in several cases, promote) them to employees, so I know this intimately. Additionally, there are payroll costs and the accounting costs, and the payroll administration burden. For a tiny growing business with no outside capital it matters more than you know.

The 5th largest economy figures come from semi monopolies like Google and Facebook. In the beginning, they get a VC investment, a comfortable office, a payroll admin and Wilson and Sonsini from day one. In the meantime, San Francisco restaurants cannot afford cooks.

Contractors send 1099 they receive from a company to FTB. They don't need to complain.

This means that a bootstrapped start-up cannot temporarily hire a graphics designer or a coder in California anymore, without the budget to make him an employee. But non-VC entrepreneurship has been hardly possible here for other reasons: building and rent control regulations driving the housing and office space costs. Since the 2006's "web2.0", progressive California regulators are at it for real, pitching entrepreneurship as an enemy of labor: it's no longer a place for small business and non-VC startups. Those have been fleeing.

I think the sunsetting is very premature. Python 3 became a stable and viable alternative only since 3.6.1 (look at the evolution of async/await before that for example). Giving it 2 years is definitely not enough for enterprise (unless their focus is startup, tinkerers and data scientists)