mlyang

What a waste of an article and opportunity. The journalist had the opportunity to sit with 30 other tech visionaries listening to them talk about their vision for the future, and he just..forgot everything they said because he was hungry, and spent most of the article writing about his own hunger?

This is a fascinating article. I wonder to what, if any, degree this methodology stifles innovation because innovators aren't rewarded. It seems from the article that ATLAS did not think the Nobel Prize was awarded properly to the correct people...would that affect their research in the future?

I find it interesting how YC is trying to increase its classes sizes significantly and YC partners are traveling all around encouraging everyone to apply (which would seemingly reduce the standard for getting in, unless qualified applicants are significantly increasing every year) in light of pg's point about gaming the system. Getting into an incubator, for many applicants, is effectively like "playing house" at starting a company or gaming the system, when really what those people should be focusing on is just building/growing their product, rather than figuring how to get into an incubator before they have a validated product. Especially given the predictors on a YC app that might increase an applicant's chance of getting in (prestigious school, work experience, etc.), seems like there are still lots of opportunities for "gaming the system" in YC.

(Per above comment, I work at the VC that invested in Airwatch): Because Insight is a growth stage VC deploying a significant amount of capital with each investment (in AirWatch's case, it was 200M), it's aiming for virtually all hits (unlike an earlier stage VC that's aiming for 1 out of 10 of their portfolio co's to succeed wildly)-- which it almost always succeeds in achieving. This also means that it gets lower returns on its funds relative to an earlier stage VC. Given the growth stage focus, that's to be expected and its LPs prefer the reliable (and relatively substantial) upside given the fund sizes. AKA Insight's not dealing with 55%-100% losses on other investments.

I work at the VC that invested in AirWatch last year. We're happy with the investment given that it was a relatively quick and clean exit given our typical 3-5+ year exit timeline.

Great! In my experience, the most inspiring talks by female tech entrepreneurs were ones where you would have had no idea whether they were female or male based on the content of their speeches/talks (e.g. "This is how we got our first 1000 users" rather than "This is how I navigated being in an all male board room"). This conference is a great opportunity to hear the experiences and perspectives of female entrepreneurs-- I hope that its content focus is more on their achievements and strategies rather than their gender. Actionable insights like how these entrepreneurs navigated their Series A or hired their first employees give a less explicit, but (in my opinion) more resounding affirmation that women have just as much credibility to succeed and achieve in the tech space. Excited to tune in!

Fantastic! Will this be streamed? For women not based in Bay Area (and therefore realistically women with even more limited access to female tech/entrepreneur role-models), this would be a great resource to be accessed remotely and real time, and could definitely be the catalyst for some quality Twitterverse discussion/encouragement for female tech entrepreneurs.

Dropbox really needs to accelerate its enterprise sales to justify this valuation long term. Given the tight integration that Box has with so many enterprise software solutions and Box's focus on enterprise, it'll be interesting to see how these two firms fair against each other on the public markets eventually (inevitable at this point given their valuations). Maybe just being a household name will do it for Dropbox even if Box can close more/better enterprise deals.

Will Nest customer data be shared with Google? Our privacy policy clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest’s products and services. We’ve always taken privacy seriously and this will not change.

This phrasing is pretty ambiguous/vague if you ask me. "Taking privacy seriously" will not change-- though I'm sure few behemoth Internet companies, including Google, would say that they don't take privacy seriously.

I think the best summary of Nest's answer is: Yes, we will share customer data with Google. But we'll take it seriously.

The thinking about MOOCs and their success metrics is flawed. We wouldn't measure the success of Wikipedia by the percentage of people who've read an entire Wiki article top to bottom for a particular topic they've searched for, why would we expect the same for MOOC courses? The reality is that it's just a great social good that these courses are available online and accessible to the select few who should choose to fully utilize them.

Everyone's too fixated on the completion rates for these courses. The reality is that the people who are checking out these courses are doing it mostly out of intellectual curiosity at this point, so they have no reason to finish certificates, or finish courses, or watch lectures that they're not interested in. These people have no incentive other than to pick and choose, and to idealistically expect that people will put themselves through the downsides of education (HW, exams, watching the boring lectures when they can just pick the interesting lectures) is unrealistic, and certainly not an indication that "MOOCs have failed."

according to the snapchatdb page, they've blurred the last two numbers of the phone numbers so as to not cause complete damage.

I never implied that the reporter was culpable. He isn't, RapGenius 100% is. But if I were in the original poster's shoes-- for me at least-- I would've initially found breaking the story to be fun and interesting, but seeing how Rap Genius as a business is basically screwed for the foreseeable future, I would've definitely thought twice. I agree that Rap Genius is 100% wrong in its shady tactics, but as a lot of the other commenters in this above thread (who have not been down-voted to oblivion) have stated, this is a pretty harsh punishment on Google's part. Knowing the harshness of the punishment after the fact, I was just pondering as to how the original poster felt, that's all.

It's obviously wrong what Rap Genius did, no doubt about it. They should not have used these techniques. But, it's not a bizarre line of thinking to think of whether the person who posted it finds it to be worth it after the fact given the severity of the repercussion (which could effectively ruin the whole business).

Creatives (designers, engineers, etc.) with optionality (at the caliber that Google would hire) pine for freelance-like working conditions (not referring to pay, but rather creative control, flexible hours, and amenities). These tech firms try to absorb as many of those benefits as possible to woo over employees. In Google's early days, maybe employees had greater creative control over their projects-- hence creating more autonomous and creative working conditions. However, as a company scales, you inevitably lose your creative control and become a cog in the larger machine. No perks can veil this, hence the changing of Googlers' mentalities.

Unless you're at the top of one of these large firms, I have a really hard time imagining any creative and truly autonomous person willing to work for more than a year at any of these institutions before breaking free and either founding a startup, joining an early stage startup, or freelancing.

Go onto Meetup.com and see if there are any relevant meetups in the San Francisco area for people looking to practice English. Alternatively, just go to any Meetup for a topic she's interested in (e.g. crafts, health, etc.) and she can talk and interact with the people there.

I would recommend that she volunteer somewhere (a non-profit or a clinic) where she'd be talking to people for most of the day. The best way to improve is just by practicing. I think that'll be more efficient and effective than any of these language sites/products.

The downfall of Facebook is what was the crux of its initial success: the comprehensive largeness of one's social network. On Facebook, most people accept all acquaintances and friends they have in real life (should they get a friend request)-- it would be rude not to-- and as a result, one's Friends List is usually a pretty good indication of one's entire social network. This allowed Facebook to gain its initial network effects, but this is also now paralyzing the activity of its individual users. I feel uncomfortable posting extensively online because there are many people in my friends list who I feel uncomfortable seeing my things (and I don't care enough to create Private lists).

As far as addressing the teen exodus, and related to the above impact, Facebook's NewsFeed is just not interesting anymore. Back when Facebook started, I was friends largely with 100-300 people whose lives I actually was interested in. I am not interested in the minutiae of my current 1000+ friends' lives, and their endless and meaningless statuses bore me to no end. Facebook wanted its NewsFeed to break out of the echo chamber effect, and therefore made the NewsFeed algorithm more random, putting the onus of creating relevant NewsFeeds on the individual user (through the creation of individual lists of friends). But USERS WANT THE ECHO CHAMBER EFFECT! I don't want to know what's happening in the "town square,"-- I want to know what's happening with my 20 closest friends. Because teens joined on when this new paradigm was already in place, there's nothing to draw them in. It's just not interesting-- and apps like Instagram and Snapchat are more engaging as a result because they're more personal.

Lastly, Facebook is way too cluttered. It has an atrocious UI, so many buttons all over the place. Mark Zuckerberg's utilitarian aesthetic lives to today, only it's way worse because Facebook has so much more (useless) functionality. Instagram and Snapchat are clean and elegant-- it's not jarring to open those apps like it is to navigate Facebook.

I think this will pretty substantively impact Snapchat's moderate to less prolific users. Most people don't NEED their pictures to self-destruct, they weren't that embarrassing in the first place. This however, allows for more fun engagement after the initial picture sending and once users get a feel for that, people would opt for this I believe.

This will have a huge impact on Snapchat, IMO. Instagram Direct allows you to keep a conversation going with close friends, which is much more engaging and fun. Snapchat does not allow for that. One of the reasons that I'm not as prolific on Snapchat is that I just can't know what the hell I'm going to take a picture of next in response to someone's Snapchat. This addresses that issue by allowing just one picture to be the instigator for a conversation. Obviously loyal Snapchat fans will still stay there but I think the less prolific Snapchatters will opt to send a picture this way rather than thru Snapchat.

This isn't so much a bet on bitcoin as it is a bet on virtual currency. If another currency trumps bitcoin, Coinbase will become the wallet for that. So as a VC, if you buy the digital currency story, this seems like an intuitive investment.

Interesting to see a new spin on this. Webvan was one of the biggest busts of the dot com era (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan) -- interesting that Amazon resurrected it..

One important aspect of Bay Area wealth to keep in mind is that Silicon Valley has a very supportive entrepreneurial culture-- wealthy exited entrepreneurs generously funding seed rounds for up and coming startups, lending a hand to pull up those around them. The mentality of modesty and collaboration greatly detracts from the sort of dystopian and polarized picture this article paints.

Research institutions like the MIT Povery Action Lab try to make economics research as experimentally rigorous as other research -- but I think even this fails to make economics a true science. Economics is concerned principally with correlations that have no reason to be universally and timelessly true-- just a snapshot of current (and transient) social phenomenon and the corresponding correlations within that snapshot. Correlations (and policy efficacies) that are found fundamentally rest on shifting psychological, social, cultural, and political trends. Physics, on the other hand, even in correlative experiments aims to find relationships that are timelessly and fundamentally true-- and provide the foundation for other scientists to discover what those fundamental truths are that drive this correlation. Such truths don't exist in economics.

Cool idea-- people inventive enough to go down an entrepreneurial route would probably be interesting/compelling candidates for academic innovation.

I actually think that creating many interesting projects + one's corresponding Github would be a better metric than getting a Google (or even YC) acceptance letter. You want people who are constantly tinkering and thinking of new ideas/projects/approaches and inventing just for the sake of inventing.

If you go too entrepreneurial, you might also be selecting for students who might be more amenable to dropping out from the program and doing a start-up (which then wastes the resources/time that Jeff mentioned he had to give to every PhD candidate).

It's a great teaching tool (so in a university/academic setting at the very least)

Once you factor in genetic selection (Gattaca style -- many aspects of which we are ALREADY capable of), inequality will not just become a matter of knowledge/education/motivation as this article states, but BIOLOGICAL - and that will really be the turning point in global inequality.

This is-- from a scientific perspective-- not far off at all, and we haven't figured out the ethical system that can help us navigate this coming phenomenon.

Even start-ups like Counsyl, which are doing great work with respect to genetics and family planning, are a part of this movement towards genetic variation between the rich and poor.

That's true-- although just based on my observations it feels like Facebook comments on popular posts are silly because of how angry/polarized they are, not necessarily how nonsensical they are (relative to Youtube's comments historically).

For example: typical bad Facebook comment = angry rant at Sean Parker from person who seems genuinely angry

vs

typical bad Youtube comment = some nonsense troll/needlessly racist comment.

This isn't just to make commenting more social (i.e. pushing friends comments to the top)-- I imagine it's also largely to hold more people accountable for their comments (w/ their reputation) so that there aren't as many nonsense/flame/bigoted comments like there always have been on Youtube, and in turn get higher quality comments (e.g. Quora vs. Yahoo answers analogy)

I feel like politicians are to their constituents what parents are like to teenage kids with respect to substance use advice/"laws." Parents of teenagers ban their kids from substances even though they themselves definitely did them when they were younger. The hypocrisy is kind of funny to me-- it's like there are two different worlds going on (one public facing, one the reality) that everyone just plays along with for reputation's sake even though we all know we're kidding ourselves -- it's ridiculous that this social play we put on actually seriously affects the lives of those touched by the global drug trade.

Feedback:

1) I feel like including in your limited app space/pitch "finding people of your class" is a poor indicator of your ability to market the product. While there is some way to spin the whole "find people with similar intellectual interests/career aspirations/etc.), referring to "class" specifically seems elitist, and would be poor marketing IMO.

2) In the "impressive things," Nishant wrote "getting scholarship" though it should've said "getting a scholarship."

3) The tone of the app seems childish at points (references to "fat little boy," "I want to spread love"). While it's good to not take yourself too seriously, it might've been a little too much perhaps?

4) I don't think you explained/framed very well what exactly is the problem that people are facing that you are solving. If you can draw upon some references to people really preferring to date others with similar educational/professional background or something, that would've probably helped.

Just wanted to give some constructive (but conjectural) feedback. Good luck guys! :)