msmith10101

Sorry to break the news to you, boz, but FB is a toxic waste of X. Fire yourself, pls.

I just think this story is not worth talking about. Two people created a fake website. That is the story. This is a span story.

So the IRS has no way of validating these numbers (they do require brokers to provide the numbers these days)? Overall I'm just not buying that this story is true, in other words.

How can you do your taxes if your trades are not executed?

Bad Blood is an awesome book. Really disturbing. There's a story about a naive stanford grad who joined Theranos and tried to blow a whistle internally when he realized that the "Edison" (a Theranos-based testing equipment) was BS. Holme's right-hand-man destroyed the kid, fired him, and even turned his grandfather against him (who was an investor - these Stanford fucktards and their legacies). Of course that stanford person is now pursuing his own startup...

Bad Blood has not had the impact in SV that it should have. The stock market needs to crash and the myth of steve jobs needs to die :-(

I'm playing the smallest violin in the world for these guys, a la Reservoir Dogs :-). I hope they can find a new job :-( if they can't suss out this 2b :-(((

Glad to see founders get the employee treatment ;-)

Makes sense. Hardware/software overall is monopoly-determined. If you are looking for an exit or a business model in the startup world you have to do something unique. This whole scheme was dead in the water, IMO.

Driving in a gas powered automobile is a lot more barbaric than drinking beer ;-)

Would like to see the gig economy move off of human labor. Do any of these companies like Grab or Go-Jek have much of an autonomy story or any real competitive differentiators?

If not, this whole space is otherwise a race to the bottom and a question of who can raise the most money. The fact that money from Softbank and Alphabet is allocated to competitors illustrates that it is very unclear how these companies differ from one another.

Couldn't agree more. Ridesharing is a terrible solution to the transportation problem. And the artificial markets that Uber/Lyft have created here are not sustainable.

no more uber stores pls. kthanks.

More likely a new grad will get nothing: recruiters, dilution, and taxes will see to that.

Not really. That's the 'only solution' if use limit yourself to the straight jacket of existing CS theoretical methods. Given how irrelevant it has been to industry up to this point (unable to even prove something as simple to state as whether P = NP), that seems pointless.

Looks like both Benchmark and Travis Kalanick wanted to sell more stock than they were able to. Can someone explain who was able to sell stock and how their sell preferences were prioritized and executed? Was everyone able to sell at least one percent of their holdings, for example?

What, exactly, has been fixed? What leads you to believe that the supply of Uber driver's will exceed zero once Uber can no longer lose over a billion dollars a quarter in subsidizing trips to pay these drivers more than minimum wage? Uber spun up self driving cars because it realized that it does not have a product or a business model.

The saddest thing about Travis Kalanick's story is that he was ousted because his greedy investors were afraid they wouldn't see a 20x return on their investment, and not because of the ponzi-scheme fundamentals or ethical compromises that appear in tech rags every week. He was ousted by Benchmark, not by law enforcement. He's walking away with over a billion, rather than a go-to-jail card.

Two points:

1. You write as if Uber has solved the transportation problem sustainably. The end state of an Uber job is that it will pay less than minimum wage. Why? Because the barrier to entry is the same as most minimum wage jobs (assuming you have a car made in the last 10 years) and it is more desirable than minimum wage jobs (flexible hours, no boss). The pay may look better on paper, but when all the hidden costs are accounted for it will be less than minimum wage. Uber is operating in an unsustainable bubble. Sequoia and Softbank are subsidizing your trips.

2. My guess is that if your mom was raped in an Uber and one of Travis' lieutenants got (somehow, possibly by stealing/bribing - not by asking her permission) your mom's medical records to prove to himself that she really was raped (to determine Uber liability and that it wasn't staged by a competitor), then you might feel differently in your respect and admiration for Travis Kalanick.

Reading something like this: I feel like TWTR users need to find a better product.

Newtons method and linear algebra. High school math, basically.

Revenue/user growth are irrelevant if your business model is to raise money for goods/services that cost you more money than you can charge from random users who have no brand loyalty. Uber's in a market in which there are no barriers to entry. It's a race to the bottom and waymo/lyft have better strategies thus far. (Lyft: raise less money at a reasonable valuation - stick with a crappy product in markets that actually matter, Waymo: Go fully autonomous using Google tech). Uber is the worst of both worlds. 2020 sounds reasonable to me after a snap-style IPO - Uber burns a lot more money than Snap :-)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2017/12/14/why-cant-...

youth, gullibility, and the desire to please

I've been wondering if the heat will take down a few data centers in this area. I guess reddit is hosted on AWS, however, so its current outage is not related.

Congrats! Since your LAN House is in Palo Alto do you take the Caltrain up there? What do you think of the commute? I myself am between jobs now and trying to settle on a place - currently located in SF but thinking of moving to Palo Alto.

Sorry, I meant to ask "was it a whistleblower?". Just curious how exactly this whole gnarly situation was discovered.

Guess this is what spurred the investigation: https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-...

Still, how did this article come about? What is a whistle blower?

How did Vizio get caught? Was it a whistle blower? https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-...

John Carmack has a history of betraying employers (e.g. softdisk). Hard to take him seriously when the evidence is he said she said and the law decided against him.