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theoracle101

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This makes sense, SF benefited a lot from the social/mobile/on demand boom. Silicon Valley is set to benefit more from the AI/ML hype as this as stronger ties to academia, and also older, more academic type engineers who don't get as much value from living in the denser city of SF (that the mobile/social/on demand startups did).

Long term both cities will dominate and I don't see this as a structural change, this just seems like a shift based off of what is popular in VC funding right now.

"If you follow several of the steps I outline in this story (unless you go with Google Voice), you’ll end up with at least three email addresses: your current primary one, one just for your mobile carrier, and one that you use for other sensitive accounts such as online banking or Facebook or Dropbox."

Why not just have all sites that require SMS 2FA (there are a lot, including tele co.s) be directed to a personal google voice number? And also remove the any SMS 2FA from this google and your personal? Wouldn't that solve the issue they are suggesting? Why do you need a third account?

Yes but what you are describing is essentially unsecured debt. The government is guaranteeing your loans, why do you think student loan rates are so much cheaper than credit cards?

The price you pay for that guarantee is that you can't declare bankruptcy. The government is propping up this industry and it has some parallels to the US housing before 08 (encouraging lending to subprime homebuyers)

How can he claim they have poor tech & be secretive at the same time?

Within SDC circle, Hotz's company so far has shown some pretty poor demos. Really poor. I guess the salesmanship will him raise more $$ but its founded in anything but reality

In reality was a reference to the difference between why an acquisition price is reported as so high in the press yet appears on the financial statements as much less. This isn't unique to Cruise. Not a slight at this article.

From an accounting standpoint yes, but in reality they paid about $1B. Half was directly for the company, the other half was golden handcuffs. They are choosing to allocate the second to operating expenses and not acquisitions. To the employees of Cruise, still feels like a sweet billion. For once investors got less and employees got more, which is a refreshing change

How is this any different than Gawker using the legal system as a defense strategy? They print whatever they want, and good luck suing them, they'll wear you out in long legal battles with their deep pockets.

The only difference this time is they picked on a bully with bigger pockets.

I think the biggest thing everyone is glancing over is the wording of the app:

"If you have not formed the company yet, describe the planned equity ownership breakdown among the founders, employees and any other proposed stockholders."

Planned != official, no ? Couldn't cruise claim that the stock was never awarded

Thats not how these things work. Scenarios:

1. Deal falls through (unlikely) 2a. Deal goes through, and engineers amount are held in a reserve fund for 18 months to 2 years until the lawsuit is settled or the after the above timeframe. This is standard in situations like this. 2b. GM may reneogotiate to have this come out pro rata. Also unlikely (this may be incorrect if dillution only impact Kyle. Jeremy does claim he wants 50% of the whole pie)

So in all scenarios, this does not bode well for them at all. Kyle must be furious, but for the engineers who had no part in this, who there is no question have both ownership and actually wrote code, I feel very sorry for.

The lawyers will make out better then them too :/

So let me get this straight.

Jeremy was "waiting", while Cruise raised seed, Series A then B, and congratulated them assuming that he still had 50% and was happy to see his work grow?

He never thought to protest, or sign any documents at each round giving his consent. If this isn't extortion I don't know what is.

It will be pretty easy for Cruise to prove he wrote no code/prototyped nothing. All he has is association with Kyle and Cruise for 4 weeks before they parted ways.

Sad to think all the engineers at Cruise, working their ass off, getting fucked over by this guy. He'll probably end up with more than all of them.

Cruise 10 years ago

The sheer amount of misinformation in this thread is astounding.

He wrote no code, literally did not prototype anything, contributed nothing.

Self driving cars take 100s of moving pieces and complex algorithms. You can literally just check the github repo to see who has contributed what. There is no one IDEA that is the silver bullet. Its an entire system working together.

Obviously I can't say much as most is hearsay (though I do believe what I've heard), but the one part of this story that irks me the most is that this all started when Jeremy (allegedly) drunk at a party, bragged to Cruise's counsel that he could stall the GM deal if he really wanted to. Can't believe its actually come to this.

I feel for the engineers there. All their hard work, and likely they will have to lose a large portion of their shares due to indemnity clawbacks when the deal goes through.

I don't know. Sam was at a bunch of our parties/events, and has tweeted about us. My CEO and cofounder are great friends with a lot of the partners. Hopefully you're right, I just don't want to apply without telling them and they find out from that. But also telling them I'm thinking of leaving is hard too