Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

How did Zoox start?

In 2012, Kentley-Klay stumbled on a blog post about Google’s self-driving car project, then pretty much the only one in the field. He saw the company’s prototypes as unsightly half-measures.. Then, one day, he walked into his Melbourne office (animation, video production) and announced he was off to America to fulfill his driverless dreams.

In a move that some will call devious and others will call ingenious, Kentley-Klay reached out to some of the biggest names in the field and told them he was making a documentary on the rise of self-driving cars. The plan was to mine these people for information and feel out potential partners. His first “interviewee” was Sterling Anderson, then a robotics researcher at MIT and later Tesla Inc.’s self-driving car chief. “I played the oldest trick in the director’s book: the vanity card,” Kentley-Klay says. “I showed up at MIT with a Canon and a bullshit microphone and interviewed Sterling for two hours in a grassy field..."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-17/robot-tax...

This reminds me how shoemaker Kenneth Cole started, who also used "making a film" as a cover story:

> Wanting to preview his line of shoes at Market Week at the New York Hilton, but unable to afford the purchase of a hotel room or showroom to display his items, Kenneth Cole inquired about parking a trailer two blocks from the Hilton Hotel. Upon discovering that permits for trailers were only granted to utility and production companies, Cole changed the name of his company from Kenneth Cole Incorporated to Kenneth Cole Productions, and applied for a permit to film the full-length film, "The Birth of a Shoe Company". In two and a half days, Kenneth Cole Productions sold forty thousand pairs of shoes, while chronicling the beginning of the company on film. [1]

Which is why it's still called Kenneth Cole "Productions" to this day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Cole_(designer)#Birth_...

Fake it until you raise 1 billion and then sell your company for 1 billion?

I’m working on my fifth $Billion...

I gave up on the first four...

The sale was a distressed sale. Their earlier valuation was over thrice the acquisition price, so a $1B exit was not the intended outcome, and probably leaves many investors/employees underwater depending on liquidity preferences.

Ahh yes, the ol' buy high, sell low strategy!

Well years ago the joke was Amazon sold at a very small loss but made it up in volume, and we can see how that turned out... Maybe they're going to blow up this business model as well!

Amazon’s “losses” have mostly been a tax dodge. They would for example invest in software R&D without presenting it as an investment from profits but rather an operating expense.

Losses are negative income. If I paid you $100k and then paid you -$50k you would be rightfully upset if you were taxed like you made 100k

Maybe this speaks to a need to tie taxes to income AND revenue. Not that I think the tax code should get any more complicated (quite the opposite), but if Amazon is selling at a loss to decrease the amount of tax they pay, while they starve out other companies in the market, there should be at least some benefit to society.

Companies losses are just spending.

If I pay you 100k then you spend 50k buying land that’s not a “loss”. When a company spends 50k on R&D that’s generally an investment not an operating expense. Plenty of other dodges exist for physical assets via depreciation games etc. Even just buying more brand averting is an option to increase capital without being taxed on it’s creation.

Buying land would technically be a capital expenditure where you can only claim a deduction if the land becomes less valuable. If you're talking about more "normal" business purchases like computers or equipment you get to deduct a portion of the expense every year as it depreciates. So if you buy a $2k laptop for a developer and in 1 year it's now worth $1500 then you can deduct $500.

For a business that really doesn't make a difference. If you have $1 billion in revenue but spent $999,999,999 in order to generate the revenue then your business income is $1.

Or the complete logical extreme. If I sell a dollar bill for $1 that's not income that should be taxed.

> If I sell a dollar bill for $1 that's not income that should be taxed.

You always have overhead so you can’t actually sell 1$ for 1$. Breaking even requires selling assets for more than their worth to cover transaction fees. We let companies deduct those fees, but what’s a fee and what’s an investment gets blurred. Especially when most companies don’t suddenly get destroyed after a single transaction. The classic razor and blade model being a prime example for hiding profits.

Sure, cash flow may make it seem minimally profitable, but that’s only relevant in this quarter or if you run out of cash. Spend X million on software development or brand advertising and can have a tax free transfer from income to capital. Leverage that for a few decades and suddenly your business is worth 10x as much without any apparent profit. Clearly an asset was being invested in.

"You always seem to play the vulture @Kvogt — we all know the @cruise Origin’s origin is @zoox . While flattered, you do make a valid point in seeking the best: Zoox engineers are better than yours, and soon better funded :)"

https://twitter.com/TimKentleyKlay/status/126933132126166630...

Wow that's pretty funny, but what's the context for that tweet? Did Cruise try to poach talent from Zoox ? The tweet definitely gives me an early 2000's Dotcom over the top rivalry/ceo vibe!

Vogt personally sent out an email to various Zoox engineers encouraging them to work for Cruise.

https://gmauthority.com/blog/2020/06/general-motors-looking-...

This will go over very well once they are eventually sued for patent infringement.

He's going to fit in great with the rest of Amazon leadership.

Even if that’s only half of the truth, it makes a great story that people will tell

Even the Obama-Os story is 90% fake, the story PG tells (and is repeated) is not even close to the story that the founder himself told on a startup podcast

What's the story? I thought they sold novelty cereal boxes as a fun side project and PG admired their creativity.

Unfortunately, if you look at his pattern of behaviour, it's probably entirely untrue. It's most likely something he thought would be a good story to tell. It's an exploitation of the silicon valley game - since everyone else is embellishing their stories and achievements you can just make things up entirely and pay no price for it.

SV is hardly the only corner of business prone to fish stories/dick waving. It's the same as the Hollywood gossip circuit, serving the same function.

High school lunch-table politics don't end at 18, unfortunately.

That's the most Silicon Valley way of doing things.

For one, I'm glad to live in a world where those kind of things still exist.

I'm glad to live in a world where those kind of things still exist.

Lying your way to success?

Have you noticed that the Odyssey is one long celebration of doing exactly that?

I'm not sure Greek myths are great sources of ethical behaviour given, you know, all the rape, incest, bestiality, cannibalism and more.

Quite a lot of Greek myths, when not stripped down to the "simplified for story-telling to kids" versions, are straight-up case studies / moral lessons to adults.

I'd never look at the Odyssey and mistake it as something to emulate. That people do is kind of surprising.

If you have to go back to the time of the writing of the Odyssey to justify for your behavior, you're probably doing something wrong.

there's a better world out there, believe me. you are alienated by living in such a pool of sharks. you won't believe how relieving it is to live in a world where you can trust people

if you become successful at the venture, then was it lying in the first place?

It obviously was still lying, even if you are successful. How is there any question? You either lie and are unsuccessful, lie and are successful, or lie in a legally material way and are sued or fined, and are either successful or unsuccessful. All outcomes still started with a lie.

It also reminds me of Shenzhen, with their fail fast, fail often, chabuduo for now grit.

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