She wasn’t getting paid the $7M total because of her deep interesting take on markets. They wanted direct access to the power players and to see how their mind works.
This revolving door with industry and policy makers gets a very uncritical eye by the media (especially compared to other frivolous background details) and obviously by the self morality of the participant speakers themselves.
I personally hope Chandrasekaran gets in trouble for hiding evidence. But nepotism and conflicts of interest seem to be super common in the upper tiers of industry and politics, which Theranos famously surrounded themselves with, right down to their board of directors being politicians and ex generals.
Can a city in a poor country afford anyone here's fee to visit them to speak on their area of expertise?
The fact that nonsense like this is actually upvoted on HN is absolutely hilarious to me.
The idea that all it takes is $300k to change monetary policy in the US is absolutely nutty.
The position that she only gave one speech and it was in direct exchange for a huge change in monetary policy is a strawman.
Eh. People make these kinds of statements, but though that may be true in some cases, it isn't true in many other cases. For example, there are plenty of organizations that are flush with cash that want a political celebrity (whether it be Yellen, Hillary Clinton or Obama) to come and speak to their membership or conference without expecting anything in return other than the speech they give. Why? Because people like to be around celebrities, political or otherwise.
I attend healthcare conferences where attendees number in tens of thousands (paying hundreds per attendee to attend) and hundreds of vendors paying hundreds of thousands or millions to display and advertise their products... For that conference to shell out $500k to have Hillary Clinton do an opening speech is peanuts.
159,000/mo is 4 FTEs at typical consulting rates.
You need a DBA to manage the database, an developer to spin up some reports, someone to manage the project, and an ETL developer to get the data in and out?
There’s your $159,000/mo “database”.
Are there cheaper ways to do it? Of course. But that isn’t why anyone hires consultants.
Some companies hire consultants precisely because their internal politics are so bad that they're unable to get the work done themselves.
I don't know anything about these companies at hand here, but I wouldn't scoff at these numbers alone.
I say this having been a consultant.
The people actually hiring these consultants usually don't care much about the skills of the individual developers. They're concerned mainly about resolving the issues that led them to hire those consultants in the first place. These often include things like:
1. Timeline. Can this consultant start work immediately? Do they have expertise in my tech stack, my industry, my regulatory environment, my particular business problem?
2. Politics. Does this consultant have sufficient reputation that I can use it as leverage in my internal business politics? Can this consultant navigate my company's business politics in order to further my business agenda? Can they produce the strategic documents/guidance to help me support my business goals?
3. Flexibility. Will this consultant work under terms that work for me? Will they put a consultant on a plane Monday? Or will they work remote? Are they willing to adjust the contract to meet a level of risk I find acceptable?
The process of choosing a consultant is mostly a business transaction between business professionals. The director of ACME's marketing department is typically in no position to evaluate the resumes of the proposed consulting development team. They're interested in getting their project done on time and on budget while minimizing risk. They're not stupid, they just have a wildly broader set of concerns than code quality.
If you get money thrown at you by VC’s, why not throw and exorbitant amount to a good friend as well...