Red Ventures has turned very specific advice into very big business
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If you are a reporter or investigative journalist I'd encourage you to do some poking around into the business model behind APlaceForMom.com and the FTC action to spin off Caring.com and the overall effect on the nursing home industry.
I can go on a major rant about RV, their moves to rollup the majority of the lead gen industry but due to prior legal interactions with them I'll refrain from painting a target on my back any further than I have.
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I can only imagine that businesses are going to setup somewhere outside the US. Not for tax reasons, but simply to avoid the exposure to the minefield of patent.
But between the vagueness and buzzwords I didn't get it at all.
If you are an investigative journalist or class action lawyer, please feel free to reach out to me. I’m easy to find.
If you want to engage with the HN community, talk about why you own and have prosecuted what seem like obvious patents. It was filed in 2009, when similar services were all over the web.
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We were sued in 2018. My knowledge of their patents is from then. They may have abandoned some since then.
It's active and I see lawsuits were filed around it in 2018.
It's ultimately why I believe control mechanisms must be abandoned, no patents (or if allowed, perhaps only for 3-5 years to give a head start but longer than that is clearly harmful and costly to society and innovation/competition).
I believe they cause more harm than good and we should just get rid of software patents. At most, they should be replaced with IP protection that's similar to software innovation timescales (ie, 1-2 years, not 20 years).
Patents are written to be vague. They don't need to teach anything. They just need to look "sophisticated" so a jury of yokels in rural Texas thinks that it's very "smart". Then you get an award of Billions of dollars for something you cook up on a whiteboard over lunch with your lawyer.
After seeing the breakneck pace of innovation in Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm convinced that a free for all is a better state for an economy then what we have in California with patents. Patents create a system where you need to get a thousand permissions from people ... spend millions on lawyers ... all for what? All because we are worried that someone somewhere might have done the thing you are trying to do first. I say so what? Yes its sad if someone makes something and they don't get paid for it because everyone else does the same thing. But is that a bigger tragedy then what we have now where trolls shut down whole industries and approaches? Where lawyers live parasitically on the backs of engineers, doing nothing but causing friction in the system and adding no value.
I know formerly good engineers that no longer do engineering. They just spit out endless amounts of bullshit papers for lawyers to turn into patents, which will then be used to harass those of us that are actually trying to build useful products.
A society that incentivizes parasitism instead of productive work will end up falling behind a society that incentivizes useful work.
Between the policies of the Fed that have pushed so many smart people into unproductive speculative jobs (like flipping houses) and stupid laws like software patents, I've become very bearish about America's future prospects after visiting China. Everyone in China actually seems to be working at a breakneck pace making useful stuff. Everyone in America seems to just have their hand in someone else's pocket, or they are buying some asset in the hope they can sell it for more tomorrow.
How can we continue to make progress like this? This is so insane.
The broader point about yokels from rural TX is less true than it used to be. Post 2012, as a practical matter, to assert a patent, you have to survive an IPR challenge, where a group of more experienced technical staff at the USPTO decide whether the invalidate your patent in an adversarial proceeding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TC_Heartland_LLC_v._Kraft_Food...
I've seen their job listings and looked them up from the employment side before, and they seem to have high turnover & somewhat cult-like/exploitative behaviors.
The fact Google is too lazy to stop a bunch of conglomerates from monopolizing the internet is the most disgusting part
It would make them somewhat hypocritical if they did.
Private Business Network?
at their scale, I wouldn't be surprised if they had multiple people on Google Search team bribed. They'd lose billions if they actually got the penalties they deserve
The same for eBay's massive organic penalty after they published a case study showing that pausing their paid ads didn't hurt their business.
Would Google make more money if they did this?
https://www.aplaceformom.com/sitemap
This websites also used the same website design:
https://www.allconnect.com/internet/cheap
This one is slightly different but same leadgen business model:
Also with a coupon directory with affiliate links: https://www.mymove.com/coupons/electronics/
Couldn’t find any obvious cross links between properties. But definitely giant Google keyword engines with a leadgen business model.
Apparently APlaceForMom was #1 in the market and Caring.com was #2 and the FTC feared that having the same stockholders owning majority stakes in both companies would lead to data sharing and essentially be market consolidation.
So RV sold off their $1.4B investment.
Talent wise, I have never worked with a group of assholes as delusional as the people who work there. Their technology sucks, and the people who are implementing are is extremely fucking dumb. They get distracted by shiny new technology all the time. This lead to all of their crap being this unmaintainable mess of crap powered by wordpress.
And if you tried to make things better, everyone there had the biggest egos you can imagine so any criticisms were seen as an attack on their character. One time there was this code that was super insecure with SQL injections all over the place and remote code execution vulnerabilities. When this was pointed out, the director who wrote that code 20 years ago tried to get someone fired. No quite a place I would trust for all of my personal information btw.
If you think you are the best, this place is for you. Shitty technology and shitty products that leave plenty of room to just coast with no real challenge. But if you are actually smart and want to work with real smart people, this place is not the place. One of the worst places I worked at in my career.
Your review prompted me to check them out on glassdoor, https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Reviews/Red-Ventures-Reviews-E14..., and it doesn't seem too bad. Is glassdoor not a reliable source anymore?
There aren't very many smart engineers working there honestly. One of the good things there is that they put junior engineers in charge of projects, which lets them grow faster than most places, but the problem is that they put a bunch of junior engineers in charge of projects so there is noone who really understands software engineering and could actually mentor others. Like if a senior engineering resume came to me from RV, I would treat it as a Junior engineer.
So fine place to start your career, terrible place to actually learn how to build good software.
I have given up on using glassdoor, I put its ratings somewhere between Amazon and Ebay Seller ratings
No, the only signal in their sea of noise are the negative reviews.
In any case, I can see why some people would have had a bad reaction to various aspects of the place -- I myself left after only 10 months, repaying my relocation bonus to go work at a healthcare startup.
> For instance, they purchased more than a million toll-free phone numbers, and each visitor to their marketing website was shown a different one. So when prospective customers called, Red Ventures knew exactly what they had been looking at on the site, which gave the agents what they needed to make personalized sales pitches. This was a pretty high-tech form of digital surveillance in those more innocent times.
I know what I look like in a shop. I know what the clerk knows about me.
I know what the clerk can only guess about me from my appearance.
This is the clerk picking your damn pocket to find examine the contents of your wallet before returning it without your knowledge. You didn't agree to it. You now don't know what they know - but - and this is the real kicker - you probably think you do.
Nobody ever gave informed consent for of this surveillance which has been a massive bait and switch. It does /not/ map to going into a store and having the clerk watch which product you look at before assisting you.
Just be clear, we are still exactly talking about a website owner tracking what somebody looked at and passing said information on by utilizing unique phone numbers in case they call? Because I can't help but feel like we escalated this thing a notch to vent on pent-up feelings about privacy in general (which we might actually agree on, but yeah, different scope)
No? Ok then. It's one example of many of secret and deceptive surveillance. If you want to be angrier about worse ones please feel free...
As an aside, there have been plenty of things from which we defend ourselves from salesmen. Both ethical and not dating from well before Berners-Lee thought "I can use markup to make a documentation system with this new-fangled tcp/ip thing on unix machines right here at CERN!" Some of us are naturally better equipped to defend against all the techniques than others. Arming con-people grifting from the gullible with additional personal information to use as secret ammunition along side psychological manipulation seems wrong to me. The continuum goes all the way from "no such thing as a bad sale" through all selling is wrong. That's where I sit on that continuum. YMMV.
Also I am 100% certain I am not completely aware of what a clerk knows about my actions when I enter their shop. Unless I pessimistically assume "potentially everything", including my exact identity because I live around there somewhere.
I start to see ethical problems when they start selling or sharing the personalized data they collect with other parties, or start tracking you when you’re not on their site.
There are companies who provide regular local area numbers, with all kinds of analytics (number of answered calls, average length of time to answer, etc) plus recordings and lots more.
See https://www.iovox.co.uk/solutions/advanced-call-tracking for just one example.
This has been a privacy concern for decades.
Services have changed substantially and I'm no longer current on information (WATS itself has been retired), but no, a toll-free call is not the same as a standard POTS / direct-dialed toll number, AFAIU.
That's above and beyond the per-user or per-source tracking accomplished here.
Note that similar schemes can be run via postal mail through specific P.O. Box or department routing addresses.
https://www.google.com/search?q=red+ventures+site%3Areddit.c...
But... someone on the call didn't like my description of classes (like object/class stuff), from what I remember - disagreed with both some of the material and some of what I'd said about classes. FWIR, he didn't like them at all, and thought classes were "too much overhead" or something along those lines. I'd indicated that we could customize the material to focus on whatever they wanted to focus on. They were onboarding something like... 10-15 developers every other week, and this would have been a "crash course"-style "everyone learn the same thing to get started" - a combination of "our internal processes" but also "industry standard stuff" from an outside company.
We didn't get the gig, and I think they just settled on "in house only", IIRC. This was probably... 2009? Knowing they were adding ~20 developers per month was already an indication they were growing organically pretty fast (imo).
I worked there for a couple of years and it was honestly a great experience. I'm sure they've "grown up" some more at this point, but at the time it was all the fun, freedom, and flexibility of working at a startup with the security of a company that was essentially too big to fail.
To their credit, RV is really an opportunity company. They'll give anyone who can smile on the phone a shot at learning sales. Some folks are awesome at it and could out-earn some early tier tech roles in their compensation for closing sales. And the "creepy" profiling work that was done on lead gen would basically fit shopping style to an agent who had been shown to be able to close similar shopping patterns. I worked on the tech side and wasn't enamored by the revenue streams, but if someone was shopping for an 'x' RV sure made it easier to buy it. That was their thing. They didn't do outbound calling unless you called in and asked to talk another time.
The tech side was very exciting. I met very skilled folks from all sorts of disciplines and people pretty much worked shoulder to shoulder, which I've grown to appreciate a lot since working elsewhere.
Funnily enough I didn't really know what they did either until reading this article, shows how separate tech is from many products
To be fair, there are huge piles of money in 2/3 of these as well. There is obviously the perception that tech labor cannot bring much value to these industries. (Or there are externalities: techies will work for less money if you let them work on space travel.)
I guess the salaries are about the same in companies like SpaceX etc, but I would guess that working hours etc are not. Some engineer working for a bank will probably demand quite relaxed hours, negotiate low pressure tasks and have some holiday time with family, while with the same salary guy working for SpaceX will be busting his ass off and working weekends multiple times an year.
The problem is- let's say you're a brilliant genius who's willing to work 80 hours per week doing very difficult tasks. You can make $130-150k net working for space travel, or engineering traffic lights, or you can do similar very complex work for $200-800k in finance. They're hoovering up the smartest, most competitive people because the rewards are the most outsized.
From "Max Dama on Automated Trading" [1]:
> Quantitative trading is the job of programming computers to trade. It is the best job out of undergraduate - you commonly make $100k base salary, plus a bonus which is often larger, the hours are flexible as long as you produce, there is no dress code, the work is extremely fascinating, fast paced, and uses the most advanced technology, and your performance is evaluated objectively. Quant trading combines programming and trading. Programming is the fastest way to take an idea and turn it into reality (compare it to writing a book, publishing, etc or to architecting a building, getting zoning permits, doing construction, etc). Trading is the most direct approach to making money (compare it with starting the next facebook, programming, hiring, advertising, etc or to creating a retail chain, hiring, waiting for money to flow in to reinvest, etc. Combining programming and trading, you have the most direct path from an idea in your brain to cash.
At the last large organization I worked for, I spent two years trying to convince managers responsible for a critical-path item database to upgrade their tech stack. They had me work on tons of downstream problems, every single one of which was a direct consequence of "the data in the database is incorrect". They refused to fix their tech stack, pay more for good programmers, change their approach to DB management, etc., so I left.
Cut that crap. Most of the companies in these spaces are value-adding services and products. It is annoying that this kind of thinking is prevalent "If I don't understand how it generates value, it must be useless."
I understand how the industries produce "value". I, however, do not find the "value" they produce to be overall beneficial to humanity. Furthermore, even if I accept the utility of currency, it is impossible to deny that these industries have grown into a parasitic nightmare sucking the world dry in the pursuit of ever-higher piles of cash.
I'm personally fascinated by both financial and marketing strategy, it touches on interesting aspects of many dimensions, from mathematics to psychology and much more. And those fields do serve a purpose in an ever changing and evolving complex economy. But is that purpose really that "valuable"?
I and many others are jaded, because their incentives don't align with progress towards solving the big, important problems. They play their self-perpetuating games while putting on blinders.
All this time, energy, brainpower, centuries of stacked education and research only to manipulate people into constantly buying more stuff. Growth for the sake of growth, piles and mountains of concentrated wealth and power, while people die and suffer and are moved like pawns in a game that nobody signed up for.
Nature is furiously shaking and cooking our planet, while gigantic poisonous gas clouds are leaking from its pores. Our forests, insects, fish and fungi die in masses. Our springs dry up and our seas are covered in trash and poison.
Meanwhile our smartest and most fortunate are building gigantic machines and crunch data so they can "add value" covered by a smoke of ideology mixed with pretend skepticism to keep the gears turning.
There is no money in planting trees for the next generations and in facing the hardest challenges that our societies and nature pose, but I'd wager that this would be "value-adding".
And those are just the flashy ones- there's no money in wild birds, bugs, waterways, air quality, plants, nature.
Do people value the wild and getting through each day in a pure, healthy environment, or do they value efficiency for the sake of itself?
If you aren't in a position to be picky about what job you take I understand, but I didn't get that sense from your comment.
"the company’s South Carolina headquarters, a 180-acre campus with a cluster of modern buildings, a fire pit, a six-lane bowling alley, spin room, pickle ball courts and 264 residences for employees who choose to live where they work."
Personally, I'd much rather work in an urban/dense-suburban setting, where I can pick from multiple fitness facilities, housing options, etc.
My current office has a "free" fitness room and a for-profit (consumer pays) cafe. Both are shared by multiple tenants in the building. Anything beyond that really starts to feel company-store and a bit dystopian.
I do know that I was sold Mr. Elias as modern-day Mr. Rogers for all the praise lavished on him.
Saint in the streets, abusive asshole in the office.
I too once saw him as the guy with worldly wisdom gained when his plane (Sully Sullenberger flight) crashed into the Hudson. The guy with a number of noble sounding nonprofits like Road to Hire.
It's tiring coming across two-faced people like this and the erosion of trust they cause in taking anyone at face value.
Disclaimer: I have been wrong before and will be wrong again.
Red Ventures is “all about profit maximization,” said JT Genter, who left the site more than a year ago. He and other Points Guy writers said they hadn’t been pushed to publish stories they found dubious — indeed, the site has occasionally offered carefully critical coverage of Chase and American Express, its dominant business partners.”
Well there goes that resource for me.
I assume almost all information outside of forums with high barriers to entry are being gamed by marketing, and I assume as days go on, more and more forums will succumb.
The rapid access to high signal to noise ratio information was nice while it lasted.
Damn that branding is strong, I need to verify ownership and how authoritative writing works on these blogs.
It's fairly standard practice that issuers will remove some cards from the affiliate channel (Chase Slate was the prime example of this last I was active in the space.) Once a card is out of the channel, a publisher may need to scrub all mentions of that card off their site completely to stay compliant.
So in my last hands on example - even through the Chase Slate was arguably one of the best balance transfer card options at the time, we literally had to pretend like it didn't exist, or risk all other commissions from other active Chase cards.
There's no way to actually be honest and stay within their terms at the same time - all language is reviewed and picked apart by lawyers, which is why you'll see the same exact 'marketing bullets' across cc review sites. (Amex was the worst - can't say 'grocery store', have to say "US supermarket" type nonsense.)
RV is a great company to work for. Like any organization, there are bad managers. Ultimately RV is what you make of it.
Likewise, to those that post “RV has terrible employee reviews…” pay attention to most of the positions that are posting those bad reviews. Most of them are sales associates who work(ed) in the call center.
I plan to be at RV for at least the next decade because of the opportunity I see afforded to me and the recognition that I am able to receive.
It’s just funny to me how much angst some people have because of THEIR bad experience when thousands would say they have a great one.
I hope everyone the best. To each their own. But for me, at least for the foreseeable future, I’ll be at RV - building cool shit and being part of an amazing company.
I heard several times that he "Business reviews" were a mini MBA course, but I think there was more value in watching the way leaders freed engineers to creatively solve a problem, and then reigned them in just across the line of an MVP, to focus on something new. It was very hard for me to understand the objectives at times, but it was clear eventually that there were diminishing returns in allowing the pursuit of engineering goals over business goals.
I learned a lot, even from outside most of the interactions I observed.
Cheers to you and your team Mr Kotov
Many may not know how the affiliate world works but that's the world they're in... not surprising to me but at least with our sites RV was interested in seeing what fit into the current site instead of just selling every possible thing on every possible site; which some of the comments here assume is/will happen, but not really how it was internally. It's a game they're pretty good at playing (as are others) and a more competitive game more and more every day. Just how things are these days. Search for "Best XXXX" anything and you'll see all the sites playing that game... lot more "news" sites the last couple years getting into that game. Also NYT bringing wirecutter into their domain instead of stand-alone. Play ball!
Anyway, I don't have any ill will against RV and from what I experienced they were a pretty good company to work for given my roll and the situation I was in with the acquisition. Others certainly seem to have different experiences and that's fine. Can just speak to my time there only. And sure, I'm down to answer questions if you feel my limited insight could help.