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Thats what so many miss in a tech company IPO.

Slack has built a business model off commodity tech that was around for decades. It has happy customers who continue to spend money with them and a plan to continue growing their revenue with more happy customers.

Personally I just see it as a refresh of yammer or a business focused discord but at the end of the day someone in procurement is signing checks for Slack.

When hacker news shits on a tech company IPO its definitely time to buy.

Same problem here.

2019 is also looking like it will be another incredible year.

And this is how its always been. Its similar to some kind of natural life cycle. All those founders out there seeking problems to solve? They just need to look at what big tech is acquiring and begin building a competing product. Often times the clients of the acquired company aren't pleased about having to a new relationship with Big Tech Co either.

Only have to get rich once.

Exactly my thoughts. This was a fantastic company in the early 2000's and to be honest they probably did a lot worse back in the day as a fast moving startup flush with cash and success.

The difference today is that Google is a solid Ad-tech company and is just like any other massive advertising company, rife with politics and an army of anonymous employees just grinding away each day.

The similarities between these stories and Madmen is striking.

It would be nice to see other scientists contrasting his data points and trying to reconcile why male scientists are able to see this yet everyone does not. If its a fallacy, then help these male scientists see the facts. Why isnt the media presenting the data that refutes his facts! A lost opportunity.

We are burning someone at the stake for their ideas in the science community. If he is wrong, so be it. But to burn and punish him because of his research and ideas is taking us back to the dark ages.

Due to the media reaction of this, I guarantee we're missing out on significant amounts of research that could cause offense in many areas of society. Today anything to do with the lottery of life (your race, your sex, inherited genes) is nuclear and career ending if it doesnt fit a popular narrative.

This entire movement is now reminding me of the Kurt Vonnegut short story "Harrison Bergeron" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

Zestful's business model is based on offering perks.

They traded their company for hundreds of millions of dollars. Good on them for turning a product into something that was so lucrative for FB and a real enjoyment for so many people the world over. I think it can't be understated how Instagram has become a pillar of so many brands and online businesses today.

But in reality their departure is really part of the business of software, the founders sell out, become exceedingly wealthy. After a few years the disillusionment with being part of a corporate machine (and not in control) sets in and they quit to spend time on their burning man floats. Its always been this way and theres nothing wrong with that.

I think many of us would do exactly the same given the option of struggling for a decade to profitability or a $10m+ exit with a comfortable VP level role.

I find it interesting that Instagram would want to include more adverts, as I find myself drawn to brands/interests without the help of annoying ads.

There is a beautiful irony in an employee at a company which makes its revenue from advertising, deciding his values are now at risk.

If you google you will find some data on this, GenX/Millennials are due to receive the largest pot of inheritance of any generation before them!

Maybe someone from FB can chime in and prove whether this is true but wouldn't FB take a copy of ANY data that is made public for any portion of time? So it may have been public for a day but ultimately that data is now stored and available for 3rd parties to leverage.

This is exactly what something like Archive.org would do.

My own career is an example of this, by all accounts and measurements used in HR in the US I shouldn't be earning as much as I do or as successful or sort after in my field.

Its always a shock to colleagues when they ask where I went to college and my response is that I'm still on my gap year that started 15 years ago. When I go into the details of what happened throughout that period the bias towards college education disappears.

And the paper is correct, I fully understand that my skills on offer are on par or better than what any C-level or senior exec can offer, but I only realized this after a few years of interacting and working with these people.

Maybe you could articulate what you dislike so much about your current job?

It sounds like you're seeking an outlet for creativity and the current job is not giving you that. I personally don't see $500k/yr as an important factor as for the majority of people there is no real difference after $150k/yr. The burgers taste the same, great schools are available, same nice holiday destinations. Anywhere outside of the US is cheap and your standard of living would be high. Unless you have a weakness for luxury watches, high maintenance women and overpriced champagne. I admit I do enjoy the odd bottle of bollinger.

You're also thinking about starting a business completely the wrong way, you never use your own money. This is what investors are for and you need to spend time finding the right investors. The world of ICO's has made small investments easier than ever before. For games you can use a kickstarter to get it going. You could also move to a smaller company with a role that takes up less of your personal time and start the company on the side or even become a consultant giving you even more free time to move between paying projects and personal ones. I would also see if you can network and contribute to an existing game company to get a better feel for the business.

I'm earning more than you and work from home and have complete autonomy. I live in the bay area and go kite surfing every afternoon in the summer and work from a rented cabin in tahoe during the winter with my wife and little corgi. I do not associate with the tech crowd outside of work or hob nob with VC's in Palo Alto or the rat race of the peninsula. Keeps life fairly simple and straight forward. I imagine this is something that would be attractive to you.

I'll offer a counter point to this, we hired a senior SVP from IBM about 2 years ago (he spent his entire career at IBM). IBM also tried to sue him when he left. My company is a "born in the cloud" company so we have values and an attitude that I would consider in alignment with modern, inclusive, customer positive values, etc. He passed interviews and all the numbers showed he was a high performer etc.

We brought him on hoping he would use his experience to grow our cloud business into "the enterprise". What we found was we had hired a guy that scoffed at ideas like UX, frequently bullied his team and the extended team in calls. Would often go off on monologues and was extremely rigid in his top down approach to management. It was a complete culture shock to the team and customers. We understood that some of these things were part of the deal but what we didnt expect was a near zero openness to ideas.

He had classic double speak of stating his door was always open to differing opinions or ideas but a week later he would be telling the company on conference calls that if people didn't like it there was the door. He brought in his entire exec team from IBM and things continued to go down hill from there. Some of his own team would make fun of our sales leaders until one of them called these guys out and discovered they had little to no understanding of how cloud pricing and subscription worked. It was a big moment.

My experience of him and his team makes me wonder if IBM is doing the right thing, if that experience is common across IBM they are going to struggle to compete with firms like my own and even worse attract talent that has no interest in being bullied for decades before a promotion.

Got to spend those profits some how. Salesforce probably calculated that if they include integration with every deal for an additional 15% to 20% they could grow revenue X%.

This is going to be really good for system integrators as Mulesoft is a complex platform that requires hours of consulting. If I was in the Salesforce space I would be signing up to Mulesoft courses and getting my guys all over that.

This reminds me of when Oracle purchased BEA for their Weblogic platform 10 years ago. Oracle destroyed that product and company. Importantly it didn't solve their integration problems as all the best people left within the year as they discovered how hard it was to get anything done in a company of that size.

It does confuse me that Mulesoft, a tool that only the best java developers can get value out of, would be purchased by a company that focuses on ease of use or no software. Salesforce likely has its own internal integration problems and needs an enterprise class platform to integrate its own clouds. In which case Mulesoft would be a good choice. I do not see Mulesoft causing much of a problem for the leaders like Informatica or Boomi. Maybe the Salesforce reps will force Mulesoft down their customers throats but not everyone can manage a java based ESB.

Price wise, its obscene at 22x, so congrats to the mulesoft exec team for getting out while the going was good. I know they were struggling to grow beyond being a 1 product company and many execs/staff were burnt out from staying ahead of Wall St. There has been a lot of attrition from the company over the last year. I know because I hired many of their PMs.

Maybe Salesforce fell for the cool aid of Blockchain, as there was a rumor Mule had some kind of blockchain based tech they were working on.

Chamath is all about entertainment, his Q&A was fun to watch and filled with brilliant one liners that are quote worthy in their shallowness. Ultimately his advice is useless to a group of people that have to work for a living.

He also pontificates and chastises social media yet he is a prolific on twitter.

"Because I'm a billionaire, I'm going to have access to better health care so ... I'm going to be like 160 and I'm going to be part of this, like, class of immortal overlords."

Not really an 'immortal overload' but closer to a vampire seeing all of your friends & family pass away while you never age and only those that you decide to keep are allowed to continue living until they arent.

From what I understand a certain large UK pharma company has already been running an AI based, video conference only recruiting program. So far its been a massive success as the pool of applicants they recruit from grew from just 3 top tier UK universities to about 30. They also noted that the applicants stayed longer in the firm, were a better fit and were marked as a success within the first year of employment.

Watch how quickly your career comes to a standstill if you go around your manager trying to resolve issues or push your ideas forward. CEO's may state things like this but its usually just lip service.

I've seen one employee use our "whistle blower" hot line and he ended up being fired and then had the company use their considerable legal resources to mire his court claim until he ran out of money and his US visa expired. It was disgusting to see.

This is exactly what happens in enterprise software companies. I've been part of a team that built a $100m ACV SaaS service from 2010 to today. Recently our sales have been taking a big dip and I've been trying to workout what is going on.

What I discovered resonates with this blog post...

1. I compared powerpoint decks from 2010 to 2017. The pictures got better but the fluff and high level descriptions got further and further away from what our product actually does! I think this is due to multiple marketing leaders taking over and putting their veneer on the marketing message rather than sticking with the current message in order to justify their role.

2. Current sales reps are taught the high level benefits and problem the solution solves but they had no idea of the basics. So again when they speak to potential customers they sound like a Deloitte consultant using words that are so far away from the basic issue a customer is trying to solve.

3. R&D also became focused on the high level benefits and forgot that we sell technology and features DO actually matter they just shouldn't be the only focus of a sales/marketing team.

Its interesting to see that most sales strategies today imbue this idea but I think what happened is most of us have gone so far off the map that we end up with Meltwater problems.

This. If you've ever heard the story about the 1 man engineer with the better, faster cheaper solution that competed with IBM (slower, thousands of $$$ more) for business? IBM won every time because the buyers wanted to be associated with big impressive projects(and have IBM on their resume). This is actually a sales pricing tactic that every engineer should learn so that they dont price themselves out of the market - by being too cheap.

Love your product. I use it to sign up for everything from mortgage applications to forums to absolutely anything that I never want to be bothered with again.

My account is johnconnor@mailinator.com

I recall that MacRumors still have a forum thread from the first iPod release in 2001. The commentary is almost identical to the vitriol we see online today.

Here it is: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.50...

I lived in London where I was on 115k GBP per year. To be honest I lived in an ex council flat in not a great area and never really felt like I had "made" it (despite being in the perceived 1%). Everything went to saving for a house deposit for a pretty miserable house in london!!! The only time we actually felt middle class was when we travelled to cheaper destinations overseas.

I was transferred to SF about 2 years ago. I got a nice pay increase to $250k, live in a lovely neighbourhood, bought 2 cars (1 new, 1 nearly new), 2 motorcycles (1 new, 1 nearly new), have already saved 100k USD and now planning on getting my sweet wife a great boob job.

Never looked back!