code4tee

When companies struggle the first thing they tend to pull is advertising. Need some help making this quarter’s numbers? Pull all the TV adverts for a few weeks. “Go dark” as insiders say.

Short term this is all standard. The long term danger for Google and others is when lots of companies realize they probably didn’t need to make all that spend in the first place. That big “reset” is a new normal that advertising dollar driven tech companies will need to adjust to.

Having a lease is not the same as “owing the bank money” to go with the loan analogy. Yes it’s painful for landlords but the landlords have options. If they kicked WeWork out they’re not just out the money in the way a bank is if a borrower defaults. There’s some short term pain but if WeWork has long leases at some point it benefits the landlords to just kick them out and move on.

True although that scenario is hardly uncommon.

Lots of investors have board seats and there are decisions (like if to invest in the next round) where the desire of the board (get more money for a new round) may conflict with the desires of investors that have seats in the board (we think the company has run its course and don’t want to put more money in).

Like any VC SoftBank likely has lots of internal walls and controls to keep those decisions separate. Just because a VC has a board seat doesn’t tie them into perpetually funding every need of the company.

Regardless the case here seems to rely on the breach of conditions and WeWork seems to have offered little evidence that these breaches did in fact not occur. If they failed to meet the conditions SoftBank can walk away.

Quote: WeWork’s board said that it “regrets the fact that SoftBank continues to put its own interests ahead of those of WeWork’s minority stockholders.”

Of course they’re going do to that, it’s called fiduciary duty to their own stakeholders! Such diligence is something WeWork’s board seemed to casually overlook for far too long.

At this point why would SoftBank buy WeWork shares that are in all likelihood worth little or perhaps even worthless. They’re deciding to cut their losses and move on.

If I sign a contact to buy a house it still has contingency clauses. If 2 days before closing the house burns to the ground I can walk away. Obviously I don’t want to buy a burning pile of rubble. SoftBank is walking away from buying a burning house and that makes complete sense.

Coronavirus is just accelerating the market correction in startups that was already underway. In the end it may actually do some good to just pull the bandaid off fast.

This is just the next wave in the cycle and those of us that have been around a few years know what to expect. Those that haven’t been though this before or are in denial will learn the hard way.

Nobody cares about your pumped up valuation anymore. If anything pumped up valuations only hurt you in times like these. Options become worthless and early investors don’t want to take a hit at the benefit of others that come in on a severe (down 50+%) down round. What people do care about is how much cash you have and what your burn rate is. Cash is king.

Getting new cash will mean making it with old fashioned revenue and profit. If you can’t do that your days are likely numbered.

The business model of these companies seems in question long term given that they rely heavily on location data “opted in” from users that honestly probably didn’t realize they “opted in” to share their data for such uses.

As more efforts continue (by Apple, Firefox and others) to crack down on that sort of thing the proportion of reality represented by the data such companies hope to sell gets smaller and smaller.

It’s increasingly not “people shop here” but “people with bad privacy settings on their device shop here.”

Former big time user here. The product slowly declined from its own operating system to a buggy app.

We really had no choice but to migrate onto other products and these days even hard core Mac folks use AD for directory, Exchange for email and 3rd party products for device management.

It’s painful and sad sad for those subjected to such poor leadership. However in the end things have a way of working themselves out.

Companies with leadership teams that are this poor tend to get washed out in the long run. Those let go just get a head start on moving onto what’s next. There are exceptions but the market does a decent job of dealing with this sort of behavior... eventually.

Please don’t let this company anywhere near the healthcare system.

Who’s going to teach us what to cook in our slow cookers now on the weekends?

There are a lot of companies that should probably be 5 people in a basement somewhere run in the cloud... but everyone wants the VC money, big offices, huge teams and such. Maybe the whole current situation will change attitudes back toward lean and mean which always seems to be when tech does it’s best work.

This never made sense under WeWork. Hopefully will help stabilize their future and maintain a service that’s used by many.

Still not really sure what the “business” here is but the site and its network are certainly popular.

Sadly this whole current mess may be an insurmountable hurdle for an industry that was already struggling. This is all going to force some changes for what the future of retail looks like.

Hopefully in the long run we can all find a place for in person retail. I buy a lot online but still like going to stores sometimes too. We will likely see the industry re-invent instead a bit with smaller footprints and a focus on things that sell better in person than online.

We had a bad manager at my last company who really wanted to do this sort of thing.

I said to him “So this is an interesting proposal... if we install this software then I can save on management costs by replacing your position with this spyware?” He never brought it up again and we later just got rid of him completely.

Micromanagement and this sort of spying rarely builds high performing teams. Managing worker productivity is one thing but blatant spying is a sign of much deeper problems with a company and its management.

I’ve generally found a fairly strong inverse correlation between how good a manager is and the amount of paranoia they have on their teams not doing what they should. Good managers build great teams and then trust them.

I like Amazon, but at some level I find it hard to believe that a company that can build a store that automatically tracks my purchases with ML and let’s me walk out without a checkout can’t figure out how to flag some of the blatantly fake stuff being sold on their site.

Sure given the scale there can always be a few bad apples but some of the stuff is clearly fake and stays up for ages.

The company isn’t just magically worth billions because they want it to be and want to exit. That may have worked years ago but those days are over.

They’re worth something relative to the revenues they’ve been able to generate. The IP is also worth something but given the cold shoulder from the FAANGs of the world probably not as much as they’d like.

At some level these sales start to look like a stubborn buyer that’s asking far too much for their house. It will sell but a painful reset of valuation expectations is clearly required if one wants a sale to close.

Boeing’s argument is that the issue really isn’t an issue based on available data.

The FAA’s argument is that a rule is a rule and Boeing seems to have a problem following the rules.

Boeing is probably right but given the mess they got themselves in it’s probably best to just fall in line and follow the rules. They’re not helping their cause trying to apply logic here.

It’s generally hard to have a “false positive” in a PCR based test unless the sample was contaminated with the material trying to be detected. False negatives would be much more common.

It’s amazing how companies make such stupid decisions on their branding. The new logo looks terrible.

The old logo was timeless and iconic. It stood for something and that’s what people wanted from BMW. They don’t need to be hip and modern they need to be BMW. Many companies clearly never learned the lessons of “New Coke.” If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

Just setup billing alarms. Spend is reported continuously. These people surprised by end of month bills just aren’t paying attention to all the data AWS shows you on your spend.

If they hard shut people down then people would be posting “AWS turned off my services and took my site down blah blah blah”

The Achilles heel of electric aviation is that batteries don’t shed weight as they discharge. A fundamental aspect of Aerospace engineering is that rockets/planes shed a lot of weight during flight by by burning fuel. Many big jets take off at weights far too heavy to land and long ranges are only possible because of all the weight shed in flight.

Until that issue can be addressed with electric aviation, electric planes will be a concept limited to very short range flying.

Rockets solve this problem by dumping the dead weight overboard but not sure a bunch of dead airplane batteries parachuting back to earth is a viable approach.

Cool tool and the problem it’s trying to solve is a real one. However on the complex mesh of connections across accounts isn’t the new way to do this now not the Transit Gateway?

A tool that could manage complex TGW setups across many accounts would also be cool. Terraform can do that but it’s not the most elegant solution.

I don’t agree with the use of an app here for many reasons. That said, such an app would basically need secure authentication and a form to upload some pre-templated numbers.

It seems pretty hard to screw that up so badly but clearly it’s quite easy to make a complete dumpster fire from those requirements.

Other states couldn’t care less what the Iowa constitution says on the matter.

In practice it’s ultimately up to the DNC (this is a party process after all). In the past if a state threatened to disobey the party the party would just say the state’s delegates wouldn’t count or would count for less. Iowa’s constitution has no governance over DNC policies and practices which at the end of the day are a private matter.

While states set the dates themselves they generally only do so with consent of the parties. In the past the Democratic Party has supported Iowa in going first. After yesterday’s fiasco that stance will likely change.

The only thing clear about the results at this point is that Iowa will probably be fired from their first in the nation status on voting.

If there was ever a use for the phrase “You had one job!”

Yes. Plus all the SQL-like things you can do now. For example storing data on S3 and then querying it with AWS Athena is a simple and powerful way to keep a huge archive of data that you may want to query at some point.

Also, never underestimate the power and speed of a well tuned SQL-family server/cluster, even at surprisingly large scale. A lot of use cases for the older “Hadoop Cluster” type stuff have been overtaken by these approaches. I’ve seen a lot of operations spend silly sums to build ultimately quite clunky Hadoop-based systems when really they probably just needed one half decent SQL admin and a well tuned cluster.

Clearly they’ve come to the realization that they either do this voluntarily or future regulation will force them to do it. The beginning of the end of hyper-targeted online advertising has started.

Other product companies take note: the tide is turning on all this “tracking” nonsense. Clean up your house now or find yourself shamed into submission later.

Consumers increasingly don’t care that “the lawyers said it was OK because it’s on page 73 subsection C line 4 of the use agreement For the product.” Privacy is the new black.

Radar isn’t going away. This article talks as if ADS-B is replacing radar, which it’s not. It’s enhancing radar where radar coverage exists and providing coverage on traffic where radar coverage currently does not exist (usually lower altitudes away from major airports and over the ocean).