flylib

I mean they don't say how they accessed the GitHub repo or whether there was a vulnerability in Github itself that allowed access

Knowing about Uber isn't enough, you need access to their seed round which is on a selective basis

I mean they didn't scale anything back really, neither Google or Uber are manufacturing the cars either

thats why Netflix is going insane on original spending, they have no long term plans to keep other content

"If you want to make money angel investing, you really have to treat it as a full time job, not because it makes you more likely to pick the winners, but because it makes it more likely that the winners will pick you."

plenty of good entrepreneurs have great angel investing track records doing it part time (Elad Gil, David Sacks, Aaron Levie)

a loss? are you joking? Benchmark investment in Uber is tracking to be one of the best VC investments ever made, 11 million series A + whatever money they put in pro rata and their stake is currently worth anywhere from 5 billion to 14 billion, 20% of Uber (Series A) + dilution

1) an API around freight shipping

2) an API to connect with insurance carriers as a broker

Lily and Pebble also were VC Backed and each raised 15+ million

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pebble https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lily-robotics#/entit...

Kalanick forced him to resign as a condition of him resigning

at the upper bounds (350 million) (10% is 35 million) with 22.5 million invested in 9/2016 and the sale shortly after that is a nice flip and a gain of 10+ million

> It took me about ten years to figure out that Twitter is a cesspool.

Reddit has similar problems

> What Reddit does right is focus on topics, primarily, not personalities.

This is an advantage for twitter in many ways, people want to follow and interact with other credible people not with a bunch of random people with no credible experience discussing a topic on reddit

they didn't flush any money down the toilet, 21.co mined a lot more then 120 million in bitcoin, they mined at least 75,000+ BTC

he still has the board seat, it's TPG board seat, he can pick one of his co-workers

this is hilarious, Facebook can just launch their own coin if needed if you want to compete with them that way by giving users coins which will give them monetary incentives to use your service, hell Kik is laying the playbook for FB to copy them

this will most likely amount to nothing or very little, waymo is also launching their own competing service at some point and lyft has other suppliers for cars (GM/Cruise), this will most likely be a stop gap and used as a a good headliner grab for both companies, just look at what happened to the short lived Lyft/Didi/Grab partnership that went up in smoke

> But noone actually wants a "relevant timeline".

I want that

social apps are really hard, no one going to pay more money to acquire a dead app

NYT should be ashamed they posted this, extrapolates examples from a small sample size to make a fake story

we are starting to see that, A16Z made an investment last year into a smaller bank

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/01/cross-river-bank-gets-unco...

DeepMind will go down as one of the best acquisitions ever

the company still has a paper valuation of 2 billion (it got cut from 4.5 to 2 billion last year), not a total wash like the media make it sounds, for companies started from 2013-present, Zenefits still has one of the highest valuations at the moment

"Besides, Lewandowski couldn't realistically raise money through proper channels if his pitch amounted to, "I stole stuff from Waymo."

yes he could, the team and him had a killer track record and he wouldn't admit to stealing anything from Waymo

"He joined Google in 2007 as part of its Maps team and helped to build the company’s Street View product. When Google gave the green light to begin working on a self-driving car in 2009, Mr. Thrun picked Mr. Levandowski for the original team.

Mr. Levandowski gained some notoriety within Google for selling start-ups, which he had done as side projects, to his employer. In his biography for a real estate firm, for which he is a board member, Mr. Levandowski said he sold three automation and robotics start-ups to Google, including 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots, for nearly $500 million. After this story was published, the real estate firm updated its website erasing Mr. Levandowski’s biography and said that it had “erroneously reported certain facts incorrectly without Mr. Levandowski’s knowledge.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levand...

"And yet, one of Google’s most strategic acquisitions has mysteriously been actively blocked from public view. An investigation by IEEE Spectrum has uncovered the surprising fact that Google’s innovative self-driving car and the revolutionary Street View camera technology that preceded it were largely built by 510 Systems, a tiny start-up in Berkeley, Calif."

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/th...

"That Otto hadn’t received funding from any VC’s is unusual. With 91 employees, getting paid $150k/year (this might even be too low given they are working on self-driving cars, one of the hottest spaces in tech right now), they would have had a $13.6 million/year burn rate just on salaries. Otto always aimed to get to market quickly, but getting to profitability without funding seems like it would have been very hard, especially on the accelerated timescale they were working towards and the need to likely hire many more people to get to production. All of Otto’s public self-driving car and truck competitors have taken venture funding. However, as someone working on a bootstrapped SaaS application, I’m sympathetic to wanting to self-fund."

Anthony Levandowski has a personal net worth in the hundreds of millions, that is not counting the other founders plus they could raise money at a whim, or get acquired whenever they wanted

"The next day, January 15, 2016, Mr. Levandowski’s venture 280 Systems - which

became OttoMotto LLC - was officially formed (though it remained in stealth mode for several

months). On January 27, 2016, Mr. Levandowski resigned from Waymo without notice. And on

February 1, 2016, Mr. Levandowski’s venture Otto Trucking was officially formed (also

remaining in stealth mode for several months)."

not sure if that timeline is accurate, any way to check when the ot.to website was registered? the site used for looking up http://whois.domaintools.com/280systems.com doesn't work for ot.to

yes they are saying they are going to expand nationally for the last 6 months but you can't expand nationally if you are running out of money (check ride sharing forum's where drivers are starting to report sporadic payments from Juno)

they operated at a $600 million loss in 2016

http://www.businessinsider.com/lyft-lost-600-million-in-2016...

the number will be higher in 2017 as they are expanding internationally (http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/13/lyft-to-go-global-take-on-ube...), they are primarily still US only while Uber is in most of the world

Juno is burning 10's of millions trying to compete on low prices and they are still in NY area only, unlikely local competitors will be able to compete at low prices unless they have a huge war chest which will come from rich founders (Juno) or investors (Uber/Lyft/etc.)

GM will purchase them for around $1-$3 billion and drastically raise prices and fire most of the employees as their public investors will be skeptical and the stock price will take a hit, Uber will be able to raise prices enough to get better economics and atleast IPO at a haircut of their current private valuation

Lyft and Juno will run out of cash by the end of this year and be forced to sell to companies that won't run them at a loss, that Lyft $500 million round they are trying to shop around won't happen (that leak is a bad sign, early Lyft investors are dumping their shares on the secondary market as well) and Uber currently has billions in the bank while Lyft is down to under 1 billion, Uber will raise prices and no new competitors will be able to find any funding at this point

either payment or in general

anyone got a collection of more posts like this?