True, one of the X projects like Glass would be a better direct comparison in terms of resources and headcount. Google Scholar was just the first thing that popped into my mind when thinking of a Google product that is a social charity. Which, of course, is not the right way to think about Maps since the location data they collect is probably some of the most valuable data for their ad targeting.
Google has plenty of low revenue, unprofitable products, some of which are social charities like Google Scholar. I don't think Mayer deserves as much credit as a visionary as you are suggesting. It was more about empire building after a sudden demotion and not paying increasing licensing costs to a third party vendor for turn-by-turn data. But I agree that the end result is a mapping platform that is far ahead of anyone else thanks to Google's significant investment and resources.
I don't expect Google to pull its map app from iOS because it is a very valuable demographic to collect data from and target. Also, Apple already has a large hole on its balance sheet trying to catch up to Google in mapping. It started around the time they very publicly fired Forstall for the whole iOS 6 maps fiasco.
Exactly this. For those who weren't around in the first dot com bubble, he has a certain reputation which he has managed to bury. Benchmark used to be a much bigger firm back then, and due to poor fund performance, they had to scale back and "reboot" the firm. Along the way, he managed to bury his lesser know reputation. This was critical to getting deal flow in the current investing environment which is much more founder friendly given the increased availability of capital and competition for deals. Tolia also managed to rehab his reputation after lying about completing his Stanford degree and working for McKinsey (and teaming up with Gurley to screw over his other Epinions cofounders). He's now running NextDoor with significant investment from Gurley.
I, too, don't get the hype about voice assistants. There are a few uses cases where they may be genuinely useful like if you are driving and don't want to take your hands off the wheel, but for nearly everything else, it is usually faster, more accurate, and more reliable to use a GUI with touch or a keyboard.
It's also a matter of principle. You can always argue that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear in support of more surveillance. But that's a slippery slope.
He is naturally a bit puffed up and that was a common critique of him from back in the Google days. I think this personality type is somewhat common among successful seed investors where being a "tech personality" helps with getting deal flow. Name brand institutional investors like Jurvetson and Horowitz don't need to rely on such tricks for deal flow.
If Forbes is accurate, then so is Sacca, although I imagine some non-trivial amount of that is in Uber, which is facing downward pressure on its private market valuation.
Once you have a one big win under your belt, it becomes easier to hit other big wins because you have greater access to capital to diversify your bets as well as much better deal flow. He did have an incredible run, which I would attribute to equal parts hard work, skill, and luck.
So "Hell" was the name of their program for tracking Lyft drivers, and "Heaven" or "God View" was the name of their program for tracking Uber passengers. The allegations of Uber employees abusing the privacy of individual passengers using God View go back to at least 2014, so this actually isn't anything new, just more specifics about who they were spying on. See here for a screenshot of their God View emailed to a journalist without her permission: https://www.buzzfeed.com/johanabhuiyan/uber-is-investigating...
Trilogy Software in the late 90's had the exact same model with cultish hype aimed at graduating students at top universities who mostly didn't know any better and bought into the hype.
According to the screenwriter, they hedged a bit on the question of free will in the movie compared to the book. He specifically addresses this here: https://youtu.be/xzEPU2PTjT4?t=23m55s
The funny thing is that the author of this article is a former (longtime) investment banker. I found the line where he describes the lack of liquidity in private shares "falls especially hard on early investors who are not company employees, those so-called 'series A' or 'series B' venture-capital investors" especially amusing. As if we are supposed to feel more sorry for VCs who are diversified in many investments than employees who aren't.
Given that key HR people at Uber come from Google, is it possible that Uber senior management actually knew about the issues surrounding their star SVP hire from Google when they hired him and were OK with it until reporters were tipped off due to current events and they started sniffing around? I am a little dubious of Uber's narrative that they first found out about this from reporters and fired him soon after.
Right, but it's possible (and I would say likely) that their self-driving program is behind everyone else and their disengagement rate is atrociously high, which is why they would go to great lengths to delay reporting this information and happily decamped to Arizona, which doesn't require disengagement reports, while they try to catch up by whatever means they can. According to NYT reporting, their software failed to identify six traffic lights during the brief time they were testing in SF, which suggests they are pretty far behind. Kalanick has correctly identified self-driving technology as an existential threat to Uber, and given their lofty valuation, they absolutely cannot afford to be perceived as being behind in this area.
GV may make decisions and operate completely independently from the rest of Alphabet, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Alphabet does not take into account GV's portfolio position in Uber, which is its largest investment. Waymo even hints as much in its Medium post: "Our parent company Alphabet has long worked with Uber in many areas, and we didn’t make this decision lightly."
I think Alphabet probably views Waymo as their next big thing, and Waymo appears to have a sizable lead over everyone else in the self driving space which they want to protect. Remember, Alphabet is a major investor in Uber through Google Ventures, and their stake is likely worth billions. They wouldn't pursue this unless Waymo was of critical importance to them.
I believe the parent means Facebook makes money off of this indirectly. The more salacious fake news on Facebook, the higher the user engagement rate with the news feed, and the more time spent on Facebook reading and sharing this stuff. This translates to more ad revenue for Facebook.
Right, in an effort not to appear as though they are editorializing legitimate news stories for one side or the other via what appears in the trending news section, they threw the baby out with the bath water. Fake news is not legitimate news. It's a form of spam. They did nothing to remove this spam once they got rid of the human editors. So the trending news section went from left leaning legitimate news stories under human editors to a bunch of spam. Now they want to use automated methods to police your private messages when they couldn't be bothered to figure out an automated method to remove spam from their trending news section when it really mattered.
Facebook sat idly by during an election cycle as their platform was used to propagate fake news because blocking this stuff would amount to censorship, and now they suddenly have the moral imperative to police your private messages? I am so glad I quit Facebook a long time ago. They are the big tech company I like the least.
I imagine there is a huge difference in the employee pool between their Fremont factory location and their Palo Alto office location. Of course, Tesla is not exactly known to pay even their engineers very well: http://www.autoblog.com/2016/03/08/working-tesla-meaning-str...
A common failure mode for Anova is steam condensation in the electronics because the housing is not completely sealed/waterproof like the Joule, so I'm not sure if I would agree with it being built better and smarter. This is especially a risk with long cooks.
Some of these execs keep a high public profile and do a lot of press. It's part of the game at most large tech companies that aren't Apple. I personally find it really amusing that they get all this coverage in the tech press almost like they are NBA players, but it's to be expected when they have such a high public profile. Funnily enough, as accomplished as he is and despite the carefully curated PR, I remember him most for being the other part of that Sergey love triangle: http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-r...
I was really curious about the timing as well with the year off. It appears from the comments below that at least one other engineering VP from Google (Kevin Thompson) has recently joined Uber but without taking a year off. So is the 1-year no solicitation clause that you mention only common for the senior-most employees like SVP and above?
Singhal's title at Uber says that he is in charge of marketplaces and maps, not the self-driving stuff. So this would be stuff like pricing, dispatch, supply optimization, and route optimization which rely on traditional algorithms and not ML. But I agree with your larger point and find his departure from Google curious. Even if they were moving search in another direction or he was completely bored with what he was working on and wanted change, I am shocked that they would let someone of his caliber leave Google.
When Google Photos was mistakenly identifying black people as gorillas in 2015, there was a tweet where the Chief Architect for Social was asking the user who reported the issue for permission to examine the data in his account:
Just FYI, you can store locally as you described with 1Password. You don't have to use their cloud service. Or any cloud service for that matter since 1PW supports syncing over a local wireless network.