throwaway6497

Did the founders cash out and left the employees in the dark about it?

Respect to Chamath! I am disappointed there hasn't been much discussion in the community around why AirBnB founders did this. Is @sama in support of this wheeling and dealing in general. I am pretty sure he is not. What is YC's official stand and ethos around cashing out by founders without providing the same kind of liquidity to employees. Since AirBnB has been successful beyond anyone's wildest imaginations this event was either forgotten or didn't really make for a bad PR. We don't need for things to fail spectacularly before we do what is right.

I see YC and YC community in general bringing more transparency and fairness to the way startups are built and run. They need to set the tone and tenor about what is right and acceptable. I am looking forward to see constructive debate around this topic in the comments (or not, if I am totally off the mark here).

Why did we have to pick the name Yarn which clashes with Apache YARN on which Hortonworks and Cloudera depend for their survival?

Amen to that!

As usual Apple is missing. Pleasantly surprised to find Amazon on the list of collaborators. They usually take from open source/communities and rarely give back. This is a good change.

Dumb question: Does it mean, it is law now.

Oh! Sorry for the confusion. Conflicts do exist. I am was speaking purely from the point of view of Benioff pulling of something questionable with the express intention of putting in more money in his kitty or do good for his investments opportunistically. I was saying Benioff is beyond that. Legally speaking, he will have to tread this carefully, and show that he didn't shirk his fiduciary duty as a board member and CEO while making this deal.

Good point and observation. In this particular case, it is moot since Benioff is above doing any side-deals to put more money into his kitty. I would certainly suspect a VC on a public company board and the company buying the start-up VC invested in. Lots of examples like that.

Thought so too

searching for "flipkart app only strategy responsible" showed this result http://www.businessinsider.com/flipkart-punil-soni-explains-...

on the first page as the 4rth result for me.

Whoever, initiated and approved that move!!. Quick Google search showed this name - Punit Soni. Why did he leave? Fallout with the CEO and team?

Agreed. If Mayer was awesome, she would have been CEO of Google, infact she was best positioned to be one at some point. All the people she hired were getting promoted over her. She was pissed, obviously could never show it. Bided time and took up the CEO position at Yahoo. Anyone with big ego would. I wouldn't blame her. She did what is best for her. Just like any other economic actor. What I really felt bad for - Yahoo's employees and customers. Only qualified person who was willing to take up the job was Marissa. Rest were no-name hacks who had no idea how to build products. Board had no choice but to hire her. Hailing her as Obama with Obama change posters, I felt was a little over the top. Yahoo's employees were desperate. She improved morale initially. Had she shown results, she would have won huge loyalty from employees and board. She tried. Made some bold moves and failed. Not bad in my opinion. I wonder, if any other CEO would have made such bold product moves. Acquisitions - lots of them, mail, home page improvements, new redesigned apps, attempting to build an internal product for search. She at least tried. RIP yahoo.

Looking at legal immigration woes of H1B from India and China - USA policy makers should really think hard about the their stupid policies where H1Bs are tied to their employer to stay legally in the country even after being on H1B for several years. Waiting in GC line for 10+ years is a joke and cruel. USA succeeds despite this. There is no political will to provide any job portability. Obama's executive directive has been watered down by special interests who don't want EAD to be provided to immigrants H1B + I140 (second stage of GC).

These regressive legal immigration policies don't make USA great and show the spirit of America in good light. It feels as if, corporations and special interests like high skilled indentured workers hurting both americans and immigrants alike.

I have noticed that that areas with human settlements for the longest period seem to have most diverse and healthiest food choices. Mostly Asian - Chinese, Indian, Persian, Japanese. Western food is the crappiest of all. Lots of unhealthy meat, too much dairy, bad fat, salty and sugar diet. This kind of food is slowly taking over the world due to globalization.

They may be exceptions. I can't imagine engineers at Yahoo are pulling in $400k+. Only engineers who got in through acquisitions have packages comparable to what engineers at Google and Facebook make. Majority of Yahoo engineers make 30-50% less than people of comparable levels at Goog/Fb. Check http://h1bdata.info/

Looks like everyone gets to milk the Yahoo cash cow - board, investors, business partners, execs, friends of execs and management except engineers. Yahoo still pays engineers terribly hoping to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook. Why don't they just give up at this point and expedite selling. Why bother with all the posturing.

Top 5 in Cachet in no particular are probably Benchmark, Andreessen, Sequoia, Greylock, Accel. KP comes after them. It used to be number one. Not anymore. There are so many angels, good old/new VCs (YC, LightSpeed, FirstRound, Union Square, SocialCapital etc) that calling out KP for prestige doesn't make sense anymore.

Getting funded by KP now means => You raised money from a good VC firm. Nothing more. Years ago, it was more like - "Wow, you guys raised money from KP? You must me special"

KP doesn't have the same cachet anymore. It is one of the top 10 VC firms. That is all. Nothing special here. Move over.

git, mercurial, linux, emacs, vim, intellij, java, zsh

productivity: chrome, google docs (slow but works), dropbox, tiddlywiki, gmail.

Any guesses on how much money Antonio ended up making at FB? Was the trade off worth it? How to do even put number on the decision made.

What I find amazing, is that except YC no-other VC firm would publicly acknowledge that 10 year exercise periods make sense. In this age of social media, I find it absolutely appalling that they still endorse the current 90 day rule. I am guessing they categorised the PR nightmare of not endorsing is marginal. So, they kept quiet, since keeping status quo is in their interest.

YC is trying to make things better and fair for employees. For a really long time the odds were always stacked against the employees the most. YC, Adam are hacking it for the better. All good entrepreneurs who believe in "making the world a better place" should endorse this. Unless, the idea gathers enough momemtum, the old-guard, vulture VCs will not change their stance. This includes A16Z.

Just curios how does this automatic refactoring across entire code base work? Do they build AST's and then refactor? Or it at more surface level where you are replacing text intelligently?

Can some one explain the purpose of this other than marketing? I feel, we take it too far these days. This thing seems straight out of Silicon Valley HBO show. It is difficult to tell reality from fiction. Why code jam from NYC trade floor? What is the intrinsic value of this code jam to Twilio other than marketing. May be I am a bit being harsh. May be I am old school when I think we should all be rolling like Wozniak's (apple co-founder) not flashy brogrammers who would do anything for marketing.

Did anyone do a S1 summary of Twilio already? Will be great, if you can point to it.

How is the severance package like?

What is remarkable is that on a computer, you can reedit what to write to death. On a piece of paper, you have to get it right the very first time.

Yes, This was demonstrated in the Silicon Valley HBO show. Hooli had the employees sign a contract which could not be enforceable legally. The episode where Gavin Belson is in a arbitration hearing room surrounded by a bunch of Hooli lawyers and gets his ass handed over to him by the arbitration judge. David beats Goliath in the court of law.

I don't remember actual details but I am pretty sure someone here can shed more light on this.

If Guillory has undiluted 50% ownership of Cruise - he surely must have made a bank. Anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions.

It is to give you the appearance of large selection though they don't. UI gimmicks to steer you away from the low selection problem. Frustrating for a small selection their customer base - mostly tech people who can see through this bull-shit. Annoying, but not enough to quit the service. Netflix knows this. Any smart person who realizes this will feel like an idiot for being taken for a ride like this. Gives up and submits to this treatment as Netflix is rather top of the market in selection for non-linear TV.

"You will need to merge master back into your cleanup branch periodically, but that is usually easier than it would be to recall all of the context relating to the original change."

Won't there be merge conflicts when you do this the first time as the clean feature branch code be different from the flag based feature on the master? Of course, all the subsequent merges should be conflict-free.