ziszis

There is an interesting theory [1] that Uber's value prop to consumers is dependent on subsidizing 59% of the cost of each ride. Over time they have to remove this subsidy to stem the Billion $ annual losses. The relationship with drivers will undoubtedly be more strained over the coming years, whether it happens as a financial necessity or due to Uber's push into self-driving. Managing the nuance of this transition will be one of the greatest challenges for Uber and require strong skills in empathy, communication and strategic thinking.

[1] http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...

I have talked to numerous Uber people over the past month and there are many that are locked in because they can't trade the stock and can't afford to exercise the options because of the valuation. Very unhappy .

I wonder why he is even apologizing. I assume he can't be fired because of dual class voting structure. I don't think he actually cares about the driver.

How many ethical and legal violations will be until the CEO of Uber is fired? If this were a public company, 1) the stock would have taken several hits and 2) he would have been out a long time ago.

A decade ago it was Worldcom and Enron and other giants. It is unfortunate that the founder mythology has shifted some of the worst corporate behavior to start-ups.

There was a time when founders were replaced too soon with "professional management". The pendulum has swung the other way with the mythology of the founder. Now, founders are rarely if ever replaced.

The post misses an important ingredient that separates most product managers from great product managers: strategy/vision.

The best product managers have a clear point of view on the long-term and where the product should go. You will see them engaging the CEO (depending on size of company) on core assumptions across the company. They will reshape decisions in sales and marketing re: customer selection.

Without strategy & vision, you have a PM filling in an ROI spreadsheet. What do customers want vs. what is the engineering cost?

Of the five largest tech companies in the world, the CEOs of four of them have come out against the Executive Order targeting specific immigrants: GOOG/MSFT/FB/AAPL.

AMZN and Jeff Bezos have strangely been absent even though he was the most critical pre-election.

I have tried several different routers and firmwares.

The #1 thing that made accessing the Internet faster was implementing domain level blocking of the top ad and tracking servers at the router level (e.g. doubleclick.net)

OpenDNS/Cisco let's you set this up domain level blocking in about 10 minutes that also covers iOS devices, if you don't want to tinker with openWRT.

Previously OpenDNS would monetize by "hijacking" mistyped domains, but they switched to a friendlier free consumer/paid enterprise model.

Overall mission statements have low correlation with behavior. Enron's motto was "Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence."

There are many examples. Here is an obvious one - when Amazon stopped selling Apple TVs to punish Apple. Hard to see how this is good for consumers.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/10/01/amazon_blocks...

Neil Hunt a year ago [http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2015/09/the-real-reason-netflix-won...]

“I think it's something that lots of people ask for. We'll see if it's something lots of people will use. Undoubtedly it adds considerable complexity to your life with Amazon Prime – you have to remember that you want to download this thing. It's not going to be instant, you have to have the right storage on your device, you have to manage it, and I'm just not sure people are actually that compelled to do that, and that it's worth providing that level of complexity.”

Part of me wonders how much this was marketing spin to cover a gap they had relative to Amazon Prime and they were in actuality evaluating how to catch up.

This happens far to often. Notorious example is Ballmer saying iPhone will be a flop when teams internally know that Windows Mobile just blew up.

1st assumption is correct. 2nd assumption is incorrect.

My wife was perfectly happy in particular with the environmental and ethical benefits. Also doesn't hurt that you can get a larger diamond that looks much better.

Give your girl the benefit of the doubt.

We came to a similar conclusion. Although we had already bought a diamond ring.

After researching, we figured out that we could sell our diamond (we only got about 60% of the original price back from a diamond broker) and buy a twice as large synthetic diamond and still save several thousand $.

There is only upside as far I can tell: it looks better (clarity), is bigger (no can tell the difference between a real and "fake" diamond), has fewer environmental and ethical externalities, and is cheaper.

AdBlock has commented on this and seems that there have been intermittent periods of no blocking: https://adblockplus.org/blog/ping-pong-with-facebook

"While Facebook appears to have had the last word for now, this, friends, is a long game. That being said, a few other ad blockers have apparently found workarounds to Facebook’s latest circumvention."

Why they do it? Easy. You are not the customer, the advertiser is. So as long as it is tolerable for a sufficient % of the audience, it is worth it.

Case in point, circumventing ad blockers. Audience explicitly doesn't want the ad experience, but Facebook wants to make more $. Facebook just announced a record quarter on desktop advertising fueled by successfully circumventing ad blockers.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/02/add-cash-plus/

There is agile software development and agile companies. I am impressed that a big company like T-mobile can move this quickly to recognize a trend and embrace it. Having worked at a large company, just getting approval on press release can take a week.

Imagine all the various groups that need to get aligned to make this happen.

Low impact in the short term, potentially huge impact in medium term (1-2 years). The pattern for other AWS services is that they will drive down price until they are low price provider and quickly close feature gaps. Adding inbound to SMS seems like a natural next step.

Also, SMS is a substantial part of Twilio's business. Even though Twilio has been adding new extensions to their product, the majority of usage is tied to a small set of API calls.

Twilio now has a company with a huge developer audience going straight after their core business. One that is willing to be very aggressive on price to win share.

Twilio has been very effective at the low volume end of the market with individual developers where simplicity and time to market is more important than price.

But that equation changes as a company grows. The question remains whether they can also play effectively at the high volume end of the mArket. I have heard of several other companies that mimic the Twilio API, but with much more competitive pricing.

AWS is successful because companies are deeply locked into their unique services and APIs. Twilio does not (yet) have the same deep lock-in of customers.

Talking to a notary based in SF this week, she saw an increasing # of Bay Area clients buying a home in Portland or Seattle and moving.

Kaldi. "Kaldi is a toolkit for speech recognition written in C++ and licensed under the Apache License v2.0."

http://kaldi.sourceforge.net

This tweet by Jeremy (Yelp CEO) speaks to the broader issue: "5/5 entry level jobs migrate to where costs of living are lower. Have already announced we are growing EAT24 support in AZ for this reason."

https://mobile.twitter.com/jeremys/status/701094909072150528

As an example - imagine a company with a billion $ in cash. If investors believe that the company will be wasteful with that money (for example by making poor acquisitions as is sometimes the case with companies with an excess of cash) then investors will value the company at less than a billion $.

I don't know which sites you use specifically - but i would guess many people on hn use at least one of the following: Google Search, Gmail, Facebook, Chrome/Firefox.

What depends on ads?

Top sites and apps: Facebook, Google, New York Times, Gmail, Podcasts (that are increasingly ad supported), Google Maps, etc. Most of the content that trends on hn. Long tail of content that lets you get an answer to just about anything on Google.

I think some of these would be missed.

Right now there is a free rider problem with internet content. If this becomes more prevalent the market will have to adjust to deal with free riders.

If you believe that content creators have a right to earn money there are two ways that can happen: 1) directly - you pay directly for the content that you want to consume or 2) indirectly - you see ads or sell your data in some way.

I wonder what people will choose if these are the choices. Right now you can ignore paywalls because relatively few sites employ them and they aren't robust.

Not sure Scandinavia is a good example of effective housing policy. Sweden and Stockholm in particular has one of the most severe current housing bubbles in the world. Housing prices have far outpaced GDP growth for several years.

http://www.businessinsider.com/hsbc-sweden-housing-bubble-no...

There is a risk. It needs to be weighed against the benefit.

Assume that Netflix has done the analysis and prefers AWS over other provides. The benefit can be framed like this - if Netflix does not use AWS, then Amazon Video has a strategic advantage in being the only one with access to the best platform. By using AWS, they remove that competitive advantage from Amazon Video.

It's not that strange. Google does the same more or less.

Search for "insurance" on Google. Google ranks a bunch of insurance companies: Geico, Statefarm, etc. They also show ratings for some specific agents. Google also sells ads if you want to drive more traffic and not just be in the organic listings.

You can find nuanced differences between Yelp and Google, but the problem is not conflict of interest. The problem is that businesses are not seeing enough value in the ad product that Yelp offers. Many advertisers dislike Google, yet they still advertise.

We used Tableau for about a year and then decided to drop them. The reason was a sudden change in licensing terms where: 1. The minimum step increase in server cores changed. 2. The cost to run ha increased. 3. The cost per core increased.

The only thing that is worse than an expensive product, is one that has unpredictable pricing.

With diamonds, unless you are a professional and are looking through a magnifying device, you cannot tell the difference. If anything, the synthetic looks clearer and better. I have done the test myself.

If you can't tell the difference, how does it impact signaling value? If you are optimizing for signaling value, synthetics are better since you can afford a larger and clearer one.