ziszis

Can you link to the information re: "having at least 25 riders be former sex offenders, sexual assault, and murderers just in Cali"

Don't see it in the source article.

Most of the call spam blocking solutions suffer from needing to trust Caller ID. Spoofing caller ID is now trivial and used by spammers [1] There are some work arounds to this like "audio fingerprinting".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing

Link to formal termination letter: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2017/0...

The termination letter indicates that the termination is for cause and may have implications on stock awards and other compensation:

"Under the Stock Award and other agreements, you are entitled to 20 days to cure the events that give rise to this termination for Cause. This letter constitutes the “prior written notice” triggering the commencement of that 20­day period."

Groupon is a great counter to consider in terms of the product-market fit theory. Few companies have ever had the product-market that Groupon had "Groupon is so effective that Mason claims Groupon now has 35,000 companies clamoring to be on its roster. Only one in eight applicants makes the cut." [0]

Instead a better model is to think about having a great product in a great market has phase 1. But if the company can't create a moat it still dies. "One problem with the Groupon model: Anyone can replicate it. More than 200 copycat sites have sprung up in the U.S., with another 500 overseas, including 100 in China."[0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0830/entrepreneurs-groupo...

I generally believe in transparency. But I would resist transparency with someone that exhibits this attitude:

Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, has been candid about how he feels about people reporting his site for its content. “We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us,” Anglin wrote in one online post. “We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now.”

It is not a coincidence that Uber's competitors are all raising money at this point in time. It was hard a year ago. Uber's struggles have not only boosted the metrics for competitors [1], but there is increasingly a plausible story about how Uber could fail.

1: http://www.thedrive.com/tech/9739/lyft-bookings-ridership-so...

Waymo's allegations now go much deeper and further back than just Otto:

* "Levandowski was deceiving Google almost from the moment it hired him to work on the Street View maps project back in 2007."

* "Levandowski controlled a company called Dogwood Leasing that hired ex-Google contractor and 510 Systems engineer Asheem Linaval to use Google’s secrets to develop self-driving car technology."

* "Levandowski founded yet another startup, Odin Wave, feeding it confidential lidar technology ... renaming the company Tyto, to hide his involvement."

The miss isn't that eBay made money on the transaction in the end.

The miss is that eBay completely failed to secure the IP rights to Skype. Zennström (CEO of Skype) was essentially able to sell his company twice and eBay made less than they would have without the mistake.

I assume that Otto execs indemnified Uber with respect to the intellectual property, given that it was a primary value in the acquisition. If so, Uber can claw back the $680M they spent.

If not, it would be the worst IP miss since Ebay acquired Skype for $2 Billion, only to find out that they didn't own Skype's IP or have access to the source code [0].

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/new-lawsuit-brings-clarity....

The numbers in the headline measures the # of H-1B petitions that were received before the USCIS decided to stop accepting more because they can meet the "mandated 65,000 visa H-1B cap" and "the 20,000 visa U.S. advanced degree exemption, also known as the master’s cap"[1]

Given that the agency "will reject and return filing fees for all unselected cap-subject petitions that are not duplicate filings", it would be desirable to limit the number of excess applications.

I am not sure that the data points in the article extrapolate to "A lot of people are looking at America, and (wondering) if it is still a place to make business."

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-reaches-fy-20...

And then UAL gained back almost the full value by Wednesday morning and has performed similar to Delta and other airlines. Like most PR disasters unless you keep digging when you are in a hole, the long-term impact is small and consumers forget.

Uber is in the hole right now and digging. Microsoft used to be. Amazon used to be.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AUAL

More supply of senior engineers will decrease salaries. The visas used to be taken primarily by junior devs preventing (some) senior devs from getting one. Senior devs may no longer be blocked which increases supply. Demand is unchanged, at least in the short-term.

H1b visas have primarily been used by consulting companies to bring in less expensive junior engineers (<$100k) [1]. If new directives make it harder to sponsor junior engineers, it will shift the mix to more senior engineers. This will shift the supply/demand curves, so that US salaries will come down for senior engineers and go up for junior engineers.

[1] http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

No True Scotsman? [0] What is Andy Jassy's engineering degree? What is Sheryl Sandberg's engineering degree?

The reality is that people aren't one-dimensional. If you have overly simple rules: no MBAs, must have University degree, must have Ivy league, Uber people are unethical etc, you make worse decisions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Verizon's plan when buying AOL [0] wasn't to become a media company, but to become a leader in ad tech. The way to lead in ad tech is to control data. Technology alone is not a moat.

Verizon has made several attempts at unlocking the carrier data including the short-lived header injection [1]. Phone data is the holy grail of data (location, voice conversations, web browsing, apps, address, and potentially purchase history in the future) etc. Lets see if they have a winner this time

[0] http://fortune.com/2015/06/24/verizon-gains-aol/

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has an MBA. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has an MBA. AWS CEO Andrew Jassy has an MBA, etc.

It is easy to undervalue marketing, sales, financial and other non-technical skills. There are definitely terrible MBAs, but also amazing ones.

Acceptable belief vs. True belief are independent. There are some beliefs that are acceptable (Jesus) and others that are not (Zeus, Scientology). They are equally likely depending on your perspective.

The Internet has enabled people that think they have found a true belief that is unacceptable to find each other more easily than ever before. The creation of these micro belief systems is one of the most interesting aspects of the Internet. Lots of these on Reddit as an example.

Seattle* is an anomaly. Roughly the 100th city worldwide by size, yet has 2 of the 5 largest companies in the world by market cap.

* Technically Seattle metro area

Good call on the footnote. The Facebook 10K [1] clarifies the definition of DAU:

"The numbers for our key metrics, our DAUs, MAUs, and average revenue per user (ARPU), do not include Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users, respectively, based on their other activities on Facebook." -> This clarifies that they are measuring users without considering any Instagram, WhatsApp or Oculus uplift.

"We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or used our Messenger application (and is also a registered Facebook user), on a given day." -> This clarifies that they only count if the login happened that day or they did a visit during that day. Not passive open tabs.

It does also have this note "For example, while user-provided data indicates a decline in usage among younger users, this age data is unreliable because a disproportionate number of our younger users register with an inaccurate age." -> This might be some of what people are experiencing. A shift in demographics to older people.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680117...

No. Instead, this is probably an example of people on this forum not being representative of global Internet users. If you want actual data, look at their quarterly earnings [1] where they report user engagement metrics. Daily active users reached an all time high of 1,227 Billion in Q4. DAU/MAU reached an enviable all-time high 66%, etc.

There are some challenges in how they present the data and it is unclear what you are including in the definition of "Facebook". The report doesn't break out Instagram & WhatsApp separately. So there could be a decline on Facebook.com which is offset with increases elsewhere.

[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_presentations/FB-Q...

"it's not even on our radar screen.... 50-100 more years" If he really believes this there is a huge disconnect between the belief system of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

"Possible targets floated by investors include Thomas Staggs, the former COO at Walt Disney Co.; Tim Armstrong, CEO of Verizon Communications Inc.’s AOL; and John Martin, CEO of Time Warner Inc.’s Turner, said a person familiar with the matter. The three men declined to comment."

The argument that "Uber isn't taking the money, but the driver is" seems like a difficult one to make (and I know that you are not making this argument) given that :

a) Uber actually collects the payment and then disburses some payment to the drivers. The amount paid to driver is variable over time as percentage of revenue.

b) Uber's model is not subscription based or something that clearly decouples Uber's revenue from the driver's revenue.

c) Uber initially subsidizes and pays drivers above and beyond the total market revenue to build liquidity.

So, in every possible way Uber's revenue is intertwined with the driver's payment.

AirBnb charges and pays VAT in the UK and EU [1]. EBay charges and pays VAT in the UK and EU [2]. I understand that companies want to avoid paying taxes, but I wonder what the legal reasoning was that led Uber to decide not to. Uber needs to pick its battles better.

[1] https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/436/what-is-vat-and-how-...

[2] http://sellercentre.ebay.co.uk/business/about-vat

Now every departure is viewed with suspicion. With a 10,000 person company there is going to be exec departures, but even normal departures will have rumors attached to them (why did they really leave? Isn't the timing odd? Was something about to come out?)

Every senior person leaving Uber now has to manage their image as they leave. And every journalist is digging to see if there is any dirt.

The counter quote is from Warren Buffet: "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."

Is Craig's List a highly profitable machine because they have the best culture? Is Amazon a highly profitable machine because they have the best culture?

The obvious answer is that it's a false trade-off. You need both strategy and culture and while it's a fun quote, it's also silly.

Just the way companies incur technical debt, there is also ethical debt. It is accumulated by taking ethical shortcuts and avoiding painful decisions (a case I have seen several times is letting star devs/sales misbehave).

Eventually the payment on the ethical debt comes due. In Uber's case, they have been building it up for a long time without any down payment. A hard cleaning is needed from top to bottom.

This is the closest I can find:

“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” Bannon said, not finishing the sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered...

Traditional customer service channels are increasingly broken since they are seen as a cost center to be reduced by many companies. In particular, if you are trying to cancel service or withdraw money it is even "worse" because not only do they have to pay the salary for the rep, they also lose money helping you.

If after one or two calls you don't get what you want, it is not worth retrying. I gave up after being placed in queue for an hour with Comcast. After finally getting ready to speak to a rep, I was informed by an automated message that they were closed for the day and to call back tomorrow.

Here is what I find works: 1) Least likely - Traditional customer support channel. Try once or twice at most. 2) More likely - Contact publicly on social media like Twitter (Comcast is actual great about this). 3) Most likely - Getting upvoted and written about here and elsewhere.

I would wait to engage with a lawyer as there is a good chance that someone from Paypal will popup in this thread. It is probably already surfacing in some internal emails at Paypal now. Good luck.

This is a classic halo effect [1]. A positive halo was "Google is making lots of money and they have 20% time. So, smart companies should do this." This is a negative halo "Uber is experiencing lots of bad PR and hustling is part of their culture. So, smart companies should stop being scrappy."

The problem isn't scrappiness. It is when you push far past scrappiness and start breaking the law.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect