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How many quarters after Q1 2016 till Marissa Mayer is unemployed?
1 or fewer
2
4
Her job is guaranteed; what are you even talking about?
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Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


It was initially coined to refer to how venture capitalists were chasing after the startup company which would be worth a lot of money. Because there are thousands of startups that flame out or just end up being mildly successful niche businesses finding and investing in the company that was the one to actually hit $1B in valuation was a near mythical event and was compared to catching a unicorn. The term "unicorn" just stuck stuck.

A better term would be something like "winning the lottery", "beating the odds", or "hitting the jackpot" but VCs don't exactly like to admit that their business model sometimes strongly resembles gambling.

The fact that there are so many unicorns running around is more an indication of how freely the cash is flowing than the quality of the businesses. There is a lot of money out there chasing any sort of return.

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Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Also it is really really important to know/remember that the value of many of these companies have been artificially goosed over the $1 Billion mark because they (the founders and the investors) want to say the company is a unicorn. Most of the late round funding has conditions and ratchets which basically make the headline number being trotted around meaningless.

For example a VC might invest $100M for 10% of a company, which makes the company worth $1B. That's the number the press talks about. What they don't talk about (because it is done via confidential contracts) is that the 10% is only true if the company keeps going up Up UP! If that doesn't happen the investor gets to lay claim to more shares at a reduced price so that their original investment is made whole. So if the company IPOs at a valuation of $750M (making the initial investment worth $75M) the VC might be able to buy an additional 10% of the company for $50M... making their total ownership 20% at $150M and they didn't lose a penny. Employees on the other hand who bought shares at a time when they thought and were being told by the founders that the company was worth a billion dollars are screwed - this is kind of what happened to Square employees.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


The really frustrating (and dangerous) thing about the current bubble is unlike the last one these are for the most part private companies who can conceal things until it is too late. Ignoring the giant elephant in the room of Uber, if something like Stripe, WeWork, or even AirBNB were to run out of runway it could potentially impact a whole bunch of people financially.

As for the tread topic as to which unicorn is going to die first? I vote Theranos. After a riding the promise of being able to diagnose everything with a single drop of blood to a $10B valuation they have been nose-down and accelerating since October when the Wall Street Journal published an article which basically said their tech is inaccurate bullshit that doesn't work.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


go3 posted:

i always figured most of it went into legal fees to draw out a defense of a position you can't hold until favorable legislation went through

They have been doing things like charging patients $7 for a test then paying UC San Francisco >$300 for a comprehensive panel on it because Theranos's wonder machines don't actually work.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Arsenic Lupin posted:

Oooh, link? (I'll be very embarrassed if that was covered in one of the links I put up yesterday.)

It is in the initial October WSJ article. That's pay walled but here's a random blog which has the paragraph quoted:

http://labsoftnews.typepad.com/lab_soft_news/2016/01/theranos-outsourcing-some-tests-and-suffering-losses-on-this-basis.html

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


The leaked slides from the last funding round showed uber burned through $700 million in Q3 of 2015 alone.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


computer parts posted:

They subsidize the rides and give a bunch of freebies to gain market share.

Right. In many case it is probably more profitable for the drivers to focus on recruiting new drivers to get the reward than it is to ferry passengers around for $2 at a go.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


wateroverfire posted:

This was A Good Thread before it became about Uber. =(

Can we get back to that? It was really interesting.

That seems to happen to these threads doesn't it? Maybe we should all agree on a "no uber" rule like the Politics thread doesn't do Israel and Palestine discussion.

What I think is really interesting this go around is how much cargo culting there is going on. Steve Jobs was an rear end in a top hat who dressed in a distinctive manner, we should have a CEO like that (Theranos) and copy the format of their product announcements (Xiaomi, Samsung, many many more) because Apple was successful. Twitter took off at SXSW in Austin, so we should burn absurd amounts of money to get attention there (uncountable numbers of startups) because we want to be Twitter. You even see it with the "hey we should be worth $1B too" fake valuations. Then there is the worship of being "disruptive" as a goal itself instead of a means by which to enter a crowded market sector.

Shifty Pony fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Feb 11, 2016

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


You can't help but feel deja vu when you read about things such as people getting booed if they dare ask a startup founder their revenue plan.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Doctor Butts posted:

Speaking of jet.com, how is that place doing?

Pretty rapidly running out of runway last I heard.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Scrub-Niggurath posted:

BBT is pretty much a bunch of caricatures while Silicon Valley hits way closer to home

If I remember correctly Silicon Valley had a hell of a time fleshing out a startup hhackathon/accelerator/meetup whatever because nearly every stupid idea and name they could think of was already an actual startup.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


cheese posted:

The beating heart of both social media/mobile specifically and, frankly, the internet in general is real world companies that sell real goods and services (Toyota, Coca-Cola, Kleenex, Carnival Cruise, whatever) paying for online advertising. Turns out that a lot of that "traffic" that advertisers generate (by buying/selling clicks and views from a whole host of platforms) is artificially generated and total bullshit. It all comes crashing down if those companies turn their increasing doubt and skepticism about online advertising into smaller and smaller ad buys.

A lot of what is making Facebook stupid amounts of money in mobile is that free to play apps have all figured out the profile of a whale user and they have bid up ad space and cost per install on those people to absolutely insane levels.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


redscare posted:

Agree, but posting on medium certainly won't fix that for anyone (speaking of bad life choices, getting yourself fired from the job you clearly need by publicly complaining about it is pretty high up there). California is a pretty pro-union state, maybe she should have given organizing a shot instead. If nothing else, she'd still have a job.

It didn't even need to go that far. If she and a bunch of buddies had been posting back and forth at each other on Twitter ripping on yelp about the working conditions and ways to fix them that probably would be considered protected activity. Open letters... Not so much.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


cheese posted:

Its not like there is a dearth of places and things to put to your Scrooge McDuck stacks of money into,

There actually is. The wealthy are sitting on a lot of money and there is only a limited number of "good" investments. So every rich fucker dogpiles onto things which show a slight possibility of return, driving up the prices until the price is incredibly out of balance with the risk. Repeat.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


g0del posted:

The minimum spec is an nvidia 970/amd 290 paired with an i5-4590. That's a $200 CPU and $300 video card. The steam hardware survey doesn't break down video cards very well, but based on VRAM stats less than 10% of steam users can hit that spec. I think the idea is to get it started now, and hope that in time the minimum spec eventually gets cheap enough for main-stream adoption.

Oh, and those stats already assume simplistic graphics. A 970 isn't hitting 90 fps with good modern graphics.

A friend got to fiddle around with a dev kit and says if it drops below 60fps you are going to start to feel queezy. In addition to the raw computing power problem there's trouble in that a modern PC is actually really bad at consistent real time operations. Game engines and graphics cards experience frame-to-frame variation in framerate and micro-stuttering as a result. The readout might say 100fps but what is actually happening is 80 frames took 5ms each to render (200fps) but a random 20 frames or so took 30ms each to render (~30fps) for one of myriad reasons.

Then there's the problem that most non-enthusiast computers aren't getting any more powerful, they are just getting more power efficient. If it takes off anywhere consoles are probably where the technology is gong to shine.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


computer parts posted:

Again, not really. Companies are perfectly able and willing to offer a wide variety of jobs and pay scales. What they're not willing to do is promote existing employees to a significant degree.

So you could have low or non-existent raises for years, get an offer from another company, work there for two years, and get an offer back from the first company for a lot higher than what you made earlier, despite the fact that the only change is that you're not presently working at the original company.

When I was working private sector I knew people that pulled this after HR flatly stated 5% was the largest raise they could give them. They came back a year later thee positions higher with a 30-40% bump in pay. Sometimes I wondered if the company was actually using it as a way to get information about their competitors' operations.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


The New Yorker did a really good article a while ago following up on the companies and lessons of The Innovator’s Dilemma which is the major religious text of the whole "disrupt or die!" cult.

The actual end result is that with a few major exceptions the sources of the "disruption" were pounded into dust by the big established companies once they turned their considerable engineering, logistics, distribution, and marketing power to bear on the newcomer.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Arsenic Lupin posted:

I think these were some of the examples used in the book, but in the mainframe/minicomputer/workstation/PC transitions a lot of the big companies would not commit to the newer, cheaper paradigm because it would undercut/destroy their revenue streams, and because they believed that nobody actually wanted the cheaper, less functional version.

The corpses of the BUNCH (anybody else remember that acronym?), DEC, PR1ME, Wang, Apollo Computer, and ultimately Sun illustrate this point. More modernly, dedicated assistive-communication devices with customized software are being replaced by iPads, even though the iPads don't have the same quality of software. I was at the slowly-decaying shuffling corpse of PR1ME, and the company refused to believe that anybody wanted the cheaper workstations, to the extent that William Poduska, a founder of Prime, left to form Apollo. There was also a very expensive source-management system (anybody remember the name?) that required its own dedicated sysadmin plus prayer wheels, and that everybody gratefully abandoned for less-functional (at the time) open-source solutions.

I'm not endorsing old management books. However, "we can't undercut our existing expensive solution to switch to the new cheap solution" is a genuine thing.

Definitely, I just think there is a mistaken belief that the one who sets off the avalanche will also be the one on top after the dust clears, which leads to the unicorn valuations.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


What I find really interesting is that VR seems to fundamentally break horror games. Nearly every write up I've read has said that things which used to be enjoyably spooky are transformed into being legitimately not at all fun terrifying.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


axeil posted:

holy poo poo.

"guys the actual forms we are legally required to file are lying, don't listen to them, everything's fine i did nothing wrong"

Dude is probably primarily concerned about the SEC at this point and has a legal team trying to close any potential opening for an investigation to start. He lost some very powerful people a lot of money and did it in a way that made defending him political poison so once an investigation gets rolling he knows he's not going to have any help.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


That reminds me of this Terry Pratchett quote:

quote:

The Grand Trunk’s problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management had made mistakes—oops, “well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error”—but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting “fundamental systemic errors” committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometrical otherworld, and “were to be regretted.”

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


I think that was cards against humanity where they ran an Black Friday offer of paying $5 for nothing, then turned around and bought out the factory capacity (to produce a bunch of nothing) to give them some time off.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


If my blanket is clipped to the top sheet how am I supposed to kick it off when my Nest thermostat decides to randomly set the heat at 88 degrees during the middle of the night?

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Cultural Imperial posted:

Does snapchat really make money?

No.

Their advertising program has been pretty shaky and they had to recently partner with Viacom to fill ad space. They can't get really aggressive with ads or implement a subscription system like Tinder did because their core market of teenagers is both broke and really fickle and willing to hop over to whatever other app at comes along. For a while there it was Kik but there is always something new.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


mobby_6kl posted:


How? Isn't that a lovely site where your first action is hitting the back button?

It is also a place where people largely post things they want to buy for themselves or that they think someone else should buy. Also they have a huge database of "people that pinned this also pinned this" to suggest products or target advertising. It is a money printing machine via purchase referrals and a mutually beneficial arrangement for both the merchant who puts the "pin this!" link on their product site and Pinterest.

Also Pinterest is one of the few concentrations of women on the Internet. Something like 80-90% of the site's activity is from young women users.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Google at least partially uses the random but interesting-to-nerds companies for employee retention. They like to keep the illusion going that if your current position doesn't really do it for you hey maybe you can work on the self-driving car when a position opens up!

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


redscare posted:

The fintech space is going to be rapidly adding notches to this belt. I'm at one of the lending startups and we laid off ~20% a month ago because the burn rate was too drat high but uh we're doomed and I'm looking for a way out. Much of the space is expanding deeper into subprime, and we all know how heavy exposure to that plays out.

What exactly is fintech? I've read so much of the yospos bitcoin thread that seeing "disrupt" and "banking" makes me instantly suspicious.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


That juicer's natural environment isn't at home, it is in the company cafeteria where it lets you show your rockstar coders or sales staff how much you care about their health (and keep them from leaving campus twice a day to get their hangover recovery and brain superfood juice), without relying on them to clean the drat thing after they use it.

Had it been released a few years ago I could see it being a thing. Still dumb though.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is facing a class action lawsuit for organizing and participating in a price fixing scheme (namely the agreement of all uber drives to charge the same base fares and to all also charge surge fares according to the formula which Kalanick invented).

The judge denied Kalanick's motion to dismiss the case . The legal reasons behind the case are kind of interesting (they are suing Kalanick at least in part because he is a driver for Uber and thus part of the conspiring driver class) but the decision is just generally amusing

There's a citation of the Silk Road case to shoot down Kalanick's argument that he cannot be a part of a conspiracy because all of the drivers and passengers independently entered into the contracts for rides:

quote:

Sophisticated conspirators often reach their agreements as much by the wink and the nod as by explicit agreement, and the implicit agreement may be far more potent, and sinister, just by virtue of being implicit. Recently, for example, in United States v. Ulbricht, the Government alleged that defendant Ulbricht had organized an online marketplace for illicit goods and services called Silk Road. See United States v. Ulbricht, 31 F. Supp. 3d 540, 546-47 (S.D.N.Y. 2014). In ruling on motions in limine in Ulbricht, Judge Forrest rejected the defense's argument that transactions among Silk Road's users gave rise to "only buy-sell relationships and not conspiratorial behavior" or, at most, to "a multitude of discrete conspiracies." United States v. Ulbricht, 79 F. Supp. 3d 466, 481 (S.D.N.Y. 2015). Instead, Judge Forrest noted that the Government charged the defendant with sitting "atop an overarching single conspiracy, which included all vendors who sold any type of narcotics on Silk Road at any time." Id. at 490. In the instant case, Uber's digitally decentralized nature does not prevent the App from constituting a "marketplace" through which Mr. Kalanick organized a horizontal conspiracy among drivers.

Defendant argues, however, that plaintiff's alleged conspiracy is "wildly implausible" and "physically impossible," since it involves agreement "among hundreds of thousands of independent transportation providers all across the United States." Def. Br. at 1. Yet as plaintiff's counsel pointed out at oral argument, the capacity to orchestrate such an agreement is the "genius" of Mr. Kalanick and his company, which, through the magic of smartphone technology, can invite hundreds of thousands of drivers in far-flung locations to agree to Uber's terms. See Tr. 12:15-16. The advancement of technological means for the orchestration of large-scale price-fixing conspiracies need not leave antitrust law behind. Cf. Ulbricht, 31 F. Supp. 3d at 559 ("if there were an automated telephone line that offered others the opportunity to gather together to engage in narcotics trafficking by pressing "1," this would surely be powerful evidence of the button-pusher's agreement to enter the conspiracy. Automation is effected through a human design; here, Ulbricht is alleged to have been the designer of Silk Road…"). The fact that Uber goes to such lengths to portray itself — one might even say disguise itself — as the mere purveyor of an "app" cannot shield it from the consequences of its operating as much more.

Which leads right into...

quote:

Recent jurisprudence on vertical resale price maintenance agreements does not, as defendant would have it, undermine plaintiff's claim of an illegal horizontal agreement. See Def. Br. at 15. In Leegin, the Supreme Court held that resale price maintenance agreements — e.g., a retailer's agreement with a manufacturer not to discount the manufacturer's goods beneath a certain price — are to be judged by the rule of reason, unlike horizontal agreements to fix prices, which are per se illegal. See Leegin, 551 U.S. at 886, 907. The Court cited various "procompetitive justifications for a manufacturer's use of resale price maintenance," id. at 889, and concluded that although this practice may also have anticompetitive effects, the rule of reason is the best approach to distinguishing resale price maintenance agreements that violate the antitrust laws from those that do not. See id. at 897-900.
M

Here, unlike in Leegin, Uber is not selling anything to drivers that is then resold to riders.5 Moreover, the justifications for rule of reason treatment of resale price maintenance agreements offered in Leegin are not directly applicable to the instant case. See Pl. Opp. Br. at 15-16; Tr. 20-21. In particular, the Court's attention has not been drawn to concerns about free-riding Uber drivers, or to efforts that Uber drivers could make to promote the App that will be under-provided if Uber does not set a pricing algorithm. See Leegin, 551 U.S. at 890-91. While Mr. Kalanick asserts that Uber's pricing algorithm facilitates its market entry as a new brand, see Def. Br. at 16-17, this observation — which is fairly conclusory — does not rule out a horizontal conspiracy among Uber drivers, facilitated by Mr. Kalanick both as Uber's CEO and as a driver himself. The Court therefore finds that plaintiff has adequately pleaded a horizontal antitrust conspiracy under Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

Basically a manufacturer setting minimum prices for downstream retailers can be legal. But Uber has repeatedly said it doesn't actually sell anything and is instead just an app connecting customers with independent drivers. So they may have just forced themselves into having to choose between being unable to claim that exemption or admitting on the record that they are a transportation company - an admission which would really damage their argument that drivers are independent contractors.

Also amusing:

quote:

As to market definition, plaintiff defines the relevant market as the "mobile app-generated ride-share service market." Am. Compl. ¶94. Plaintiff alleges that Uber has an approximately 80 percent market share in the United States in this market; Uber's chief competitor Lyft has nearly a 20 percent market share; and a third competitor, Sidecar, left the market at the end of 2015. Id. ¶¶95-97. Plaintiff then explains that traditional taxi service is not a reasonable substitute for Uber, since, for example, rides generated by a mobile app can be arranged at the push of a button and tracked on riders' mobile phones; riders need not carry cash or a credit card, or, upon arrival, spend time paying for the ride; and riders can rate drivers and see some information on them before entering the vehicle. Id. ¶104. Indeed, plaintiff claims, Uber has itself stated that it does not view taxis as ride-sharing competition.


Defendant contests plaintiff's proposed market definition, arguing that plaintiff provides inadequate justification for the exclusion not just of taxis and car services, but also of public transit such as subways and buses, personal vehicle use, and walking. See Def. Br. at 18; Def. Reply Br. at 8. In defendant's view, "[e]ach of these alternatives is a clear substitute for the services provided by driver-partners." Def. Br. at 18.

One could argue this either way (and defendant's attorneys are encouraged to hereinafter walk from their offices to the courthouse to put their theory to the test
).

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


It is really really important to remember that in a motion to dismiss all facts are assumed to be against the one making the motion. The purpose is to determine whether a legal cause of action exists, even if everything the plaintiff alleges is true is actually true. That's why I didn't quote much of the discussion about the allegations as in a motion to dismiss decision the court presumes as true all but the most outlandish of claims.

Uber/Kalanick also has a lot of money to spend on lawyers and can drag this out. But there are tea leaves to read and the Judge throwing Leegin right back in their face is definitely not a good sign, nor is the snarky comment about Uber's council walking from their office to the court if they think that is a valid replacement for a car ride.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

:getin: Thank you for the explanation.

It gets better. The antitrust case against Apple regarding their ebook price fixing is precedent in the NY federal court in which the Uber case was filed. That is not good for Uber/Kalanick because it basically unambiguously says that a lot of pre-Leegan precedent is still applicable post-Leegan, including findings that say that hub and spoke pricing agreements (with a bunch of supposed competitors organizing a fixed price by all agreeing with a third party) are always illegal. The decision is not ambiguous about it and quotes old Supreme Court precedent: "any conspiracy “formed for the purpose and with the effect of raising, depressing, fixing, pegging, or stabilizing the price of a commodity . . . is illegal per se,” and the precise “machinery employed . . . is immaterial.” ". It also includes this wonderful quote

quote:

Apple’s initial argument that its agreement with the Publisher Defendants was procompetitive (an argument presented principally in an amicus brief adopted wholeheartedly by the dissent) is that by eliminating Amazon’s $9.99 price point, the agreement enabled Apple and other ebook retailers to enter the market and challenge Amazon’s dominance. But this defense — that higher prices enable more competitors to enter a market — is no justification for a horizontal price‐fixing conspiracy. As the Supreme Court has cogently explained:

In any case in which competitors are able to increase the price level or to curtail production by agreement, it could be argued that the agreement has the effect of making the market more attractive to potential new entrants. If that potential justifies horizontal agreements among competitors imposing one kind of voluntary restraint or another on their competitive freedom, it would seem to follow that the more successful an agreement is in raising the price level, the safer it is from antitrust attack. Nothing could be more inconsistent with our cases.

Catalano, 446 U.S. at 649

Higher prices enticing more drivers to enter the market is the explicitly stated reason behind surge pricing.

(Is it strange that I enjoy reading court opinions?)

Shifty Pony fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Apr 13, 2016

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


cheese posted:

I love legal sick burns. Ohhh, you say that buses, riding your bike and even walking are all clear substitutes for Uber's service? Then please, by all means, arrive at future proceedings by walking - after all, its a clear substitute right? :smug: :slick:

So its possible that Uber will be forced into 1) admitting that they are in fact a corporation that hires people to drive cars for money, and have to pay benefits and so forth or 2) sticking to the "we are just an app that connects people" in which case they admit that they are engaged in a price fixing conspiracy with a mountain of precedent against them? Oh my :suspense:

Also Uber's insistence that their drivers are acting as independent entities is what lets them bypass Uber's mandatory arbitration agreement by suing Kalanick directly. The agreement only covers disputes between users and Uber - not users and drivers (who are "not Uber" according to Uber).

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Arsenic Lupin posted:

Their product, had it existed, would have improved medical testing. Unfortunately, apparently it failed tests early on, and whle they were trying to make it work they were simultaneously issuing fraudulent reports about its working.

Their product does exist, and is made by other people even. Nanoliter biological sample testing is a thing but the problem is that the when you get to that sample size the number of your target substance is so tiny that it cannot be relied upon to produce a large enough response to always detect. What people who are smart do is to pull a normal sized sample to divide it and run a bunch of tests in parallel against a bunch of reference samples. But that's not cool enough I guess.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


cheese posted:

No, their innovation, the thing that had people so crazy excited and willing to throw around huge stacks of money, was the claim that they could use finger prick levels of blood to perform tests that otherwise took much larger samples. Without that claim, they were nothing special - certainly not special enough to get all the publicity and articles about them, and the huge investments. That this was a lie is why it all came tumbling down. They made promises that they ended up not being able to deliver on.

Whoever was talking about the problems of investing in biomedical as if it were software was totally spot on. The same rules do not apply and it burned people big time.


It is a clash between SV culture and reality. While getting things right 70% of the time is humorously quirky for your face swap app it is utterly unacceptable for a medical test where competing established tests are in the high 90s.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Most cab companies charge a per-day or per-month rate for using their car (or branding) and dispatch. as long as you pay them they don't give two shits if you go park in a parking lot taking no fares.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


blah_blah posted:

I've heard this objection before but literally never seen it in any of the major cities I've taken taxis in. Quick googling indicates that NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, and Seattle are all this way, for example.

States and cities set the fares for taxis that pick up street hails and governments are explicitly exempt from anti-trust law, and companies following a government regulation on prices are likewise immune from prosecution despite that being very clear price fixing. Simply put it isn't illegal when the government does it or when the government tells you to do it.

A company can set the rate they charge for their services. A company can set the rate at which they pay independent contractors. But a company cannot control what an independent contractor may charge the clients of the independent contractor - that's kind of fundamentally at odds with the independent part of an independent contractor. Either those contractors are misclassified or illegal price fixing is occurring.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Isn't it about time for Uber to run another fundraising round? The last leaked investor financial sheet showed a burn rate so high that they would have run through half of their $2B round from January by now.

If that article is right and Bill Gurley's rant is actually an indication of inside information that Uber accepted dirty terms on the last fundraising round things could get rather interesting with VC tightening up. I don't think a company as egotistical as Uber would take a down round with grace.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


e_angst posted:

They've already decided they are going to the legislator next. Of course, the legislator doesn't meet again until January 2017, and the earliest any law they pass will only go into effect is January 1, 2018. Or, given Uber's current burn rate, around $1.25 billion in the future.

They already tried going to the Lege after Houston passed TNC regulations but their bill didn't get scheduled for a floor vote* in the House and didn't even manage to get out of committee in the Senate. And this time they would have every city delegation trying to stall, poison pill, or otherwise kill that bill so the odds will be worse. Additionally the cab companies, public safety folks, and insurance companies probably actually do have some decent pull in the Legislature so I could see a statewide fingerprint requirement getting tacked on.

*For those unfamiliar with Texas politics the Legislature only meets every two years for a very short time. Due to the time crunch the most important part of the process is getting your bull scheduled for a floor vote as early as possible.

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


Hyperloop reminds me of Theranos or the ultrasonic charging startup that got piled with money while actual experts pointed out it would never work as described.

That ultrasound startup is hilarious by the way. It is basically a photo-Theranos and ticks pretty much every box in Silicon Valley startup bingo. Some choice bits:

quote:

Perry seems to brag that she knew nearly nothing of physics before starting the company—not even how a TV remote control worked. She says the basic idea for uBeam came after only a few hours of googling, and portrays herself as the first person to have thought of using ultrasound for wireless power. “It seemed like an awesome idea,” said Perry in the TED Talk. “Why hadn’t the ultrasound experts thought of it before?”

Actually, they had. Many times.

quote:

Spectrum e-mailed uBeam several lists of questions about the issues raised in this article, but the company declined to answer any of them. A uBeam spokesperson said the questions had a “negative slant” and added, “If you want to write about real science, for a scientific audience, you would reach out to us and work with us in a collaborative rather than offensive way.”

Over the weekend, uBeam provided an interview to TechCrunch,

IEEE Spectrum just isn't real science for a scientific audience like TechCrunch is I guess.

From a different article:

quote:

So why hasn't it been done before? Perry believes her status as a non-expert helped her think about the problem differently than most. After lots of research, she says she broke the solution down into steps, using seed funding to hire contractors to build the various elements of the technology. Perry says uBeam has used 30 of the world's leading ultrasonic engineers, physicists, and electrical engineers.

"How many brilliant, game-changing ideas out there thought up by laypeople, teenagers, store clerks have been squashed by experts that said, 'That can't work'?" she says. "If I weren't as stubborn as I am, I probably would've chucked this entire idea five years ago, because people with a lot more knowledge told me that what I was doing was impossible. But by thinking differently, thinking outside the box, thinking around corners, you have the potential to outthink the top thinkers."

Ah yes. Steps and teams, why didn't other people think of that?

And of course in response to criticism the founder breaks out what must be the most misused quote in all of Silicon Valley:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi

— Meredith Perry (@meredithperry) October 21, 2015

Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'


H.P. Hovercraft posted:

VC money gambling on unicorns is the best transfer of wealth from the superrich dynasties to the merely affluent young white male

Very true.

I would argue that for most people the impact a tech crash will have will be depend by upon what new thing catches the eye of the people in charge of aiming the firehose of money that was getting sprayed on app startups.

I have no idea what it would be though, nearly every asset class is already disturbingly overpriced.

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Shifty Pony
Dec 28, 2004

Up ta somethin'



There is a real need for a service better than Craigslist but not as exclusive as the MLS but all these companies just have to tack on stupid extra bullshit and ruin their offerings. Craigslist without Nigerian scams and bait and switch listings would be wonderful.

Also what are the odds they include arbitration in their user agreement so when the landlords mysteriously always reject the black guy's bid in favor of the lower bid from the less qualified white male they are SOL?

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