Viewing profile — myhrvold

A less nefarious reason behind companies increasing profit margins, is that with more uncertainty -- i.e. potential supply chain disruptions in the future -- companies feel the nee…

Unsurprising to see TV writing overtake film writing in the last decade plus; TV writings lends itself much more to streaming shows (which are considered TV even if they never appe…

Shopify still a valuable business! It's a success story in a volatile space. So if they want to maximize their growth during good times, it's almost inevitable they'll have to walk…

Unfortunate, but these layoffs are not surprising given economic conditions. It's a sizable number of affected roles, so hopefully this is a one-and-done for now. (A drip, drip, dr…

Smart! This was a bet that I think made sense in theory for Shopify, but in practice became too hard to manage and execute given their M.O. Would imagine Shopify is taking a loss i…

Nope that was nearly a month after -- toward the end of February as I recall. #DeleteUber started when Uber turned off surge to an airport from a taxi strike. It was headline news …

Nah the taxi industry was a lot worse than Uber. Most of the arguments over whether Uber drivers are employers to me are baffling; most taxi drivers took set, long hourly shifts fr…

A lot was also in a gray area. In fact France ending up (I think very unfairly, but ofc I worked at Uber) passing laws specifically against Uber to make it retroactively illegal. W…

Yes the beginning was in late January 2017, involving a taxi strike at a NYC area airport and Uber's messaging around continuing to operate to serve the airport and surge pricing. …

Yeah I think that's in part because so much of the cultural zeitgeist around Uber was on the policy implications, and the effect on consumer behavior etcetera. There were a ton of …

Inaccurate overall IMO; a caricature of what actually went on. But accurate in terms of capturing the sentiment that a lot of Uber skeptics had during the height of Uber mania, say…

uChat actually saved Uber a lot of money by the way. Slack is way more expensive and it would not meet the requirements of Uber at the time, i.e. anyone being able to chat with any…

Maybe. The buyer certainly has more info for how market valuations are set if they're an investing professional, like is often the case for these tender offers. However, on the oth…

Yeah Uber had this, twice actually as a private company; once with Softbank in January 2018. And then again with Coatue / a few other investors in July 2018. There's a bit of game …

Stripe made the right move here. Going public is a huge move. You don't want to make a big decision like this because early employees couldn't have cashed out. There are lots of ot…

Yeah I think the question is "great for who". I think it could be great for the founders (who can achieve liquidity in a variety of ways at any point really, that regular employees…

Yes; the idea is that the startup wants control for who will be on the cap table, so they don't hassle with written requests for info etcetera. Minority shareholders (especially fo…

That's true but the reality for many will be selling at least the amount of shares to cover the cost of executing their options. And because the next window to sell could be undete…

A target audience is a good broader point about MOOCs and online education. (I took edX courses during the "glory days" of 2012 and 2013 -- and also tested out Udemy, Coursera, and…