191–200 of 201 posts
Let's not pretend: we're not equal under the law. We should be but we're not.
Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’ Eric Schmidt has a similar approach to his extra-marital affairs.
I thought it was currently not in vogue to judge people on their sex-lives.
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Just look at the pyramids. Thanks to slave labour Egypt has now a reliable source of income from tourism. Let’s make it legal again.
LOL nice. The scary thing is it's hard to tell if this is sarcasm on HN these days. Some days reading this site, I think I've found someone who genuinely believes we should end all regulation because it's more profitable without.
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You seem to be confused about the legal context. What he described are only potential civil law violations, not criminal. It's a completely different thing. Civil law has a lot of gray areas, especially around novel IP issues.
Yeah, also what GP doesn't get is that you can do everything right and with the best intentions, get all the clearances in the world, and still get sued, and still lose. These decisions are about risk preference, and the risk tolerance at a startup is by nature different from that at an established company.
But that doesn’t resolve anyone from the decision and responsibility to honor the societal rules (or use democratic means to change them) or to ignore the law and hope to become to big to fail.
In the latter case, I see those as detractors from the overall good.
It's crazy to see the repercussions of the talk he gave at Stanford, even after the video was made private by the Stanford YouTube channel. I thought the talk was great. I remember in the talk he said something like this, but he was being really open about what normally happens in these types of companies. I think the problem is that he, as someone in a position of power, was too open about it?
> It's crazy that is a phrase often used by people who are appealing to an invisible sense of "us versus them", emphasizing that the crazy thing-person-event is "not us" ? > even after the video was made private by the Stanford YouTube channel private conversations among the very powerful is exactly the topic.. so this seems a bit of a Freudian slip > I thought the talk was great. I am one of "us" so why so much upse…
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The playbook of "Do something legally gray > raise funding & expand > pivot away from legally gray OR employ lawyers to make it not legally gray" is basically the standard playbook of startups, the examples are countless: AirBnb, YouTube, Spotify, Uber, OpenAI, etc, etc... I'm sure it isn't always a bad idea, but struggling to come up with good examples for when the outcome from doing so have been more than just "sha…
Airbnb, Spotify, YouTube and Uber wouldn't see shareholder value increase if people didn't find those services useful. The number doesn't just magically go up if you build something nobody wants.
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It's not specifically about technical problems. He's saying that you need to just go all in on getting traction and not constantly be worrying about things that aren't going to matter if you never get it. It's the same thing as people who just opine about how they'll handle the big server bills, or how they'll scale to a billion users, or how they'll deal with regulations, when they haven't gotten their first user ye…
Do you remember Napster? They went all in on getting traction, succeeded, then got crushed by the music industry. Ignoring the law only works if you are bankrolled. Don't try this at home, kids.
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It's not specifically about technical problems. He's saying that you need to just go all in on getting traction and not constantly be worrying about things that aren't going to matter if you never get it. It's the same thing as people who just opine about how they'll handle the big server bills, or how they'll scale to a billion users, or how they'll deal with regulations, when they haven't gotten their first user ye…
This advice kind of feels like "Don't pay your taxes. Just go all in on enjoying your life and not constantly be worrying about things that aren't going to matter if you die. Worry about it later if the IRS goes after you." You really should be preparing for the future and operating above board, even from day one.
>...and hire lawyers to 'clean up the mess'
would be don't worry about tax at the start and hire accountants to sort it later
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He’s dead serious. Uber got its start by flouting taxi rules. By the time the backlash started uber/lyft were too popular for governments to shut down so instead most governments created an awkward different category for them, so there’s at least some regulation applying to them. If Uber had tried to work thru the regulation they would have never gotten off the ground or have been as loved by users. Taxis in many way…
>Uber got its start by flouting taxi rules. No they got their start because the yellow cabs were late, never arrived, started their timer before I even got into the car, took me a long routes to my destination. It was waaaay worse with yellow cabs. And when I first heard of Uber, I immediately switched. I may be in the minority, but I’m a happy Uber/Lyft customer.