Now that I'm older and not working there anymore, I understand that it's a culture problem and that management just didn't know any better, but I've come to accept the fact that it was a great way to cut costs and get away with it. After all, they still have many employees and manage to make more profit year after year. It just made for a very demotivating environment.
We’re prudent, we don’t like to waste money, and we analyze investments from every angle we can think of.
But we look at Tech (we don’t call it IT) as a profit center. We don’t invest in anything unless it can drive down costs, increase revenues, or is needed for regulatory or security reasons.
And when we pull the trigger, I want to make sure that we’ve got the best stuff on the market. Everyone uses either Macs or PCs (we’re agnostic), and run as many monitors as they need to feel productive. Everyone has an iPhone and an iPad. When the hurricane hit Houston, our office building was out of commission for over a week, but we kept running the business.
I want to make sure that Tech allows us to multiply our capabilities. We have a paperless office where any paper is scanned at hi-res, put into our systems and linked to client or regulatory records. Everything is shredded afterwards.
Long ago, I worked in IT, and was dumbfounded by the shortsightedness I saw inside companies who don’t know how to utilize IT. I love competing against those idiots now, because my capabilities are way higher and our cost structure is lower. If we didn’t have all our paper copies scanned in when the hurricane hit, we would have been dead in the water (sorry for the pun).
So, I really feel sorry for all those people who work for morons like the Parent describes, but here’s my recommendation: go start a company and run with your vision. You may fail a couple times (I did), but once you win - and it only takes once - you will never look back.
Appreciating something just because it's novel is bullshit. Appreciating something that solves an actual problem effectively.. that's where I want to be.
Ironically, the orgs responsible for technology “get it” the least, as they are in the business of ITIL bullshit and order filling. IT bureaucracy will spend $10,000 to save $0.10.
This has literally always been the case with IT; they were always seen as cost-centers, not profit.... which is largely due to IT departments historically falling under the CFO....
CEO: "Keep these motherfuckers from spending money"
IT: if "You want this [project] to meet your requirements of [XYZ]?, then == $2000000
CFO: "Fuck you, lets do it for half that and drop security and accessibility as a result"
It's an instant turn-off for me when I hear something like that. These are companies that should be thinking of tech as a means to an end, and not an end in an of itself. Even when I worked at a major software vendor, the tech was still just a means to an end.
Companies too invested in tech tend to spend themselves into bankruptcy. Companies not invested enough in tech tend to be overcome by companies with better tech more slowly.
1. The person who said it may be fancying his own role as tech-heavy and might relate to his/her imagination of what tech-pure companies do. Saying, we are like Google, appeases the person saying it, and satisfies their ego.
2. Often candidates like listening to this. It may not have worked for you, but for the candidates who like hearing this, this works wonderfully. If I were to wager, this line works for more candidates than it pisses off.
While I can see why you find it grating, I think I would forgive them. Whatever else they are, interviews are also those awkward social moments when new acquaintances are just trying to push beyond small talk while trying to please each other. At this stage, it's normal for people to try a little too hard.
Interviews aren't really like a casual social interaction. Progressing past the initial phone call typically involves spending from several hours up to to a whole weekend on some cute homework project, shirking on one's current job for more phone calls, burning PTO for on-site interviews and whatnot. I've got precious little time I'm willing to spend on that sort of stuff, so it's in my interest to be supremely petty.
Our head of technology strategy for Americas is on hacker news at quarter to midnight. And hiring, not just for blockchain. (See my “about” text.)
Worth a chat if you’re in NYC or San Diego.
It would seem if we can get the data to banks such as MUFG in a usable format, then it presents a large opportunity, however how would one even begin to interact with such a large entity to explore it?
You’d troll their LinkedIn looking for a title that esonated, read the job description to be sure, and try connecting, exchange enough convo to move over to their bank email, and then share the idea.
In our case, I’m the right guy. You can email me (and connect on LinkedIn if you like) and I’ll reply with my bank email. Elaborate on the idea then.
I’ve got 250 leaders thinking about how they could use new kinds of data, we’ll connect you to right groups. Even I have a team of PhDs looking for interesting things to tie together to better serve communities.
Note though, getting capital isn’t our problem, we’re interested in more ways to give it out, use it, put it to work.
(I understand what you're going for and appreciate it, it's just interesting how social signals are interpreted given different industries / contexts.)
(... and yes, me posting this comment does, in fact, mean that I'm not doing any work while I post it.)
https://qz.com/668514/if-you-want-to-be-like-warren-buffett-...
Being aware of HN is part of my work.
In my case, we get four key dimensions of value:
1. Seeing trends early is in the job description, and a small slice of zeitgeist is here. I check here, several other self-selecting subgroup sites, a broad RSS list, white paper subscription sites, etc., and typically also read one subject matter book a day. With enough dots of info across a broad array of sources, you can see trends earlier.
2. Finding emerging tech likely able to go ‘enterprise’ is also part of my JD. That often depends on leadership. Some of those leaders are here. You can tell a lot about a company from its founders. I’ve been an extremely early customer of startups found here, years later they lead their segment and we’re already on board. Examples like Hashicorp or CoreOS come to mind.
3. Emerging debates that do matter are often here early, where threads are high quality enough to get exposure to well thought, good logic, alternative views. Being able to absorb more of those improves low data decisions.
4. You can even find talent early. Many met here have gone on to release awesome tools, join or found cool companies, get acquired by BigCos... it’s great to see talented and motivated trajectories and learn it’s not all just luck.
The rules of old business still applies in most organizations: the closer you are to the transactional point where money changes hands, the more you make. This many times means sales, then management, then finance, then marketing, then engineering, then back office.
The deal-makers can get by with a spreadsheet and a BlackBerry, but the rest needs serious amounts of technology.
Ideally advisory business is balanced with dealing and financing, but different houses will be slanted one way or another.
http://www.goldmansachs.com/who-we-are/leadership/executive-...
> Prior to assuming his current role, Mr. Chavez was Chief Information Officer, responsible for the Technology Division
Profile on him from a few years back: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/business/dealbook/goldman...
I worked at a place where the CIO was a lawyer who knew the business really well, but no real tech in his background.
His only knock was that he believed the Cyber Security FUD too much.
Other than that, solid guy and I'd work for him avain.
Banks generally delegate responsibility for huge sums of money to quite a low level in the organisation, and their clients are usually much smaller than the bank is. There needs to be some kind of parity in the apparent seniority between client and bank. The CEO of an SME doesn't want to be dealing with someone who sounds junior when discussing deals regarding the total value of their company.
Banks are so large and complex that it's usually not far off the bottom wrung of the org chart that you're responsible for huge sums of money/risks/contracts. People in smaller organisations with similar monetary responsibilities (in absolute terms) are usually the senior ones with senior sounding titles.
For example, I was a lowly infrastructure engineer in a tier 1 global investment bank working in the platform engineering team not far off the bottom of the ladder, yet I was responsible for infrastructure spending decisions in the scale of 10-100 million dollars. A drop in the ocean for the IT budget of $5Bn dollars, but a larger monetary responsibility than the CEO of a mid sized company has. So yes, I was called a VP.
You'd be surprised how many people don't know :)
Don't mix source of revenue with core business, especially in multi-sided markets.
It's shocking that people don't know it's Facebook.
And in their case not just in the world, but the largest media company in history by a very wide margin. People don't see any connection between William Randolph Hearst and Mark Zuckerberg; Facebook really has the best PR team.
Remember, people don't just share articles, they share articles with their commentary.
("Content is king" was always a distraction. And that came from Sumner Redstone (Viacom), not Bill Gates, who only quoted it.)
If you're referring to AP and other news services, they pay quite a lot for that, so the reporters are paid. Also, they contribute their own stories from their paid reporters to the service for other members to share.
Indeed. I was just reading about the local broadcast rules (specifically: Sinclair broadcasting wants to buy Tribune media, and the FCC appears to be saying 'go ahead".) . Some people are concerned that this violates rules against concentration of ownership in broadcast stations.
But doesn't Facebook operate in essentially 100% of US markets? Should we even care who owns the TV broadcasts?
The internet can, theoretically, have an unlimited number of competitors, so it's not regulated the same way.
Looking up the stats a couple of weeks ago during a different HN discussion I was shocked how popular TV still is across all demographics, but local content was a plummeting percentage of the total.
Seems like a good argument that being tech-forward provides a multiplier on value versus doing the same old thing, if you believe that these are all just advertising companies.
Where did you get 110 from? I'm seeing 90 for last year.
$110B total revenue for 2017
https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q4_alphabet_earnings_releas...
I'm not the one calling Google an all-advertising company, I'm just saying that if it is, it's by far the biggest.
People don’t mind trying out a new entertainment service by a small startup especially they get a free trial month. If it breaks, so what? The same cannot be said about places they choose to manage their finances or health.
Perhaps it might be more promising for a new partnership by big-names in adjacent industries, such as the Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JP Morgan healthcare initiative, to disrupt these trust-based industries.
If there is a good way to accelerate the process of consumer trust building, it might allow more newcomers a chance of disruptions. It should result in lower costs and economic surpluses for the consumers. ‘How?’ is the 64-million-dollar question.
They don't even sell beverages. Their (mostly) independently-owned bottlers do!
I never agreed with this mentality. Advertisement is Coke's cost center; it's not what they sell. They sell licensing rights to soft drinks: that's what makes them money.
Advertisement is a cost of having a customer facing brand. Should P&G and Unilever be considered advertisement companies?
Absolutely. The value of their businesses are entirely based on the brands that they have built, and those brands are built by advertising. Making food to stuff in the boxes is just a cost of building a successful brand.
Foxconn, Qualcomm, and Samsung make their hardware.
Cognizan and InfoSys develop some of their software too.
I kind of think that if an organization views tech as a competitive advantage and core competency, they are a tech company. E.g. Netflix may be in the business of entertainment, but they are also a tech company. Google may be in the business of selling ads, but they are also a tech company.
Slowly but surely, more and more companies are realising that their digital efforts are just as integral to their business as whatever else it is that they're doing. Every company needs to be a tech company now.
In Australia, Commbank realised this at a very early stage: there's actually very little differentiation between the financial products from bank to bank. Sure, interest rates change here and there but on the whole, everyone is the same. Commbank realised that they can make their internet banking and mobile apps just as much as their core product and their differentiator. People aren't going to stay with their bank because of a debit card, but they will stay the one with the better app with more features. They rolled out a bunch of firsts - peer to peer payments by bumping phones together in 2010, transferring money to others using just their phone number, or 'Cardless Cash' where overnight they updated their network of ATMs to allow withdrawals using their phone app.
Qantas is another example of a company that invests (for better or worse) heavily into their digital products all throughout the customer journey.
Every company needs to be apt at digital because, in one way or another, every company is a tech company. It's the successful ones that realise this and use it to their advantage.
I've heard this mantra for some years now (in various forms, eg "all companies are tech companies, or dying ones"), I wonder where it stems from.
I think the point of the GP is to say that Netflix "isn't a technology company", but they don't parade around saying that. Netflix uses technology and innovation to the fullest as the means to accomplish the ends of delivering great entertainment value at a low cost.
I don't think it's as much about the "definition game" as about the message that is conveyed.
You simply cannot exist if you are not a tech company due to the complexity of the regulations.
Better to say "software ate the world, but netflix has eaten the software" by almost singlehandedly wiping all its upstart competitors from "indigenous tech companies."
To some extend, Netflix deserve some credit for tech. A non-dotcom running tier one CDN is not a small deal.
Yet, they are still a small fish "in the bigger picture of things" though.
knowing multiple people from netflix; this is literally a very-uninformed comment...
Much of what you even KNOW about cloud-computing, spot markets, streaming, CDNs, etc was pioneered by netflix.
They are secretive, but innovative as heck. So, your comment is a big NOPE.
Let's not overstate the case. Much of this was around before (sometimes long before) Netflix's digital rise.
I like to respond that Netflix isn't a tech company, either—they're in the business of delivering entertainment. Their position and reputation allows them to build a stronger engineering culture, but their technology still is subservient to their non-tech business goals. While "software is eating the world" has been quoted to the point of being a cliché, the organizations that recognize software as a competitive differentiator—rather than merely a cost center—definitely have an edge against their tech-averse competitors.