WisNorCan

Agree. We have seen this before.

What if someone reverse engineered Twitter's services and built a separate client and tried to monetize it. What would Twitter do?

What if someone reverse engineered Reddit's services and built a separate client and tried to monetize it. What would Reddit do?

What if someone reverse engineered Instagram's services and built a separate client and tried to monetize it. What would Instagram do?

It is interesting to see that employees of Convoy aren't saying bad things about the CEO. But people on the outside who don't know the CEO are saying bad things.

Usually it is the reverse.

They got caught in the same thing that happened to Flexport and others in the freight industry.

Price per shipment cratered -> Revenue cratered. (They make a % of each shipment) -> Losses spiked up. (Because they had fixed cost)

Flexport had a burn run rate of $600M a year. Convoy had less burn but also less in the bank.

https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/flexport-revenue-dr...

Not clear that slander is in play here. Neo used a framing that made themselves look better and others look worse. YC refuted it. I am assuming YC has the receipts for broader insinuations.

To be clear these are not random people inside the respective organizations. These are the CEOs of the organizations.

I trust that they had the judgment to decide that they needed to defend their reputation.

As I understand it, the beef is that Neo compared themselves to YC claiming to be a better incubator because they have comparatively more mentors.

YCs contention is that the number of mentors on the website is not the right way to compare. For example, the YC mentors are working full time at YC helping startups while Neo’s mentors have full time jobs elsewhere and only spend a % of their time mentoring startups.

So the contention is that Neo is directly calling out YC and making dishonest comparisons.

There are other things as well about the ethics and behavior of the Neo founder, Ali Partovi, but it is only hinted at. Not explicitly stated with examples backing up any claims.

Steve Jobs hired John Sculley III. And then came back to rebuild the company.

This is the scariest part of the whole article “during a presentation they said took months to prepare.”

This sounds like what I would expect in the federal government or IBM. Not a fast growing startup changing the world.

I hope Ryan can change this part of the culture or they are dead.

Don't trust the company. Trust the business model.

Eventually a company with great intentions will be dragged to do terrible things if it required to serve their business model.

Google will ruin their user experience (e.g. YouTube, Google) and push the boundary on user privacy in the interest of more clicks & higher CPM.

Oracle is one of those companies like Microsoft which many in the tech industry wrote off years ago.

Neither one qualified for the illustrious FAANG acronym.

Ideally, when these things happen people would examine their blindspots.

“Immigration support: We will set the termination date for March 1, 2023, giving those with visa applications (and a desire to stay in the US) as much time as possible to find a new job”

Every company should do this to help employees on H1B that are laid off.

The standard terms are one of the horrific things about US immigration policy; suddenly uprooting families including kids attending school in the US.

The timing is interesting.

The job market has finally softened. Employers have been waiting for a moment to kill off the WFH movement.

Expect other companies to follow suit.

Is your take that Microsoft should offer this for free? Or if they are not willing to do it for free, Microsoft should cancel this service and we should wait for Apache or someone else to offer the service?

Or something else ?

It depends on what the goal of the exercise is.

There are substantially fewer CEOs relative to SWEs. If your goal is to help the most impoverished, you are better off reallocating salary from SWEs than CEOs.

You might be surprised. I suspect people will be quick to identify the problem with CEO pay but not use the same logic to identify the problem with SWE pay.

If you feel like your salary is too high compared to Cambodian workers, why don’t you do something about it? For example, donate 50% of it to a charity in Cambodia helping poor people?

I find these articles lacking any nuance.

“CEOs pandemic greed grab has sparked outrage among Americans across the political spectrum”

Guess what the wage gap is between a software engineer in the US and the average worker in Cambodia? About 100x. The average salary in Cambodia is about $2000 per year.

Is that wrong? Are engineers too greedy? No. Supply & demand for specific skills drive the rates in each market.

* https://ips-cambodia.com/cambodia-average-salaries-2022/

And all companies that focus on selling to other startups. Like Brex. They were the first to pop during the dot com bust.

So far. We are early in the cycle. Hiring freezes and layoffs are just starting.

If this keeps on for multiple years (like the dot com bust) then it will get very painful.

I am fairly sure Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk would have failed this test. Are you better off having them at your company or not?

That is true. But you would expect that they would have found something really substantive to show after 25 years of investing in technology.

I am not sure what the lesson is. But something seems to have gone really wrong for Netflix. Not just on the content side, but also with their technology investments.

The most perplexing thing about Netflix is that even though they have a reputation for hiring the best, I can’t think of a single way that the experience is better than Disney, HBO or Apple TV.

And this is after 25 years of investing in technology.