- who may well just sell out to Facebook again after a couple of years[1]
[1] No shade - if Facebook offered me $billions for my user generated content site, I'd be at the bank quicker than you could imagine but I wouldn't expect anyone to trust me with user content again.
Brian Acton who sold Facebook his WhatsApp would like a word.
Ask him why he walked away from his final billion (with a b) dollar payment.
In a long piece by Forbes, Mr Acton refers to himself as “a sellout” despite taking what Forbes journalist Parmy Olson described as “perhaps the most expensive moral stand in history”.
After he became fed up by Facebook’s desire to find a way to squeeze personal ads into WhatsApp, he walked away from the company a year before his final tranche of stock grants vested — a common payment method to reward workers with the ability to cash in shares if they stick around.
But he knew what he was doing. The day he left he took a screenshot of the stock price on his way out the door. The decision to leave cost him about $1.17 billion.
I agree that we should try to be more positive. But for every useful startup there are dozens of quibis, juiceros and many others you mostly don't hear about, but would recognize as dead-ends if you paid attention.
So where do you draw the line? When something looks like BS vs. simply unusual/innovative. PG said that most good startup ideas are counterintuitive otherwise they would have been done a long time ago. But there are also a lot of counterintuitive ideas not worth doing.
I'm in finally. This shit is nonsense. It's just the "for you" tab of really awful systems incorrectly guessing and pushing spam on your in a Google news like interface.
Yeah, but it also makes sense to be a cynic, to be honest. We are overloaded with possibilities; there are many more ”amazing, next big thing” apps out there than we could possibly fit in a thousand lives. Plus, in a competition market, the real good things thrive through the criticism. Finally, why would you give a billionaire an easy time? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a socialist, it’s just that there’s really no reason to do it.
I can understand not wanting to interact with a certain company, but I don't get the phone number thing. There used to be books that listed everyone's phone number.
It removes the ability to interact with the service anonymously. With a phone number, they know exactly who you are, and when your data is sold it’ll be at your expense.
Yea but those books just had your name and maybe address. In the current world your number can have your whole life attached, even whether you use a bum gun. It’s not the same
Also signed up. They can have my phone number. What are they going to do with it? Target advertising at me?
To be honest, I'm a bit past caring about companies selling my data. They've built up enough of a profile of me in my 30+ years of being online, I'm not getting away from that. There's a multitude of my namesakes online who are much more interesting and successful than me and I'm pretty well hidden generally.
This sounds interesting enough to me that they can have my phone number. In 10 years time I'll be living in a forest in a cabin, living off the land and staying well offline.
It really seems like the audience is the tech gentry who cheer on Mike and Kevin to conquer a consumer market they all condescend to. The only reason to sign up is to have a savvy opinion about it.
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