Right, but one wonders why the parent commenter is not gleefully commenting about "fake news" on all of these articles: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+buys
This seems to be a notable story and doesn't need nakedly partisan hair-splitting.
Not everyone wants to go to a baseball game where 1% of the fans are constantly getting into screaming matches about the other team sucking. Similarly, I will politely nope out of an online community that won't stop clobbering me with Team Red vs Team Blue debates. Free speech is not the same as "I should be listened to in proportion to how much I talk".
> There was literally nothing wrong with the email
There were at least two things wrong with the email, from my perspective as a guy who's been around plenty of benign bro culture.
1. Explicitly mentioning "sex" as opposed to "relationship" or "dating", and talking about it so casually, sets a very aggressive tone. 20-something guys with lots of hormones will definitely hear that tone and push hard for sex during the trip (the implication is that there will be lots of it, and nobody wants to be left out). Females reading this surely know that they'll receive lots of attention and advances during the trip, whether they want it or not – even if you assume that the guys will be asking for consent, it's still uncomfortable for those who want to be professional and avoid work relationships.
2. "Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife #FML." Implication there is that there are many people on the team that the Travis wants to sleep with. If you're a female subordinate of the CEO whom he speaks with somewhat flirtily, you can infer that he's thinking "FML, I wish I could sleep with her".
barleyworth, I believe the email was written in a humorous way. If it was a serious email, with that sex point in it, then I agree it would have been weird, and wrong.
But the whole email right from the first word to the last was written in a jovial manner with plenty of jokes in it. So I dont feel it was that bad.
I can understand that Travis was trying to create a party atmosphere after all of them worked really hard to get to where they are. Imagine, if you and your colleagues worked day and night for years and then finally you reached a milestone -- you might want to celebrate and have some fun! I think Travis was just trying to setup the jovial atmosphere so that people do not just have a standard corporate event.
Fair point; I will try and avoid using "females" in the future.
FWIW, the main reason I used this phrasing was that I had already used the word "guys", but wanted to steer clear of the analogous word "girls". Using the word "women" seemed like I would be suggesting some sort of age/maturity dichotomy between "guys" and "women", and it seemed to me that "females" didn't have such a connotation.
"Female", either as noun or an adjective, neither denotes nor connotes reproductive capacity, though it may connote reproductive role (though even then, only as an adjective modifying a species or some similar classification, because reproductive roles vary.)
It's use as a noun for a human is seen by some as divisive (compared to an adjective modifying "person") or dehumanizing (compared to "woman or girl"); OTOH, it is seen by others as less awkward than either of those constructions and more accurate when the intebt is not age-specific (thus, making neither "woman" nor "girl" alone appropriate) than any similarly-concise expression.
I have been noticing more and more people using "female" as opposed to "woman". (They never seem to substitute "male" for men.) Thank you for articulating this.
> ... mentioning "sex" as opposed to "relationship" or "dating" ...
Sex is a natural human activity. People fuck all the time. People especially fuck at parties where there's alcohol involved.
> ... even if you assume that the guys will be asking for consent ...
Uh, what? The entire point was to ask for consent. I can't speak to your other hypothesizing about tone, or what 20-something guys might or might not do.
> ... there are many people on the team that the Travis wants to sleep with ...
Not sure where you're getting "many." Regardless, Travis probably wants to sleep with some of his employees, but he's leading by example and not pursuing. Again, I can't speak to your mental gymnastics as to what an employee might infer or not.
> That something can occur has only superficial relation to whether it ought to be to be discussed in a given setting.
Given the setting (an alcohol-filled after-work work party), I fundamentally disagree.
> Your comment reads as if you have little understanding of how women are treated in our culture.
My comment didn't mention women, men, or anything in between, because, hey, men sometimes have sex with men! You'll notice that Travis' email didn't mention women either.
Since I love channeling my inner Scalia, I'm just going to say that, in general, you're doing yourself a disservice by not being a textualist. With that said, I'm not going to be baited into defending a straw man, many years of philosophy trained me well :)
The way women are treated is not a straw man here, it is directly related to why Uber and Kalanick in particular have been under as much scrutiny as they have. I believe what is trying to be explained is that unless you know what it is like for your job to hinge on your decisions regarding sex, and anything sex adjacent (ie. what you wear to work, whether you are flirtatious or not, whether you keep up with 'the boys' after work etc) it would be hard to understand why it is very important that sex and work be kept separate, and why professionalism is important. Many women are threatened by men in the workplace in various way, not the least of which using sex as a hiring/firing decision. When that is the general culture for women in the workplace, this email really reads more as 'if you aren't interested in sex (or being asked for sex by your colleagues), this probably isn't the party for you'. Except missing parties can also mean missing key networking opportunities and thus losing traction in the corporate world.
The next sentence in the article does a better job at illustrating his point: "Conversely, the vast majority of startup option packages end up being worth little to nothing, but nearly none of the employees whose options end up being worthless were instrumental in causing their options to become worthless."
I interpret the point as being: the monetary outcome of a startup for the employee is a function of their individual contribution (which is what I think the author means by being "instrumental"), plus the contribution of the founders and other employees, plus luck. The magnitude of the individual contribution is small relative to the other factors, so it's difficult to say that a successful startup employee "deserves" a windfall and an unsuccessful one doesn't. The lower the correlation between individual contribution and monetary outcome, the less options should matter for motivating early employees.
Well, both Obama and Trump inherited a pretty broken TSA. That doesn't mean we shouldn't pay attention to whether the organization is improving or getting worse.
Generally I doubt that a president deserves credit, positive or negative, for changes in random agencies like the TSA. Like, does Obama really deserve bonus points for us being able to use cell phones during takeoff+landing? But you have to admit that a country-specific ban has Trump written all over it. People are rightly pointing out why it's a misguided policy.
Yeah, that subreddit is terrifying. I'm more afraid of the people in there than any other terrorist group. E.g. another comment on the same thread says very matter-of-factly: "Let's just say by now you should have already bought multiple guns."
Box has a negative P/E, so I'll assume you're talking about P/S here.
You seem to be suggesting that companies within an industry should all have the same price-to-sales multiple. (Or at least they'd "better have" the same multiple. Or else?) This is because, while all the companies have different quantitative and qualitative aspects, the mutual competition "effectively cancels out" those differences when it comes to valuation.
Snark aside, here are things that actually matter for valuing these sorts of companies:
* cost to acquire a customer (Box's S-1 notoriously had sales+marketing which was greater than their revenue)
* customer churn, or relatedly, lifetime value per customer
* subscriber growth
* margins (i.e. storage costs)
Perhaps your conclusion about the relative values of these companies is correct, but the fact that you're not mentioning any of the points above means that it's very difficult to give any credibility to your argument.
Fair points. Though if Dropbox were significantly better at any of the metrics you enumerate, they would've drummed up the media. And, they'd be in a hurry to go public.
But then again, you clearly seem to have a dog in this fight.