Stanford has been awarding EE Ph.D.s since 1919, and Stanford's prestige as an engineering institution didn't really begin until after Terman became Dean in the 1940s and began pulling in substantial government research grants.
I still agree with cfield here. There were, say 1% of the population with master degrees, and 0.2% with a Ph.D.
50 years later, there are maybe 5% of the population with master degrees, and 1% with a Ph.D.
Numbers are invented, but something like that could prove that H&P's degrees were comparable to today's Ph.Ds.
My sense is that, by definition, evidence of ways the future will be different than the present is always weak, particularly if the evidence you're looking at is data.
In that case, no one can make this guarantee. The author's home might be infiltrated, or the might be threatened with death in order to force the information.
Suppose this were to go to court. If there are multiple interpretations for a phrase, and one interpretation is not realizable (due to almost tautological reasons), then the courts are very unlikely to use that definition. Instead, they will likely say there were implicit qualifiers like "to within the limits of what it allowed by the law" and "unless believably threatened with the loss of life, limb, home, or similar serious physical threat" or "following information security principles appropriate for the expected threat model of an civil/economics topic".
This is one potential outcome of AngelList syndicates[0], which is I think one reason they have been vocal[1] about the SEC's implementing regulations of the securities reforms (including crowd-funding) that Congress called for in the 2012 JOBS Act.
I think it's simply that it's harder to find buyers for that kind of stock. And finding buyers for stock in a high risk enterprise is already a pretty difficult task.
Absent an alternative structure, default corporate laws provide for the directors of a company with only one class of common stock to be elected by majority vote of the stockholders.
However, there are all sorts of alternative structures that can alter this default. For example, it is common in a VC-backed company that preferred stockholders are given the right to designate a specified number of board members. The right is usually laid out in the company's certificate of incorporation or a voting agreement among the stockholders.
Do they get paid by shares or salary? I mean is it a viable alternative to having a "job"? I see many people around sitting on multiple boards of companies.
If you are a investor in the company you usally don't get paid, just your trip expenses.
If you are an external member, somebody strategic to the company, you get paid either by meeting or some shares. Usually all board members in public companies are paid with cash.
I don't think this has ever been a throwaway term during an acquisition in cases where the investors proceeds were higher under their liquidation preference rights than they would have been under their pro rata stockholder rights.
Thinking back over all such deals I worked on as a startup attorney, I can't think of a single one where the liquidation preferences were not asserted by the preferred stockholders (i.e., investors).
The selling owners generally view it as a buyer's problem to figure out retention, which is usually accomplished by the buyer making equity grants to the team that vest over time following the acquisition.
Sellers sometimes have a similar incentive issue -- i.e., they need to incentivize a team whose equity will be worthless in an acquisition. This is often accomplished by some form of "management incentive plan" which can have all sorts of structures. But the gist is typically to set aside some of the acquisition proceeds for distribution to key employees or management.
My experience is in line with yours - investors always assert liq pref when they can, have never seen them give much on it. I've seen preferred throw common a few cents on the share, but usually it's zero.
Yes it has. Their search result pages are crap lately, overcomplicated with ads everywhere; it's the same quality level as Yahoo circa 2002. Google is in decline; a slow decline perhaps, but it's happening.
And Google is orders of magnitude bigger by every reasonable measure than NASA both today and at the height of the Apollo programme. There are a dozen of other organizations we could point to (e.g. the largest oil or mining companies) which demonstrate that the private sector can organize on this scale quite well, thank you.
Google doesn't have products that are expected to operate perfectly 15 years from now in outer space. Google's products can survive significant defects, have bug fix turnaround times measured in minutes, and worst case, can take some downtime without too much harm.
When you talk about oil and mining companies, you mention the same ones that suffer dozens of spills, contamination incidents, and accidents? Or is there some sort of hypothetical perfect oil company with no accidents whatsoever?
I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.
> And yet the latest football game is broadcast worldwide flawlessly.
I dunno, I've often seen flaws in the broadcast of the latest football game. I think it would be more accurate to say "the latest football game is usually broadcast worldwide with flaws that are within the tolerances viewers are willing to accept", but then, people rarely die because of broadcast glitches in football games, so the tolerances there may be fairly lenient.
Because it's the exact same rehearsed process that's performed for years at a time on hardware and software that is considerably safer than off-the-shelf computer hardware.
How do you reckon? iirc, close to half a million people worked on Apollo; that's much bigger than Google. I don't think there are any private sector organizations significantly bigger than that figure?
"half a million people worked at Apollo" -- that number included contractors as well, a word which has slightly different meaning within government. It'd be as if we included key divisions of Intel and Cisco inside of Google's numbers.
I would argue that Google does a lot of things poorly, which turn out to not be a big deal in the sector they are in but would certainly be a problem in aerospace. This isn't a knock on Google, the requirements are just different.
Indeed, she credits your blog post for giving her "confidence that someone else had done it before" (and noting that your situation "was way worse")!
I'm glad you both took time to share your stories. There are so many factors, known and unknown, that influence these kinds of outcomes. But, as pg has written [0], the one constant is simply ... DON'T GIVE UP!
Yeah--not very YC of them to discourage me. But then again, I didn't seem like I was YC material at the moment they talked to me. I'm glad PB and my interview team took a chance on me though, I'm still going strong!!
Given the broad geographic footprint of the HN community, I'm curious what folks here think about how much of a role that a tolerance of failure plays in Silicon Valley's track record of supporting commercial innovation.
I don't know if others agree (and it's no doubt an over-generalization), but my intuition is that commercial failure lacks the stigma in Silicon Valley that it does in most other places. Much ink has been spilled on the topic and some have even suggested that Silicon Valley has a "Failure Fetish".[1]
It seems popular to trace the roots of this and other cultural features of Northern California (e.g., 60s counterculture) to the Gold Rush of 1849. But perhaps it simply another artifact of startup density that Sam suggests is so critical?
Assuming Wikipedia can be believed:
Hewlett - 1939 Stanford "degree of Electrical Engineer"
Packard - 1938 Stanford "master's degree in Electrical Engineering"