That's what I meant by 'ads on its own site' - but I was under the impression that Facebook generated most revenue from selling data/ads for display elsewhere (as well as on Facebook.com itself, and other subsidiaries). Perhaps I was wrong about that? Quick search shows up 'audience network', but I'm not sure to what extent that's what I was thinking of.
Nope, for the most part all the ads that Facebook serves are for facebook owned sites and properties. They don't sell data, or have general ad placements on 3rd party websites.
Series B seems to be the sweet spot to me if you would like to avoid working at a FAANG but want similar EV in your comp package, assuming you are decently good at guessing winners.
At that point the company is meaningfully de-risked but the equity offers are still pretty good for mid-career folks that you end up with millions in a good exit.
I've come to prefer post-Series A startups. In my experience Series B tended to be the moment where the startup beings to establish "controls" and bureaucracy for things. It is when you start setting OKRs, it is when you start having 2 or more tiers of mid-management and "policy documents" start flying around.
For me, post Series A is the sweet spot when there are exciting problems to solve and you still have good leeway to make things happen without too much red tape.
I'm a bit confused reading this. Is the lawsuit that users signing up for e.g. Venmo didn't know that they were also giving their transaction history/whatever to Venmo, or that Plaid was then taking the data passed to Venmo and reselling to, I don't know, a hedge fund?
If it's the former -- I certainly think services need to clearly state what/why/how they are using the data, but it's on the services (like Venmo) and not Plaid.
I once used a very dumb feature flag set up to get around a rule an Apple reviewer told us were breaking, just for review period. The supposed rule violation was around for a year and no one had flagged it except for this one reviewer, and they were clearly interpreting the policy wrong. Easier to make a flag to appease then try and work up the management review chain.
This wasn't malware or anything like that, but goes to show limits of automated review.
That's so great--when you do 100 submissions, you're sure to get some really bad reviewer who is just trying to improve their metrics. We had to take out a bunch of functionality to get it approved... didn't want to spend time fighting up the chain and the upper folks don't even care.
Almost had to do this too. Luckily the part of the app that was in violation was just a web view and the plan was to just hide that part of the page until after it went live. And with OTA updates apps can get a surprisingly large amount around the review process. Although you risk being banned if they catch you!
It doesn't seem like there's a single reviewer involved. Whenever we've encountered this behavior with reviewers blocking, simply resubmitting seems to "fix" the issue.
It's just wild to me that HN commenters are predominantly starting the timeline at her resignation ultimatum, and not what prompted it.
She was working on a known-to-all controversial research project, which was asked to be retracted via an anonymous feedback doc delivered via HR! That is a very screwed up thing to do. All reactions from her from that to me are totally justified.
I'd wager the list of folks who:
-hold a meaningful enough short position for a potential attack to be worth, say $500k or more (not a rando robinhood trader with a $200 put)
-are not an existing bank or long term day trader
is already quite small, and could be quickly prioritized based on how anomalous the trade was, other flags (foreign national, software engineering babckground). I suspect the SEC could get to a workable list of 50 prime suspects reasonably easily.
There are people on /r/wallstreetbets who are blowing up 100k accounts on TSLA puts on Robinhood. On the front page of /r/wsb right now the 3rd highest post is someone who has lost 30k gambling on TSLA.
Even betting 20k would have probably netted you more than what was gained via BTC and you would still be indistinguishable from RH day traders.
I loved Sprig. I used to use them as my example of a favorite product when asked in interviewed. Problem: I am hungry right now and can't/don't want to cook. Solution: As the founder notes, once signed in, it was literally three taps to get food to my door really quick. Also the design was beautiful.
Doordash, UberEats, et. al have certainly (glactically) widened the variety of food I could order, but I always find myself suffering from choice anxiety when I open those up. Sprig gave me a protein and veggie I could order without thinking too hard.
I get why the food delivery model doesn't work well in the US for anyone, and I did notice Sprig's decline in food quality, but I am still sad the company is gone.
I worked for a company that ordered Sprig everyday for lunch for a few months. It was pretty good at first, but at the time they only had something like 5-10 meals, and pretty much everyone grew tired of it within a couple months.
I realize that's a different use-case than occasionally wanting a relatively healthy meal, but wanted to add my experience.
>I always find myself suffering from choice anxiety when I open those up
This whole analysis-paralysis trend seems to be a thing not just in food delivery, but Netflix et al as well. I've lost count of the number of times I've kept scrolling through Netflix with a bunch of "okay" options at the back of my head, but searching for something better. Ditto for DoorDash.
I wonder how well an "I'm feeling lucky" button would do on a food delivery platform.
When you don't see something that's a definite "yes" after a couple minutes on Netflix, why not just stop looking? And if this happens often, why not just drop Netflix altogether? Curious about what proportion of the time Netflix is just a time pass at best. I can count the number of shows which I would recommend to a younger me who is deciding whether to watch those shows on one hand.
If you use Netflix that way, it effectively becomes a push technology.
I hate push technology, clear back to Pointcast.
The other thing that I hate about Netflix is that even when you search for a specific title, and they don't have it, they won't simply tell you that they don't have it. What they will do is bury you in listings of all their shows that have the most vague correlation to the title you actually searched for, even using just parts of random keywords.
Example: I just searched for "Dresden files". It proudly displayed "The Dresden Files" title, followed by mostly unrelated crap. Roswell? Wynonna Earp? The Greatest Events of World War II? Are you kidding me?
For the decision paralysis thing it helps to start a timer and force yourself to come to a decision by then. Or else come up with 2 or 3 decent options and then flip a coin/roll a die for the final decision.
> We finally got some progress on margins, but it meant degrading the product: food is fickle.
> Less money in, worse food out.
I tried Sprig a few times and really found the food quality so underwhelming that I never became a repeat customer. Maybe I caught them during this period.
As someone who as implemented similar CC blockers before: people who forget to cancel leave after one month, leave a bad reviews which affect future growth, and make churn numbers bad. I do not want many of those people, and will both send multiple reminders that they will be charged and refund them no questions asked.
But for any business that requires some amount of human support for users, it can be much easier to convert 15 out of 100 signups than out of 1000.
Maybe just a little before Casper was founded, I bought a memory foam mattress off of Amazon that was well-reviewed and could be delivered with Prime. It's been a great mattress. That's still an option today -- and at a few hundred dollars cheaper than the main DTCs, I'm not quite sure where they can really provide a ton of additional value.
Yeah I got an "egg crate" mattress topper off of Amazon and had to let that thing sit in my garage for a week before it didn't reek. I can only wonder how much it off gassed after that, but my bedroom has decent ventilation so hopefully I didn't breathe in too many carcinogens.
