I read about it on one of the other commenters' links and immediately thought that somewhere, a product manager was told to "move fast and break things" and "get it launched next month no matter what".
2,479 karma · joined April 24, 2014
Neither Mobike nor Ofo were installable on my Xiaomi ("not available in your market" - maybe they should have unlocked the app before the press release!), so I went with the "local" option of Obike (actually a HK outfit).
The interesting part were rules clearly designed to curb certain undesirable behaviour. You get docked points for things like parking the bike somewhere private, and losing half your initial points increases the 15 minute rate from $0.5 to $50. You gain points for rides and reporting broken or missing bikes.
The first 7 bike locations I checked had no bikes (including 2 locations sandwiched between 4 universities). I reported the last 5 and heard nothing from customer service (also, did not earn any points). I decided to try clusters instead and lo and behold, finally some bikes. The rest worked fine as expected, presumably because it does not involve humans, although my parked bike had moved 137m when I checked the map 5 minutes later - clearly there are teething tracking issues.
It seems that people are taking the bikes home and not getting penalised for it, perhaps due to a desire for higher usage numbers for investors. Absent customer service also indicates a swamped team.
Someone on Facebook pointed out that the Ofo bikes use a number code which does not change, and some users claimed to have taken the Ofo home after their first ride and used it for free thereafter.
Still, this is a great idea which works relatively well. I wish the best to these companies.
[1] http://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2080837/chinas-m...
I remember a famous fund launch recently and I was about to pitch them but then read up the main partner's comment history and realised his demonstrated character and worldview did not match the (excellent) marketing. That was enough to put me off even just getting in touch. Being upfront that you play like everybody else might be a better strategy (prisoner's dilemma version: "like all the other funds, we assume defect-defect; we won't try and get you to cooperate so we can defect quietly"). In other words a standard negotiation with both sides having written in guarantees to protect themselves from worst case scenarios.
On 2), every investor claims they will be hands off and trust owner-operators. However, not only is this rarely the case in practice (why else are board seats so important?), many funds explicitly argue synergy as a competitive advantage with their limited partners and the community. E.g. they get you the C-levels you're missing, an experienced marketing and finance team from their network, help you find clients, investors... and if things go badly, they eject you and put in one of their turnaround names. How can you know ahead of time? You can't, so you assume a defector. As for Buffett, he did step in to run Salomon Brothers when things went south.
However, to paraphrase something I read from a sailor, "every regulation in the Navy is written in the blood of your predecessors". If you do 10 deals, one might wipe out any upside from the other 9, even if you got more upside by negotiating a better valuation, and having a faster turnaround and lower cost of doing business. And of course, if a buyer got the reputation of not doing due diligence, it would attract all the problematic companies.
There is a reason behind every "annoying" stage, and those reasons collectively explain why the entire industry is made of buyers that follow those stages.
Since he runs 10 businesses, it is probable that the author has other ways of doing the work. He will keep track of most of the promising names in his industry, he will have a network of insiders to keep him appraised of the real story in those companies (although never officially), and he will know when the timing is ripe. His good relationship with his existing bankers means financing will be quick and standardised already, his back office experienced and streamlined. His experience tells him how you can play with what numbers to present a rosier picture than the reality, as well as how much to offer to get a founder to come to a quick decision. Unless he decides to go buy palm oil crushing plants in Indonesia, it might work out quite well.
You could learn to free dive in a couple of weeks and use your capacity for breath holding to get yourself on most countries' national team (doubt that would cut it for the US team, but you could win some regional meets). Being a national athlete confers decent status, more so if you pick up a medal.
From a quick Google for an example, the current NZ and 4th global women's record for women is 7 minutes 45 in static apnea [1], and she easily beat the men's champion, so 8 minutes would presumably be very good. I'm basing the mapping from "apnea capability" to "free diving capability" off what a free diving friend told me.
(I don't disagree with the rest of your point.)
[1] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&obje...
https://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Warfare-Secrets-Almost-Forgo... - Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten: A Personal Story of Medical Testing of Army Volunteers, by James S. Ketchum MD
Then, if an individual driver does make more than the threshold, he'd also lose his GST exemption. This would be a fair and correct application of the existing legislation that takes into account that drivers are self-employed and that Uber is a large company.
I like that Australia is attempting to maintain the rule of law, but Uber has a point: if they are to be treated like taxis they ought to have all the privileges of taxis, including street pickups.
This particular solution sounds more like the government wants a certain outcome and is bending the rules to achieve it, which is in the long term damaging to the rule of law.
If the issue is one of implementation (such as the government being technically incapable or legally barred from doing a simple SQL query to determine revenue per driver in a financial year) then they should outright say so.
> Our station also became deeply involved in what we called “active measures,” which essentially involved dirty tricks and disinformation campaigns. One of the most aggressive campaigns was related to the emerging postcolonial nations of Africa, where the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a struggle for influence. We in the KGB station in New York did everything we could to stir up trouble for the American side.
> One of our dirty tricks involved a nasty letter-writing campaign against African diplomats at the United Nations—an idea cooked up by KGB headquarters in Moscow and approved by the Communist Party Central Committee. Our KGB staff, using new typewriters and wearing gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, typed up hundreds of anonymous hate letters and sent them to dozens of African missions. The letters, purportedly from white supremacists as well as average Americans, were filled with virulent racist diatribes. The African diplomats publicized some of the letters as examples of the racism still rampant in America, and members of the American and foreign press corps quoted from them. I and other KGB officers working as correspondents in the United States reported extensively on this rabidly antiblack letter-writing campaign. I lost no sleep over such dirty tricks, figuring they were just another weapon in the cold war.
> Our active measures campaign did not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or color: we went after everybody. Attempting to show that America was inhospitable to Jews, we wrote anti-Semitic letters to American Jewish leaders. My fellow officers paid American agents to paint swastikas on synagogues in New York and Washington. Our New York station even hired people to desecrate Jewish cemeteries. I, of course, beamed back reports of these misdeeds to my listeners in Moscow, who—tuning in to my broadcasts—no doubt thanked the Lord or Comrade Lenin that they had been born in a socialist paradise, and not in a hotbed of racial tension like the United States of America. [...] I knew our propaganda was exaggerating the extent of racism in America, yet I also saw firsthand the blatant discrimination against blacks. Again, I had no qualms about stirring up as much trouble as possible for the U.S. government. It was all part of the job.
[1] "Spymaster: My Thirty-two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West" - Oleg Kalugin - https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Esp...
Having spent some time in the industry, I disagree, you're always trying to maintain or increase AUM. Funds constantly sell to existing and future limited partners (investors). Internal prop trading desks sell to management in order to keep their allocated VaR and to risk for similar reasons. Traders themselves sell to their boss and peers. VCs sell their top quartile-ness. All of the above sell to their junior staff to keep them around.
The thing is you don't know if you are good or lucky until many years into your career and someone has to put up the capital until then. Even the top funds with great track records can one day stop producing results, at which point people abandon ship.
> On a cold and rainy February afternoon in 1947, one year before the Games Center was established, First Secretary H. M. Sichel of the British Embassy in Washington telephoned Loy Henderson, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and African Affairs. He had two messages from the Foreign Office which were "rather important." They were of a sort that normally should be delivered by the British Ambassador direct to the Secretary of State, George Marshall, but since General Marshall had already left the office for the weekend perhaps, Sichel suggested he could drop off the notes, have a "brief" chat about them, and allow Mr. Henderson a weekend of reflection on them before briefing the Secretary prior to meeting the British Ambassador on Monday morning.
> Sichel arrived as State Department employees, after a comparatively dull week, were donning their raincoats and galoshes to take off for an indoor weekend. Loy Henderson, who habitually worked until eight or nine o'clock even on Fridays, had sent off all his secretaries and was alone in the office. The scene was the one of utter calm that skillful dramatists often establish to provide the psychological setting for a shattering announcement. The announcement, which Mr. Sichel delivered in the course of his "brief chat," was certainly shattering.
> The two messages were official notification that the Pax Britannica, which had kept order in much of the world for over a century, was at an end. Specifically, His Majesty's Government could no longer afford the $50,000,000 or so that was required to support the resistance of the Greek and Turkish Governments to Communist aggression either, as in the first case, by guerrilla warfare or, in the second, by direct military action of the Soviet Union. Either the United States Government would fill the gap, or it would go unfilled - or it would be left to the Russians.
[...]
> With the British announcement, delivered so calmly by Mr. Sichel, the United States was given the choice of becoming an active world power - an "on-the-ground" world power, as a lecturer at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute was later to put it - or seeing the Soviets become a more menacing feature of world politics than Nazi Germany could ever have been. Mr. Sichel said, "I hope I haven't spoiled your weekend."
- The Game of Nations, Miles Copeland (https://www.amazon.com/Game-Nations-Amorality-Power-Politics...)
http://www.pmo.gov.sg/newsroom/pm-lee-hsien-loongs-interview...
In other words much of today's target market did not see Bond wear a Rolex in cinemas, and it is a testimony to the strength of Rolex's brand that Omega's own product placement has been hijacked in people's minds.
The best example is that the Swiss used to have accuracy contests which they had to cancel after Seiko systematically bested everybody else for several years (easily Googleable e.g. [1]). Even in the quartz world, the current best is still Japanese with the (comparatively cheap!) $1,000 Citizen Chronomaster, the most accurate non-atomic-sync watch. And your average $80 G-Shock now has the atomic sync functionality.
How about extremes? Whilst everybody else was messing about with fragile and expensive helium valves to deal with coming back up from high pressures required by professional divers, such as those repairing oil rigs, Seiko put together an R&D team and after 8 years of research came up with a design that went deeper with no valve, the 6159 aka "tuna can" [2]. Of course divers now use a dive computer, but if you need a backup the Darth Tuna is very good indeed.
Want some real "handmade" artisanal creds, some ties to history? How about hand painted laquer dials using centuries old traditional methods (see any "urushi" model) or the extreme attention to detail in the Credor line (e.g. [3]).
So the watch world is fragmented into Seiko lovers and haters, the former seeing value in the engineering and artisanship and the latter seeing a lack of brand equity and disposable income signalling that is more easily found in Switzerland (or rather, on what is badged as made in Switzerland, see [4]).
Maintenance costs are not per se an indication of low quality. For example, Seiko's Hi-Beat movements (which "beat", or move the seconds hand, many more times per second than average, generating the illusion of smoother motion) have an exceptionally strong spring and need more frequent servicing as a result of the extra work done by the movement, whereas a $10 vintage HMT watch from the 1970s beating 5x slower might just need its first oiling which you could do yourself.
[1] http://watchesbysjx.com/2013/06/explaining-seikos-legendary-...
[2] http://wornandwound.com/a-look-at-seikos-early-divers/ - not a great source admittedly but if I find better I'll update the link.
[3] https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/with-the-seiko-eichi-ii-ve...
[4] https://www.indy100.com/article/cheese-one-million-pound-wat...
Debatable, as it is a sports watch (arguably "the" sports watch). Wearing a sports watch with black tie suggests a middle class New Worlder. I happen to like these values (meritocracy, individual rights, equality of all before the law) much more than the alternative so see it as a positive signal. Also, (see [1]) signals ought to be true or the effect will be very negative, since nobody likes a fake, so better the sub with the "tuxedo" if that's "who you are".
The core value of a Rolex over other brands is two fold.
First, the company is ensuring that the value of the watches will never drop through limiting grey market availability and limiting supply generally even in the face of increasing global demand (people now complain about months-long waiting lists for special editions). As you point out this does make it a sort of global gold standard in terms of maintaining value and fungibility.
Second, it shrewdly invests in multi-generational, tightly integrated marketing to maintain the image of the brand in the global lower and middle classes' mind as "the" luxury watch, as well as in the target market (the GP piece is an example).
AFAIK it is the only brand that does it so thoroughly; Patek has similar operations (including bidding on its own vintage stuff, which even involved setting up a museum, to drive prices higher) but targeted at the aspirational upper middle class only [2], and the other brands are considerably less well recognised or not perceived as expensive. This investment in marketing builds "signal equity" for Rolex wearers in that everybody will see it, not just the readers of Hodinkee.
Which is why I disagree with you that:
> it doesn't scream "expensive"
To close on a humorous note: http://www.gq.com/story/male-engagement-ring-rolex
(I would, personally, blow my $50k on the new Laurent Ferrier Montre Ecole. /signalling)
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-would-anyone-buy-a-Rolex-watch/ans...
[2] http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_f...
I'd say the number of founders who can truly aspire to get funded by the "Big Boys" (and have the choice you talk about) is relatively small - for example my lack of connections in the US precludes me from raising from them because I can't get a proper warm intro. You need to align a lot of stars.
That being said, I think he was referring to the complexity of multi-note cap tables (and time and mental effort required to deal with their preferred stock classes etc. vs 5 equivalent other deals using a vanilla structure) rather than the billionaires outbidding him. He talks more about it in another post [1].
Having been on a desk that traded exotics I very much agree that (unnecessary) complication in financial products is not a good thing, and is usually associated with people hoping you'll slip up.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Y-Combinator-What-are-the-pros-and-con...
I've followed Jason Lemkin for about a year (mostly on Quora) and he seems like a former successful SaaS entrepreneur trying to figure out the rules of SaaS as a VC (he also organises a major conference), and to share his experience with the world at large. A lot of the stuff he writes is not obvious to me and clearly based on lessons learnt the hard way.
Writing is hard and writing about a fuzzy subject (there are no "rules of business" beyond very broad generalisations) is even harder, especially when the opinions expressed are not going to be much appreciated by the target audience.
He happens to have picked the list format to note down his thoughts of the day. This is very different from clickbait spam.
Why did Google beat all the search directories? The latter used keywords on pages to figure out relevance, which was easily gamed by sites putting up thousands of keywords. Google weighed (still weighs) both the number of links and the quality of each referrer. The SEO vs search relevance war continues to this day, but PageRank gives Google a long term advantage.
The attractiveness of an investment has many variables with the two most important team quality and traction. Many VCs are on record saying they'll fund a pre-product company if the team is worth it.
If a number of high quality referrers are recommending the team, then the team quality variable might override the others. The hype's substance here was the referrer quality.
The anecdote that stayed with me was the guy who liked to show off the relative safety of liquid VX (yes, the nerve agent) to new arrivals by dipping his finger in it then rinsing it with water. Different times.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Warfare-Secrets-Almost-Forgo... - Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten: A Personal Story of Medical Testing of Army Volunteers, by James S. Ketchum MD
I disagree entirely. In fact I would claim that the movie fails precisely because it deviates from the novel in exactly the way that makes the novel great.
Spoilers follow.
The whole point of Ender's Game as a novel is the way it leads you into a comfortable, safe zone. You think you're just reading another "child overcomes tough conditions, grows as an individual and succeeds at hard task" novel a la Heinlein. Oh no. Just when you are comfortable, when you've been set up to think, ah, at last, the war, let's watch him think circles around the bugs with his well trained superior brain... you get slapped in the face so hard with the plot twist it leaves you reeling and then the book ends and you can't stop thinking about it for weeks.
In the movie, the plot twist is pretty much revealed near the beginning. My memory is fuzzy but I remember Harrison Ford communicating with the army and exchanging status updates as the point where I "deduced" that they were at war and not travelling to it. It was very important that the novel be entirely from Ender's point of view as the military conspired to create the illusion that he was training, because the illusion was key to his being able to make the final decision of the war.
To reveal that the war was actually ongoing, and that there was no waiting time, was a major early spoiler, perhaps to allow the audience to digest the idea, trading the comfort of an hour and a bit of "training" for the tension of knowing something Ender doesn't (that it's not a game). This tension has much less of an emotional impact on the viewer than surprise would have had, especially since it is one of the most overused plot devices both in Hollywood and in print.
So you are left with (very) nice visuals, fairly good acting from heavyweights, and a typical Hollywood plot. A summer movie. So disappointing.
The amount of stress that has gone from my life was totally worth the 10% discount.
> Though not explicitly said at that time, it was made clear in other contexts during my two years in the West Wing in the highest level meetings that the pretext for this mentality was the claim that in a Cold War era when communications were essentially instantaneous, the vast majority of "the enemy's" - then the Soviet Union's - "intelligence" was also based on open press and media sources, so the most efficient way to lie to the Soviets was to lie in the U.S. and allied media, which meant the American public believing the lies was considered a kind of 'collateral damage.' (Barbara Honegger)
However the real value in the book for me was twofold: first, some insight into the way PRC folks think (some mistake it for a bad translation or criticise the way the characters are thinking as "unrealistic" - I would say instead it's often very Chinese); second, this is one of few books depicting information warfare.
On the first I have not much more to say. I've lived in Asia for a while so I recognise some patterns, but I don't speak Mandarin. My understanding of PRC folks is purely based on my interaction with my friends there. Nevertheless based on this I would say that a lot of the ways in which the characters' thinking differs from that of say, those in a Vernon Vinge novel are typically Chinese. In the same vein there is the hilarious dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao although it's hard to pick up a subtitled version (it airs on one of the Australian channels occasionally).
Information warfare is rarely discussed intelligently here for some reason (probably because it is used systematically by a variety of groups that frequent HN and try to minimise its existence and impact, because "those who know stay quiet" and because it is easier to defend from manipulation if the manipulator does not understand you well).
In Liu's books, particularly the first and a little bit in Death's End, it consists of modifying the culture of the enemy so that it is more easily defeated. This is an art as old as humanity; the first formal reference to it in the modern era might be the Potemkin village, and a good introductory book on the Soviet flavour ("Active Measures") is Gen. Oleg Kalugin's biography [1] published after he defected. If you speak French, both books by the anonymous "Lt Col X" [2] (most likely to be a French intelligence officer) are also worth a read.
Taken together with the fact that the book was very successful in China (which is impossible without at least tacit government approval), it presents a possible explanation for the Great Firewall.
In the book, a key plot point is that everything you do is known instantly by the enemy - just like the NSA was shown to be able to do by Snowden. Thus, humans need to learn to hide their actions, letting just enough information leak to other humans for coordination but without tipping their hand to the very smart, omniscient, but less able to lie Trisolarians. Considering the Chinese have a reputation for speaking in parables ("riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" - applicable to the Russians originally but I heard it many times applied to the PRC) there is a direct parallel with a facet of how the authorities and some of the population might view the current top superpower.
In short I guarantee it will be unlike anything you've read this year.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Esp...
[2] http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-... - https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-manipulation-2e-revue-au...
It's possible to write a novel where the setting, and the story lead to dark places, and finish badly for the heroes, but without the heroes giving up on life or thinking. There are many instances in history of people standing their ground in hopeless circumstances.
In fiction, I think the best depiction of what I mean might be Letters from Iwo Jima (the movie, not the actual letters which are relatively sparse). Kuribayashi's character goes through hell consciously but his extraordinary resistance - down to refusing to banzai charge as is customary in those situations and instead patiently drawing out the fight to maximise enemy casualties, drawing out the pain for himself and his troops in the process - is a phenomenal description of character. It is specifically in Eastwood's depiction that this comes through although the real Kuribayashi was every bit the depicted one. So I do not consider the movie or the book "bleak" but incredibly awe-inspiring despite its content and ending for the protagonist.
Meanwhile, the main character in Ubik and most of PKD's novels is continuously failing to have any agency, thwarted by unknown and unbeatable forces until he just accepts his fate and stops moving. I always thought that this book in particular and PKD's work in general were close to depictions of depression, which is where the bleakness is. I'm in a rush right now so can't immediately come up with a good example but many modern works of fiction depict wonderful conditions and stories with very bleak characters incapable of appreciating their luck.
I disagree with seeing these books as bleak, or indeed anything by Banks (it could be because our definitions of bleak differ, since I agree with you on the other values). The SF part is simply a setting for his strength, which is to detail and praise human character. For example, he continuously breaks the "rules of good writing" such as having dei ex machina (or more properly, dei in machina with some exceptions like The Algebraist) conclude most books but he is an example where it is done in a way that augments the story.
In most Banks stories, characters (including the Minds, for example in Excession) are put in difficult situations made believable by well structured suspension of disbelief ("great craftsmanship"). They get out of these situations using their intelligence and demonstrating courage and a well defined hierarchy of values (including appropriate self-sacrifice for something they value higher than their life). This is philosophically the opposite of Story of My Life and Ubik. Even if the ending is a downer, even if major characters suffer enormously (I'm still marked by Surface Detail years after reading it... truly harrowing), reading Banks had me walk away with my mind augmented somehow.
That being said, on the First contact/alien civilisation front I always got the feeling that Banks' aliens species are always very human, representing different facets of human nature, including the Minds. I think it is on purpose, like Asimov in most of his work he was not setting out to represent truly alien species as Charlie Stross, Peter Watts or Cixin Liu have done but writing novels about human characters and values that happened to be framed by SF.