econner

Are you actually equating intentionally quieting a credible sexual harassment claim to withdrawing secret service protection?

Sure, but if you're terminated for cause you shouldn't receive anything. The $90 million was for Google to keep the story quiet and to keep Rubin from working for a competitor.

From the story on Andy Rubin,

> In Silicon Valley, it is widely known that Mr. Page had dated Marissa Mayer, one of the company’s first engineers who later became chief executive of Yahoo. (Both were single.) Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive, once retained a mistress to work as a company consultant, according to four people with knowledge of the relationship. And Mr. Brin, who along with Mr. Page owns the majority of voting shares in Google’s parent, Alphabet, had a consensual extramarital affair with an employee in 2014, said three employees with knowledge of the relationship.

> David C. Drummond, who joined as general counsel in 2002, had an extramarital relationship with Jennifer Blakely, a senior contract manager in the legal department who reported to one of his deputies, she and other Google employees said. They began dating in 2004, discussed having children and had a son in 2007, after which Mr. Drummond disclosed their relationship to the company, she said.

I was once talking to a retired guy who told me starting companies is hard because "your employees won't stop having sex with each other and your customers are never satisfied." Seems to be true for not only the employees, but also the founders of these companies and, if that weren't enough, it often strays into sexual harassment. It is good that Google is apparently taking a harder line on this, but they should've done more sooner.

Also, building a company is not all or nothing. You could even shoot smaller and likely get to $1M in revenue for a $5M or so company. The odds are much better.

Producing the work needs to cost money though for it to be viable.

I chose a company without really considering the city (SF) after college. A lot of my friends ended up in the area as well. Then my network grew and it's become harder to leave, even though I keep planning to.

One of the things I didn’t appreciate until leaving college was how much the world narrows. In college you’re surrounded by people at similar life stages who are more open to new experiences and to meeting new people (or at least more so than after). It’s a lot more difficult to form new friendships after college and that seems especially true now that phones and other entertainment occupy downtime attention. Texting has emerged as the dominant form of communication and it’s easier than ever to flake on plans since all you need to do is send a text. People seem to be increasingly isolated, lonely, and unhappy.

And this is all very new having only really emerged around 2009 - 2010 or so.

I agree with your post-college assessment, but I think the skill that's lacking practice is the ability to approach and meet new people. Phones, texting as the dominant form of communication, and swipe apps seem to have made that interaction more socially unacceptable / reduced the urgency for it.

I liked Nicholas C. Zakas book on ES6:

Understanding ES6 https://leanpub.com/understandinges6/read

Free to read online.

They do say within $1.

But yea it's a little weird to attempt to cover your tracks and then only vary the total by 28 cents.

Is there any data on how much the executives of Theranos profited while trying to produce these blood tests?

Thought it was going to be Softbank, no it actually is the Saudis directly.

Well said.

Standing strong under HN load.

Which scaleable node js javascript react framework did you build this with?

Wow, seems like everyone is taking 40% dilution on this deal and SoftBank probably has huge liquidity preference. I believe DoorDash's last round was also done with a multiplier on the liquidity preference. Crazy.

You should look at Gwern's research on the topic: https://www.gwern.net/Nootropics

From Saudi oil magnates.

He was also President of Stanford for a bunch of years.

Yea, ponzi.io was one.

Screenshot from 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20140208200431/http://ponzi.io/

To a degree the internet bubble was sad. Many people lost their shirt in the dotcom crash when they took on debt to exercise stock options or mortgaged their homes to buy dotcom stocks that failed.

But, of course, the internet bubble allowed all the fiber to be laid that formed the backbone of the internet & that gave rise to the great internet companies.

I'm long cryptocurrencies and I believe the technology is going to persist. It would be nice though to be able to do it without a whole bunch of people losing their life savings in a bubble, but perhaps that's wishful thinking.

The sad thing about this Bitcoin bubble is that it amounts to taking money from everyone who got in after you. That's the only thing that is giving it value right now: new people willing to pay higher prices for BTC. People have mortgaged their houses to get into this bubble, and many of them are going to be left holding the bag. It's not like people are buying BTC because it gives them a place to live or because it allows them to transact in a way they couldn't before.

Yes, memorably when the Mt. Gox exchange collapsed & others before that when there was very little volume.

The difference here is that it doesn't appear to be driven by any big event such as a major exchange collapsing. Possibly the Bitconnect crash is to blame, but who knows.

For me, it feels like Bitcoin has reached peak awareness so it's going to be more and more difficult to bring new people in, especially as a lot of people get burned on this crash.

It makes me kind of sad that /r/Bitcoin is all religious HODLers posting pictures of lamborghinis. Would be nice if there was actual interest in or use of the technology.

Pretty spot on. Investing in cryptocurrencies at this stage was just about taking money from the ones who got in after you.

But why should XLM have any value? Isn’t it just a means to transfer other things?

But, structure the comp so that all of your early employees & people in the trenches only get paid if you IPO. Then get mad when those same employees openly wonder if and when you are going to IPO.

Yes, but there's no denying that a bit of bait and switch goes on at these companies whereby they grant you a bunch of stock options, call it part of your total comp, and then restrict 100% what you can do with them unless it's on their terms.

This exactly. There's very a small chance you end up at a company like Dropbox, and even if you do it could still take 10 years to see any profit from it. Add to that the significant financial risk you probably have to take on to exercise options and pay AMT, all the while completely uncertain of payoff.

You don't have a share purchase agreement that was signed by both you and the founders?

I tried to transfer $20 out of coinbase and it was going to cost $32 to do so.

Seems like if you're not doing multimillion dollar payments it's not worth it. Then again, even if you are it's not worth it.

Gavin Andresen, one of the original developers of Bitcoin