flylib

they aren't really competitors, comma.ai offers level 2 autonomous retrofitting for certain cars and Cruise pivoted from initially a similar offering to comma.ai at a higher price point to a level 4 system that uses lidar and is sold to car companies or in this case exclusive to GM with no direct to consumer offering

Otto sold for 680 million to Uber in August 2016, the company started in 2015, that's atleast one company that was willing to sell and I figure most of them would, they all have no end game other then being acquired for the most part

http://www.recode.net/2016/8/18/12540068/uber-paid-680-milli...

time will tell if the Cruise acquisition pays off or not

there is 15+ self driving startups at the moment, GM has prolly seen all of them and went with Cruise

they abandoned that retrofitting hardware a while ago too, they only did that for a few months before working on a more full stack solution that is level 4 that would require a partnership with a car company to install their product which they now have

one thought floating around that he got a major scoop on the apple car (He was verge's car editor) and Apple are paying him to keep silent, he may not have any actual role at Apple but is on the payroll, not sure what the verge was told

Thiel invests all over the world and makes plenty of investments in European companies and US companies not in those markets, reporter trying to make a non story into something

no you won't, the VC doesn't report to a random reporter and numbers change all the time (WhatsApp last public valuation was of 1.5 billion (Sequoia held them at this position) and it sold for 19 billion)

except Uber already has a partnership with Volvo

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/18/12541672/uber-volvo-partne...

Investment from Toyota

https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/uber-and-toyota-confirm-st...

and they can retrofit existing cars with their autonomous technology which they are doing today/planning to do in the future, they aren't using any of the autonomous technology created by the manufacturers with no plans to and there is plenty of cars they can buy today

this is playing right into Uber's hand's, part of their fundraising strategy was to scare investors from putting more money into Lyft and it may be finally paying off.

Now Lyft won't be in a position of leverage when they have to sell themselves as no one wants them at their current price and acquirers will know Lyft is running out of options and will be 1/4 of the price by the end of 2017

this is bad news for Lyft who Didi basically just abandoned after partnering with them and were hoping that Uber would self implode by overspending in China, Uber has got the US market on lock

https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/lyft-and-didi-kuaidi-launc...

Here is tesla's comment on it, but it seems like they will be fully in control of the fleet/app software and could potentially favor their own cars in cities where they are running their own fleets over your own cars you have added into the fleet as it benefits them financially more.

Potentially "jailbreaking" and building your own fleet/app would be an option, not sure how legal but if tesla issues a critical security update and the vulnerability gets published by the researcher and the the jailbroken ridesharing provider you are using hasn't updated yet/can't because it will break their jailbreak in the short term, you are exposed

"When true self-driving is approved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else enroute to your destination.

You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you're at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.

In cities where demand exceeds the supply of customer-owned cars, Tesla will operate its own fleet, ensuring you can always hail a ride from us no matter where you are."

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

good luck finding any competitor willing to sell you a small fleet of them and let you launch a competing service, not only that they are the ones in control so if you launch a competing service with them, they could disable your cars.

Uber, Apple and Google have all taken the approach that they will rely on their own autonomous systems retrofitted onto existing cars or potentially build new cars instead of relying on anything the existing car companies make, otherwise it makes no sense for any of them to be investing billions of dollars into research if they think they can just go to Ford/GM/Tesla/etc. in 2020 and buy enough cars to launch a fleet service.

would be careful to say "near-parity", google is still ahead of everyone in level 4 autonomous cars at the moment, not only that the gap may be larger then the other car companies lead you to believe.

Google Ventures gave them no money, Google the company invested in them with Sundar Pichai (Google CEO) taking a board seat at the company

the 77 million round was done in the past (it might of been over multiple rounds grouped up into one number with part of the amount being more recent) some of the same backers in the round announced "officially" today are also mentioned in this article in 2012 as backers http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/11/14/site-live-for-ex-ap...

the company started back in 2012 and raised most of that money then, the market probably looked more attractive at that point to VC's (Dropbox valuation was shooting up) but they took awhile to release anything as it's now 2016. While at the same time, the market outlook has soured in general for file storage companies is the narrative at the moment, Dropbox has now shifted most of it's focus it seems to it's enterprise offerings as the consumer side isn't a sustainable revenue model to get to an IPO.

they already have precedent for buying illegally obtained footage and nothing happened to them

http://pagesix.com/2014/05/15/employee-who-leaked-solange-ja... http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/inside-harvey-l...

they would be more worried about a gawker/hulk hogan like lawsuit then getting criminally prosecuted

I think people on HN are underestimating the tabloid market and previous prices paid for photos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_celebri..., TMZ regularly pays out 5k for photos/videos, selling to them is the hard part and not getting caught in some type of undercover sting during the process is why most people will take the bounty

any SaaS company suffers the potential chance of a rogue employee, certain google employees could snoop around people's emails if they wanted, etc.

a potential theory is he paid her the money to not tell his wife/kids who knew nothing of the affair, obviously extremely ill advised but plausible

Giphy would have to exit for around 80 million for all investors to get their money back, seems unlikely they would be able to get that much for an acquihire even half of that amount especially if they are forced into a position where they can't raise anymore, are running out of money and need to sell so they are betting that advertising will make them into a viable business

technically Sacks could be under the hook also for non-compliance...

the WSJ agreed

"But what the former chief operating officer didn’t acknowledge is that for a long period of time he and Mr. Conrad worked closely together, sitting next to each other at work and meeting regularly for dinner, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person said that Mr. Sacks, who describes himself in his Twitter profile as a “hypergrowth addict,” helped spearhead the company’s large fundraising shortly after joining the company in December 2014 as well as its strategy to grow quickly despite a lack of internal controls and processes."

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/02/08/zenefits-ceo-parker-c...

as a counter point Zenefits already won against the state of Utah when they tried banning them so yes people have already stood up to defend them

http://fortune.com/2015/04/13/zenefits-utah-ban-insurance/

no surprise they jumped on the first chance they could to get rid of Conrad

VC funding announced in first week of 2016 is significantly more then first week of 2015 as a counter argument

he is talking about Garrett Camp's (Expa) Operator https://operator.com

in terms of returns for investors/founders/early employees, yes they are, and twitter is undoubtedly in terms of reach/impact one of the most important tech companies in the last decade, whether they actually sustain moving forward is another question

compared to what? they are two of the most successful tech companies built in the last decade

"They used to claim their partners were all real founders. They gave that up a long time ago."

no all the general partners are still founders who seem to have an overwhelming stake in who they actually fund, granted they hide who the general partners are on their site, they use the term partner loosely as another word for associate