495 karma · joined August 18, 2015
If you're good at writing insurance it's essentially a great way of getting interest-free loans which they then spin into a huge pile of low-risk, cash-generating businesses (e.g. Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, See's Candies, to pick three Berkshire brands...).
The best data for many applications is often the data you can get at scale.
This is a really unusual part of the US tax code.
If that's not embodied in contract then it's, regrettably, close to worthless. Companies change, managers change, leadership changes, philosophy changes, contracts only change when they're renegotiated.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
A ping-pong table costs $200. (Maybe a really good one is $500.) That's about what your chair costs, assuming your chair doesn't suck. A decent engineer costs at least $150k basic, probably $250k all-in. That works out at an hourly rate of maybe $120? So if you get 15 fifteen engineer-minutes of work per employee through a catered lunch, it's a net cash win.
(Plus the tax treatment is very favorable for that sort of perk.)
There is a ton of excess in Silicon Valley, it's unbelievable, but the office perks are one of the less stupid parts of it.
The only game in consumer tech is (assuming supply) being able to predict, more accurately than your rivals, what users want. As soon as Spotify are no longer cut off from supply, then the organization with the best data and best machine learning will win.
(European liberalism is clearly culturally distinct from social democratic thought; where it comes to the same positions it's typically by other means – not that there's anything wrong with social democracy or democratic Socialism, for that matter.)
A good starting point would be, at pan-Europe level, the ALDE; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_of_Liberals_and_Democ.... National-level parties you might have heard of are the Liberal Democrats (UK) and Democraten 66 (Netherlands).
In common law systems it is precisely their job to do so.
I think both things can be true at once.
I'm positing that the very real and very awful problems at Uber (again, to reiterate; those are the main issue here, I'm picking at side-issues...) have incidentally created an environment where some parties have powerful incentives to go in on Uber themselves.
But I don't think I'm advancing a conspiracy theory. There's a genuine crisis at Uber, and that's the important issue here; if a hundredth of what's been alleged is true then that's the main event here and all of this is really Valley inside-baseball navel-gazing. Let's not draw moral false equivalences here.
Still, as a student of Valley dynamics, one has to acknowledge that realpolitik exists whenever things go really wrong. Given that, it's worth wondering whether any parties can take advantage of those conditions, especially given the non-existent state of board oversight in tightly-held SV companies. Chris Sacca and Mitch Kapor have already gone to the press on this (publically), so it's not even that much of a reach.
This is, in some really grim ways, an opportunity which doesn't come around very often.
This is obviously highly speculative, but Uber is a really leaky ship right now. This could be solely coincidence, but I am positing that – potentially – someone who wants increased influence at, or to increase pressure on, Uber may see opportunity here. To that end, they might be spinning parts of the narrative through their press relationships.
In other words: never let a crisis go to waste...
Two groups with incentive to get the composition of the boardroom changed.
This is what a PR tailspin looks like. All your good people will leave, all your bad people will have to be fired, and consumer demand and driver supply will be affected. Perception is reality, and that means Uber are in real trouble here and it's gonna cost them a lot – maybe most of the exec suite – to get out of it.
The key question is: who benefits? This is corporate politics by insurgent means, so I wonder who is emptying their opposition research briefing against Uber and why. Could even be an investor who wants to force leadership out, possibly as a prelude to driving Uber to an exit.
Those tactics don't work unless the dirt exists, so this really, really doesn't excuse anything which Uber may (and, on the balance of probabilities, there's more than likely fire to go with this smoke) have done. And I don't think it's likely the individuals alleging harassment in particular are part of this at all, so anyone coming trying to impugn their motivations can go pound sand; but, as a byproduct of their legit and serious grievances, they created the environment where this kind of power-play can be made.
So who benefits?