jjmorrison

Bots or not - that $25B is coming from somewhere.

I'm most sad that so many smart humans are working on this of all the important problems in the world.

Makes loads of money though, so won't change until incentives change.

True. They do seem quite obsessed with slurping more data. i wonder how much it would hurt them in the long term if they couldn't get more.

Not sure if the breakdown is exact but financials say $25B in ads, and $700M in "other"

> 8% YoY user growth and 46% YoY revenue growth

Curious how well understood the mechanics are of this. I've been fascinated by how clever the whole model works. They know revenue growth needs to outpace their ability to increase available ad space (so user growth or attention growth). So they are heavily reliant on data to improve ad targeting so they can drive more conversion per ad impression.

The power of the ad auction model is that 100% of the improved efficiency of ad targeting is translated to revenue for Facebook. Advertisers will pay $X for a conversion in their ROI calculations - so Facebook will get the maximum amount the market will pay a certain for a given conversion. Advertisers are actually a little worst off as targeting gets better - the conversion cost stays the same and the number of impressions goes down.

To keep growing revenue at this pace, Facebook needs to continually feed the beast with better and better data so they can squeeze more and more conversions out of their existing ad space.

The only other two ways to grow revenue is more users and more time from users. Which is getting tougher and tougher. That's why this Apple fight is so important to Facebook - it's really their lifeblood right now.

Yes - by several orders of magnitude.

If I read this correctly, the point being made is that Honda got approval to allow drivers not to look at the road when in a traffic jam, which makes it technically level 3 when the car is in a traffic jam?

It's a bit of an overstatement to say Honda is leading self-driving. This seems like a great regulatory win in Japan, but not a very interesting technical achievement.

I agree - I don't know how it use to work, but today, Tesla's a pretty pushy about keep you alert. I can't imagine blaming my car for crashing when I'm using autopilot.

Plaid is still (for some unknown reason) the only company that is able to do real time ACH transactions that bypass credit card companies in the US. All other companies still require long verification processes or high transaction fees.

this is spot on

:O! That's what Quibi stands for??!

It wasn't necessarily all spent. The team likely made a decision to return the capital left if the traction really wasn't there.

Yeah... I was doing some quick math the other day. There's about 100M americans that make less than 50k year. We could've given over $20k to each one of them with this 2.3T bailout. I feel like that would've been a more impactful use of money.

> I am upset at myself for hoping anyone in this process would act like a decent human being.

I hear you that you were hoping these big institutions would do what was best for people and the country in a time like this and they didn't deliver on that.

If helpful, this is how I thought of it. If the fees are higher on bigger loans, and the company's goal is to make money, this was the right decision for them. These banks are as successful as they are because they are the best at optimizing for the goals the system we've created has set. Maybe in a special case like this, they could've chosen to go against this incentive. But that would probably be worse in the long term. The real problem at hand is that the incentives we've set aren't the ones that we want anymore. We know it needs to be fixed, but it's really hard because our economy is this tightly coupled web. No one really knows what will happen if we start changing incentives. So we've decided not to change much yet. In a way, if banks had gone against their incentives in this moment of acute need, it really would've been a lie. A red herring that might make us delay changing the incentives even longer.

I guess the way I'm holding this is without righteousness. There's no single individuals in these banks that are the evil ones to blame. We've just created a system of incentives that ensures whoever is making certain decisions will keep making the ones that are made. It doesn't matter who, they'll always be made. It's like darwinism. So let's really spend time thinking about what change we want to make that would reward people for making the choices we want to see.

I suppose it's not a broadly discussed topic, but it's definitely a thing. HR or recruiting teams would speak best to it. But you can spot this pretty easily. A recent example is Uber. When you do a big lay off followed by accelerated hiring, it's signaling the end of a talent drought. You can't performance manage very aggressively in a period of crisis since it's really hard to hire. So the bar goes down. At some point you clean up, and bring the bar back up. Uber couldn't hire well at all for several years as they went through their culture struggles.

It's definitely less of a problem for lower skilled jobs. And that makes sense since the labour is a lot more replaceable. But it's also why unions are there to prevent abuse.

I won't pretend to claim the system works perfectly. My point is just that there are levers there already that work pretty well. And we should decide as a society how to play or add levers. Managing by mod is really a dictatorship run by the angriest twitter users. If that's who we want running the show - I think that should at least be put to a vote... I'm definitely against it.

I think I disagree with that. The labor pool isn't unlimited and there's laws in place to protect workers. Reading this article as someone that's worked in banking it seems unfair to treat this company a different way that all others. We all still go to banks despite the horrible ways they treat their workers.

Ruling by mob means the treatment is unfair across companies. I think people should argue for laws that are broadly applicable when the market fail. And in this case I think the market (even like glassdoor, reviews, etc) would tank the company's ability to hire it it was not a place people wanted to work.

You're right on that. I'm more reacting to this story where the complaining is not try to change things, but an attempted take down of the company. I disagree with the anger and sense of having been wronged that's portrayed in the original article. You're not a victim if you can leave, that's totally ok to do. I would definitely agree a company is a long series of people affecting changes that hopefully make the whole better.

This is the story of a young founder who is scared and trying her best at an impossible task. And young employees who believed they were allowed to get the job they wanted at the company they wanted.

But that's not how the system works. You need to vote with your feet - you don't like it, leave and let them know you aren't going to put up with it. Without that, we're all just arguing about what's ok and what's not. Don't complain, vote!

So it's a fear that if we explore things that might not be true, we'll all accidentally believe it? For all our flaws, I think humanity deserves more credit than that :)

> There is no way to measure the consciousness (again, the experience of being) of something

Right - that's the whole game this author is playing. One question that is so easily answered if you spend time observing is whether or not YOU are conscious. That is the only thing you can ever be sure of. Because you feel conscious. You feel like something is happening. You might be a brain in a vat and everyone else is an automaton. But you definitely know that you are experiencing something.

> I think the idea exists already to some extent.

It's almost as if we've always known the true nature of our consciousness, we just keep overlooking it :)

Thanks for putting this together! What a huge effort. Ignore all the haters here, they'll complain about anything.

Why so much dislike for this? It's a theory that pushes on some of the foundational assumptions we make. Maybe it resonates and maybe not. But just being open to a new set of ideas means we can maybe learn something new and interesting. Or not and that's fine too. People seem angry that someone else would talk about an idea they don't currently agree with.

I thought the article was not great. But the fact that she's changed her mind on the topic makes me like her a lot more. How can we learn more if we don't change our mind?

I don't read anything here that isn't par for the course when it comes to fundraising. This is how it works with all VCs. Money isn't in the bank until it's in the bank. I get the frustration that it wastes time, but for better or worst, that's the game today. It might be a problem worth discussing, but if so, it's a venture capital problem, not a Softbank problem.

So exciting to see. What does society look like when science starts investigating consciousness with a more eastern philosophy lens?

> Some people advised me not to go there because it would only do harm to my name and brand, but I think I should

We need more people who are willing to try and solve problems, not just be critical. Thanks for being willing to have a conversation with them. You're making the right call whether you are able to have an impact or not.

We should totally create a bias toward minorities for things like speaking engagements. And also - that imbalance will always be there.

It's so well documented at researched at this point that the imbalance is at least partially driven by differences in fundamental interests between genders ("things" vs "people"). You see this with nurses just as much as you see it with engineers.

But, these are all averages and distribution, so plenty of work to do to make sure those that aren't in the average can still pursue their interests without facing such an uphill battle. Conference speaking seems like a good way to help. But the goal of "balance" as 50/50 is not a good goal.

Actually, the founder is french Canadian. "Sonder" is just french for "wondering" with a bit of an inquisitive connotation.

No - imagine if you had bought 100% of Apple shares for $1 at incorporation, and then sold 1 share for $207. That would make the market cap $1T and the total investment would be only $208.

It's more that the investments into Apple + the amount of money made by shareholders equals $1T.

This.

It's really only obvious why founders deserve a much larger exit than employees after you've tried to start and run a company.

There's plenty of edge cases where it doesn't feel fair, but in general, starting and running a successful startup is nothing like being an engineer. And it deserves a very different level of comp.

Also - there's plenty of engineers at startups that wouldn't get a job at a large tech companies.