riggins

http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/offices1_12382569...

The data showed that younger workers liked these kinds of offices more than older workers. The reason was instructive: they felt they could learn more from their “officemates” in this kind of office. This makes sense, since in interviews a common reason for wanting to join a company was the opportunity to work with “great” people. Having great people around, whom you rarely see and even more rarely talk to, is not of real value. Respondents talked about the much greater learning opportunities in a more open environment. Older respondents, in contrast, found it harder to concentrate and more disruptive. It also seemed the case that older respondents were simply comfortable with how they had learned to do things over a number of years, and did well.

Hmm, that's one interpretation.

Here's a simpler interpretation.

Younger workers generally aren't going to know what they're doing and need to ask questions, so being able to ask questions is important to them. Older workers already know what they're doing and don't need to ask as many questions, so they don't really get anything out of it.

This BTW, squares exactly with my experience. All the benefit of open floor plans go to employees with the least expertise at the expense of the employees with the most expertise.

If you're the most talented, expert employee in an office, in general there's not going to be anyone in the office that can answer your questions, so an open office doesn't buy you anything.

It was a link to a summary of the actual study. With that said I went and skimmed the original study and that looked just as bad. Here's the original study.

http://iwsp.human.cornell.edu/file_uploads/offices1_12382569...

Forget the fact that they didn't have the raw data. They don't clearly explain on what basis they reach their conclusions.

How are they measuring the 'success' of an open floor plan? For that matter, how can you even measure the 'success' of an open floor plan versus a close floor plan?

you see high paid professionals (i-bankers, brokers, lawyers, etc) win big awards all the time.

here's one about Merrill

Then, in the spring of 2004, an arbitration panel found Merrill had systemically discriminated against female brokers and awarded $2.2 million to a single employee.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-27/merrill-lync...

it's not exactly the same but you get the idea. Juries look at the possible damages and base the award of that. The higher the salary, the higher the potential damages.

I don't find that hard to imagine. In fact, I think the opposite would be true and I'll give my logic.

I believe in wrongful death suits (e.g. airline crashes) the earnings potential of the victim is considered i.e. higher payouts go to higher earners.

I assume a jury would follow the same logic and would be able to understand that the more an engineer earns, the greater the damages should be. i.e. a 1st year grad might have been hurt to the tune of $20K / year ... while it might have cost a more senior engineer $200K / year.

1. I can't say since I haven't been through YC, but I imagine that HN, a site that's open to every joe schmoe on the internet, is not a good reflection of the population that's accepted to YC (probably the most exclusive start-up accelerator).

2. I don't know the truth of the original claim (presumably neither do you). My question is this, if the original claim that there was a technical co-founder that got pushed out is true, is it toxic for dogfood123 to state it?

I guess I'm saying it seems like its premature to say it's 'toxic'. I agree that if there are malicious users making up lies about female founders, that's toxic. OTOH, if the claim is true, I struggle to see how talking about reality is toxic.

If anything I might buy the argument that Jobs was a huge control freak and that's what drove him to do this more than anything else, but how do you think this went down.

Jobs really didn't like having his engineers poached because it disrupted continuity. So he said to himself ... what am I gonna do? what am I gonna do? Offer 2x whatever Google is offers? Noooo ... that would never work. I need to call up Google and threaten a poaching war?

I'll go with Occam's razor. The simplest explanation is the best.

I understand your thinking but I don't think it logically holds together. If the main concern was stability, that could be addressed by matching/topping any competing offers ... so you're right back to this being about holding down wages.

Personally I like the idea of pending comments.

And yes, I know the kickstarter campaign hasn't started yet.

And I almost forgot ... this looks awesome.

I don't think that's going to be possible. A basic desk from ikea is $200.

yes I'm aware of that. In my OP I was going to also say

"at $300M with a 20% net income margin (which would be one of the higher net income margins but not unheard of) AirBnB would be producing $60M of profit." but I figured most people would be able to infer that.

Anyway, think about it this way. TPG is leading the deal right? TPG is one of the top 5 PE firms in the country. While it's possible TPG is making crazy investments, I think the best base case assumption is the TPG is not making crazy investments. I mean these are seriously smart guys with a good track record.

So if we start from the position that TPG is sane, then we ask ourselves, how are sane people getting to a $10B valuation. And I think I gave the outline of how sane people might be looking at it and arriving at a $10B valuation.

Plus I'm old enough to remember when people thought it was crazy that Amazon was valued at more than Barnes & Noble.

not crazy

1. go look at Hyatt's financials. Back in 2010 fiscal year Hyatt only generated $66M of net income. Why? Because hotels generally have high operating leverage (i.e. high fixed costs) and low margins, so small downturns in demand for rooms can have a large impact on profits. And frankly, AirBnB is helping depress demand for hotel rooms.

2. now think about AirBnB's business. They take 3% of every booking and they probably have low incremental costs (just additional server capacity).

The article below says they booked 12-15M in rooms in 2012. At an average of $100/room night (probably conservative) .. that's ~$1B in bookings with $30M going to AirBnB.

http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-billion-revenues-2013-...

We know AirBnB has grown rapidly ... and in the article they say they think they can serve 100 million in bookings per year ... which would equate to revenue of $300M. You can start to see how AirBnB could in fact produce as much profit as Hyatt without owning hundreds of properties.

Finally, don't bet against companies that combine economies of scale and customer captivity. I'd say that AirBnB has customer captivity because of the difficultly of establishing 'trust/credibility'. Once a user has established that credibility at one site I think they're fairly captive.

Anyway, time will tell. It's going to be fascinating to watch.

the claim that infrastructure spending leads to economic prosperity/dominance sounds pretty extraordinary to me.

convertible bonds basically have an equity option attached, so the interest rate paid by the issue is lower than what it would be otherwise (because the buyer is getting an option).

Often it is low grade companies that issue convertible bonds (to keep the interest expense they pay down), but it doesn't have to be. Investment grade companies can issue converts as well.

I struggle to follow this. For profit developers will build if they can do so for a profit. The only thing that will matter is whether the cost of construction is less than the PV of the future cashflows of a constructed building.

An apartment building that costs $50M to put up costs the same $50M whether a 1BR apartment rents for $1,000/month or $5,000/month (for the most part ... if you get a lot of development in response to price increases, you can end up with a shortage of labor and labor costs can increase the total build cost ... but that will be on the margins).

Furthermore, the cost to put up a building may be coming down. Here's a story about reducing construction costs by prefabricating buildings.

http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/broad-sustainable-buildi...

I don't know what it costs to construct and apartment building in SF, but if the rest of the world is a guide, there are plenty of projects that would have a positive NPV even at lower rent levels. So development would contain prices and could even bring prices down.

I'm on the fence. I think Google is doing amazing things and there is enormous potential. However, we're also talking about huge numbers. Annual revenue is already $60B. To go to $180B at the same margins they need huge successes. Like having self driving cars turn into a $60B/year business. Is that possible? Yes. But when you start to think about how huge the numbers are you see that its not easy.

Its hard to escape the arithmetic of the law of large numbers.

Also, my read is that Armstrong thought he was going to sound like a great guy ... doing everything they could to help the distressed babies.

Under the law, certain aspects of Coursera’s course offerings are considered services and are therefore subject to restrictions in sanctioned countries

Is that the case?

I suspect this was triggered by Coursera accepting money. The US has laws against doing business with certain countries. When Coursera started offering signature track classes where they charged money they are now doing business with restricted regimes.

I have been surprised that there is no discussion of your initial point, that there are very rational reasons why a state might want to control access to educational material. Sure maybe offering people will lead to greater humanity ... or maybe it will lead to terrorists who can build sophisticated drone bombs. I don't know but I'm surprised it not a more prominent issue.