tinkerteller

This is well covered in many books and articles. The back story, as I understand, is that Allen was checked out from Microsoft even before he got sick. He was going through relationship and other personal issues and went through long stretch of times travelling through Europe. Gates and Ballmer felt at the time that Allen received far bigger chunk of share of their success than he had actually worked for. You have to remember that Gates and Ballmer were both putting in 14-18 hours a day and many times not even have time to shower while Allen was touristing in Southern France for months with no indications of his commitments to the company. Even while at the founding of Microsoft, Allen's contributions to BASIC interpreter was not in balance as Gates but he did received same share of company because it was his idea. There are several authors who limit Allen's major contributions to Microsoft as: (1) Pointing out potential of microchips to Gates (2) be older face to partners like IBM (3) write small chunk of code in BASIC interpreter (4) suggest packaging apps as "office suit". There are few authors who believes that Allen did wanted to stay engaged but was sidelined by Gates when he started forming leadership team. This combined with his relationship issues and then sickness pushed him out of the loop.

There are lot of parallels to Zuck and Eduardo except that Allen was lucky enough to be at right place and right time to overhear the plan to dilute his stack and prevent it before it was executed.

I get the hoopla but what’s the alternative? It’s not that Chinese customers are clamoring for any of the Google services. Without Google, China will continue to develop their home grown services with far more surveillance than Google would put in. There are zero nations in the world which will stand up against China and dare to ask them do things differently. Some scholars even believe that Chinese culture is predisposed to this kind of government and westerners are simply not “getting it”. I personally don’t get either Britain’s tendencies to put person in charge of declaring wars and face on their currency because of no other reason than that person being born in certain family.

Pretty bad journalism. The article is full of what other people think of this act without ever revealing what really this new act does!

Main paragraph:

I grew increasingly disillusioned with academia. It seemed that many STEM undergraduates would rush into PhD programs out of sheer inertia, without exploration of other options, and spend five, six years of their prime youth down the rabbit hole of academic research. This resulted in frequent burnouts. Many PhD graduates turned, in the end, to industry after acquiring a distaste for academia in grad school. Those who continued in academia were met with fierce competition for limited amounts of tenure-track positions, and must go through several rounds of postdoctoral research stints before being accepted for a faculty position, if they were accepted at all.

Could you highlight his reasoning for being committed Christian? In my experience, it is very hard for intellectuals to cling to their religious beliefs in face of ocean of severe logical contradictions. So many of my discussions have usually ended in “ok, I know what you saying but I am not going to stop believing in [mohamed, Buddha, christ]. How did your discussion ended?

PS: I am not talking about spiritual people, I am talking about religious people who participate in religious processes without question and often financially help their religious institution to further the spread of it.

The problem with China is that government isn’t magically going to remove sensorship and Google had zero impact on their policy by staying out. It seems right move to me that Google will provide slightly more open search and other apps and may be able to instigate bit more openness. So going in seems like right strategy then staying out even if there was no money involved.

What was wrong with evil ‘ol Plantir? Thiel had been waiting for his reward since he wagged his tail for Trump.

No, they left it to rott. No innovations, no new strategy, no new leadership, no new bold moves. Nothing. If G+ was startup outside Google we would have ripped it off for not even pretending to compete.

Social is absolutely the most important space for Google, even more so than cloud. FB is eating up large chunk of their ad money and putting biggest chunk of content out of their reach. For a company out to organize world's information, this is unthinkable. And this is a company with $100B in bank, accumulation of largest talent pool, ability to attract the best. And it's not that FB is perfect and strongest at this point.

There is no "cutting losses" in tech when product category is this important. It takes years of struggle, experimentation, patience and competition to win. They gave up within an year after G+ release, left it on "maintenance mode" and now finally kissing good bye.

To me, Google has lost its charm as company that makes big bets and goes all-in until they win. Now they are company which does half-assed product and if they don't see traction right away, they cut off the oxygen and then just kill it. There is little or no reflections, learning and applying it to do course corrections.

After Larry Page arrived at the scene and flew out to his Caribbean island on extra-extended vacations, the company has failed to produce any big new product category. Eric Schmidt was able to start new product category virtually every year and become undisputed leader in it. That wasn't coincidence or luck but sheer drive to win. For example, in maps they had to invest huge amount of money with multi-year milestones and constant innovations to displace existing players.

Lot of us are estranged from our partners. I would say only this: Even if things are very bad, a thought of them dying will make you wish that you could have done something different while both of you were still breathing. There are no arguments with death.

This is a beautifully written piece.

Number of project failures and cuts under Larry Page is just amazing. Normally you would expect that founder CEO insist on long term vision and loves to go after big bets. Under Larry Page, X had been cut. Boston Dynamics was lost. Robotics effort was shutdown. And now G+. After all these time no one at Google's highly paid smartest on Earth visionaries were able to experiment, try something new and continue fight for social. This is at the time FB is bleeding heavily, is losing trust and people are willing to try something new. Google is one case where it looks like outside traditional CEO Eric Schmidt did much much better not only in operational excellence but also long term big bets including maps, gmail, YouTube, Android etc. Larry Page has nothing comparable to show for in his 7 years of leadership. This might be one reason: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-13/larry-pag...

- avoid implicit/explicit biases

- respect privacy of individuals

- avoid personal identification

Overall don’t do anything with AI that is ethically wrong to do it by other means (for example, you can replace AI with expensive human labor to do it).

His argument absolutely does not make any sense. This combined with the fact that AT&T and others have already been paying administration for getting favorable laws passed, I hope someday this guy gets investigated for bribery.

Not true. Inter-racial marriages are actually very rare in all western countries, just a drop in bucket (although they are more visible because of our tendency to remember surprises more often than norms). Usually Asian boys would travel back to their home country and marry someone from there based on their much better economic status.

Cruise has made admirable progress but with 1/3rd miles and infrastructure they are way behind Waymo. Other players have basically existed the endeavour more or less so they do get to be at #2.

What about political orientation :).

Personally I don't Musk had a choice. If he didn't do what he did then very likely Tesla would be bankrupt by now because of its debt obligations + short sellers. The short sellers counted on it. The choices he faced were go bankrupt and lose company or do this risky move and hope SEC lets you go with slap on the wrist.

It's not going to be open-and-shut if for whatever magical reasons Saudis come back and decide to corroborate on Musk's statement.

Almost everyone except you has been surprised so that should give you a clue. The Bayesian probabilities are all relative :). If you did believed 100% then you should have shorted the hell out of that stock. But you didn't so my guess is that even for you it was more like 90%.

The guy hasn't been sleeping and short sellers had essentially all but cornered him to the extent he would go bankrupt. I don't blame him too much except that he hasn't got his #2 with whom he can vent out, calm down and strategize. Gates had Ballmer, Page has Brin, Zuck has Sanders. Who does Musk has? Not acquiring #2 is his single biggest failure.

No, he is not.

Unless you have worked with Musk you shouldn't be making these claims. I personally haven't but I know people who have and they tell me its mixed bag. Very passionate but if he gets a bad idea then you are screwed. Many of his various blunders include the way he insisted Tesla self driving stack should look like and how entire factory should be human-free. Both of those decisions have cost in range of 100s of millions of dollars. This is not to say he hasn't made decisions that has brought in billions of dollars.

TLDR; According to article, SEC did do the "swift" investigation and it seems they were convinced Musk had no hard evidence to back up his $420 claim. They even drafted settlement agreement that was supposed to be signed which I'm guessing involved removing Musk from exec position. However at last minute Musk's lawyers decided not to go for settlement and now they are going to fight the case. I'm thinking they probably cooked something with Saudi to corroborate the claims - may be in exchange for some future deal. For whatever reason, Musk lawyers have figured things out so at this point Tesla is buy for me.

I really have only one question... why did you kept doing more startups as employee? I totally understand people doing this as a founder but just don't get it otherwise.

Thanks for the insight. I had guessed that most of the aquihires price are set at (investments + $500K/employee). If this wasn't the case, I would think that employees would have no incentive to get onboard and that would basically not allow the sale to go through. Is this not the case in your experience?

Depends on what career stage you are and what you will be doing. If you have 5-10 years of experience and doing distributed computing/info retrieval/AI then $1M worth of RSUs over 4 years is VERY normal and totally expected by everyone I know.

You are also failing in life against someone who won lottery last week. You should have lot of regret about not going to that same store and not choosing those same numbers that lottery winner chose.

Serious question: Assuming most of the startup crowd is in SV - how does this make any sense at all? People do have to pay $5000 mortgages there, right?

Your argument is not making sense to me as someone who had offers from startups. I was asked to take roughly 40% pay cut now and expect 10X increase in valuation for equity over 4 years which would put me ahead by 2X to 3X in terms of total compensation over that time frame. I didn't took the offer taking to account risk of failure (~80%). If I treated options as "nice bonus" it would never make sense to take any startup offer over jobs at established companies.

These days I have same feeling about Google search results as I'd with Yahoo in late 90s. They routinely fail to identify important keywords and just ignore them. I have to put quotes on important keywords for roughly quater of my queries to avoid seeing generic stuff. For at least 10-20% of my queries, things are buried deep in to page 4 or 5 because rest of the pages are taken up by people gaming the SEO or they get ranked high because of stupid viral reason. Every person I have talked to about this has echoed this sentiment wholeheartedly. It appears that no one at Google cares anymore about all these pain people are experiencing. May be Google's internal metrics would even fail to capture this dissatisfaction because people keep using it despite of issues. Thanks to monopoly, traffic doesn't just drop. The image search by image is such an old ask that they have never got around to doing properly. Kudos to Bing for keep marching despite of our collective decision to just increase our pain threshold and stick with Google.

I would love to know internal story behind the disaster that Google Finance has become. I'm not against new designs and evolving but the new website misses out on one simple thing: People using this site loves numbers, they want numbers! "Minimal & dumbed down" doesn't work with investor types. My guess is that they got new VP and the moron decided to wield his steve-jobs-me-too minimal everything stick. The guy has to be wearing turtleneck every day in the office and probably got big bonus for driving this trainwreck to its conclusion.