Every article about Block should begin with the context setting that this is a company that spent $300m to acquire a failing music streaming startup simply because the CEO likes hanging out with celebrities. It’s impossible to take any of Block’s statements about operational efficiency seriously when clearly their leadership has never been serious about running a business.
The way OpenAI and Anthropic are positioned in public discourse always reminded me of the Uber vs Lyft saga … Uber temporarily lost double digit marketshare in the US during a viral boycott over their perceived support of the Trump 1.0 admin. Heads did roll at the exec/founder level but eventually the company recovered.
If you bought Stripe at a 95b valuation in 2021 your returns are barely keeping up with the SP500 after this latest round. Not exactly an elite capital growth machine.
Doubt he took this job for financial comp so even if he got paid, it probably wasn't much.
Equity is a big part of CEO pay packages and OpenAI has weird equity structure, plus there was a very real chance OpenAI's value would go to $0 leaving whatever promised comp worthless. So Emmett likely took the job for other reasons.
Also the article claims “800 million riders” which is astounding for an app that is currently #36 in the navigation category (iOS App Store). Unless this app is more popular than TikTok everywhere outside of the US they’ve gotta be playing fast and loose with those usage statistics.
Moovit is for public transportation and that is pretty much why it isn't big in the US. Here it is #3 in navigation after Google Maps and Waze.
I couldn't live without it anymore, the city has probably around 500 bus lines. Making 3 combinations isn't unusual and it works to the point where I don't worry about researching a new route. Whenever you aren't commuting it is your best option to finding a route.
Sometimes I spend a weekend in smaller cities I don't know well. They have bus lines which you can't find online anywhere. But everything is on Moovit. This has saved me so many hours, I feel like I should be paying for it.
I think it’s actually a very savvy strategy to protest from
within. It’s too easy for Google to shrug off or ignore public criticism. They’ve done this for decades with virtually no repercussions because they hold a monopoly on their core business - very few people are going to ‘delete Google’ no matter how much you disagree with their policies.
They do not have a monopoly on talent and they are actually fearful of being no longer seen as the #1 workplace option for top candidates. Protesting as a Google employee gives you much more leverage than an outsider will ever have (unless you have the $$ to buy off a handful of senators).
It certainly helps that they've protected themselves from the ability to "delete Google" with an embrace, extend (or buy), extinguish[0] strategy when it comes to the technologies at the core of the modern web.
Why must that -- and nothing else -- be the signal they're sending? People have a variety of motivations.
For example, I left my country 20 years ago because I wanted a better future and I had no desire nor conviction to stay and try to make that future happen there. Of those who stayed, most had no other choice. However, there's a non-negligible number of people who stayed despite having opportunities to leave, precisely because they are willing to fight to make things better.
Moving in general is difficult, but leaving a country and permanently moving to another one is infinitely more difficult than finding another job for someone who works at Google.
That's precisely why I wrote "of those who stayed, most had no other choice". I understand the difficulties inherent in moving from one country to another, as I've done it twice now. The difference between changing jobs and changing countries does nothing to invalidate my claim that people can have different motivations and that one of them is "I wish to stay and fight for this cause in this place."
Not sure where you got the idea that Waymo doesn’t value hardware development - their whole lawsuit saga against Uber was over lidar trade secrets (google “laser is the sauce”). Maybe you were thinking of Tesla who has insisted their existing video/radar stack will be competitive with enough ML? For all the other major SDV companies I’m familiar with, affordable and peformative lidar is a huge focus.
Waymo handed out pcbs as earrings and their patents were bs.
Most companies want lidar to get cheaper not better. Very rarely has the solution to a perception problem been "better sensors" as opposed to "more ml".
Also if the tokens can be used for 3rd party “Sign in through Facebook” authentication this just compromised millions of people’s entire digital identities for everything from dating sites to financial logins.
If you open the link SMPLC is actually Zipcar’s NGO and basically every mobility startup signed this proposal. Full list of signatories: “BlaBla Car, CityMapper, Didi, Cityway, Jetty, Keolis, LimeBike, Lyft, Mobike, Motivate, Ofo, Ola, Scoot, Transit, Uber, Via and ZipCar”
Does anyone else find this whole thing more than a bit hypocritical?
Lyft is always telling you they are the better/ethical/woke ridesharing option - now their employees are reporting a culture of abusing customer privacy. I wish they had taken a look at their own practices before running million dollar ad campaigns full of celebrities celebrating their ‘wokeness’.
Much of the criticism against Uber concern top-level decisions, such as the creation and use of "Greyball", or actions and decisions from Kalanick himself and other top executives. Lyft maybe deserves blame for not building better and more automated audit systems and policies after knowing that these lookups could be abused.
