The product potential and the funding make it seem like this is a bunch of insider baseball going on here. This is something I feel I could build in a few months, let alone require 20 people. Aside from all the jargon about these researchers, what's special? I'm not sure users actually care about some interesting insights some professors have because how does it manifest in the app? Color me skeptical.
It's the largest streaming site in the world and could possibly be making 10 figures / year. YouTube isn't dishing out money just because they are really nice people.
Does anyone really think the textbooks in the US are showing the barbarism our country is displaying right now - let alone 70 years ago?
Civilian casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the 7 figures) would bring war crimes indictments to the leaders of other nations. Indiscriminate drone attacks in multiple countries have killed hundreds of children. You can call everyone a terrorist but I think its fair to say being under 12 years old should exempt you from being murdered.
Let me make my point more crisp if it isn't clear - the worse war crimes committed by the US, French, British, Russian...etc are not Chapter 1 in the textbooks of their own nations.
I wonder from which textbooks you get your "facts"?
>> casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the 7 figures)
I assume that is from the Lancet reports? Highly doubtful, see the reality check from the Iraq Body count [1] (never answered by the Lancet authors afaik). At a minimum, it would require a big conspiracy still controlling information from morgues in the larger hospitals -- since any large hospital would see a significant fraction of the official deaths for the whole Iraq, if the Lancet papers are correct! And a conspiracy to (continue to) hide the makers of prostheses for all the hidden maimed. And so on.
Now we can say, because of the later leaks of internal US military documents, that if there were large conspiracies like these to do the needed coverups, it would be known.
[2] is quite fun, btw.
Etc, etc.
(And don't even start explaining the logic of blaming a country U for what people did to civilians, while also trying to kill soldiers from U... But sure, I can agree that the Bush administration was criminally incompetent.)
Edit: I answered a Karma 77 account, sigh. I need to stay out of the religious hate wars people use these accounts for. [It was upvoted later, by himself? :-) ]
Edit 2: But to support your point re Japan, US sources doesn't seem to mention much that in Nagasaki they nuked the biggest church in Asia? (The remains of the church is moved closer to the point below where the bomb exploded.)
more importantly, americans need to realize that the elite have recast american history as it relates to white slavery, black slavery, the civil war, the immigration moratorium of the 1920s, jim crow, hitler, the civil rights movement, the constitution, and the anti-smoking movement.
The USA is built on false history as pushed via the educational system.
To paraphrase Orwell from his novel 1984, they who control the past control the future.
Does anyone know if these types of $100M numbers are actually true? I think it makes a great headline but wouldn't everyone at senior ranks get packages like this making it unsustainable?
It does seem likely that some tricks were involved to arrive at a sensational number.
But if Google pays an average engineer on the order of $100,000 , this is 1000 times the average annual salary as a one time bonus.
That seems exceptional, certainly, but not completely insane.
On the flip side, it might keep a certain type of engineer for bolting for a startup. Even the most optimistic entrepreneur knows the odds of a $100 M payday are pretty much non-existent.
Google is a 258B market cap company (as per yesterday's closing price). They can afford to give hundreds of these packages, even if they diluted the stock, without moving the needle too much.
It's only paper, and Google is under the spotlight for anti-poaching collusion. This story makes them look like in-demand workers benefit from their policies rather than the worker just laboring away unaware that other companies have already agreed with Google not to try to hire him away.
How many people do you think are VP's at Google? A few hundred at most? $X million per year is normal for a big co VP. This isn't like a bank were every teller or saleman is called VP.
He is a One-percenter at the top of the Google pyramid.
What flashes through my mind when I see this type of corporate fetish, even it being Google, is that the future is much more likely to be version of Brave New World than 1984.
We consume not because we're told to, but because we want to. We become vehicles in an economic equation.
Something is unnerving about the fact so many of us feel privileged to have the ability to dedicate our lives to what is essentially an organization to make money. I know it stikes odd to think that's the only purpose of Google (it seems not to be) but it certainly is for a significant portion of the corporatocracy.
Those two factors combined (variables in an economic equation and we have blind faith in corporations) can undermine the basis of a free society whose goals go beyond the enrichment of a handful of shareholders.
Companies voluntarily improving workplace conditions seems like a laudable achievement of free society.
In the epitaph of our civilization, maybe it'll say "but after all, you gotta give it to them: at least some of their corporations had offices that were actually sorta livable."
Everybody on Hacker News wants to make a wad of money so they can fuck off from corporate drudgery and play around -- there's an end goal, it's a rational process for most individuals, not a world-devouring cancer.
Individuals have far more varied dreams, aspirations, fears and sentiments that "trying to make money". Most of them actually only try to make money because they are forced to in order to survive.
Corporations on the other hand exist almost solely for making money. Sometimes they add pride and some personal vision in, but those are few and far between (and it still comes second to money).
You can see a person giving its life for someone else's benefit. A parent taking care of a chronically sick child, for example. No corporation would ever do that.
I'm skeptical of Lightbank. Taking an investment is a pretty serious relationship and not much in the Lefkofsky or Keywell's history implies these are the type of people you want to get married to.
Although this girl might be arrested today, this general trend (growing accessibility to information) will show more and more people that there is a world beyond their immediate experience and what they are being told by people like Bal is false. Bal Thackeray was a bigot. He sought and exploited communal tensions and it's a shame that one can't openly criticize such a reprehensible person. Furthermore, his party Shiv Sena "operates as a network of street gangs" and is holds ideology which isn't far from the Tea Party in America.
While Bal Thakare's politics might be irrelevant in todays times. Do not forget that he was the only voice common people had when Communists/Islamists ruled the streets and the Socialist Congress government ruled as helpless as ever.
When China invaded India, the communist party in India was calling nationwide protests "in support of china" and was running "fund raising drives". That was the first time Bal Thakare turned from a cartoonist to a mass leader.
The political party was truly formed when Islamists forced the central government to change Indian constitution to apply horrible Islamic Sharia law to ensure that a 60 year old lady divorced after 40 years of marriage will not get any alimony from her rich husband. Muslims across the mumbai would then celebrate their victory by blocking the traffic and holding Namaz on streets.
Bal Thakare seemed to be the only voice weaker sections of society had that time. Yes, like all other organizations even Shiv Sena was not perfect and many times local goons and mafias joined this party for their own gains but more or less this party remains much more faithful to common people than the other parties.
Police did not find that OK. Police just make people obey the law. And politicians write the laws. And back to politics again, so end of the story. Here you can just argue if such laws are OK or not, which will also end in a political debate anyway.
The problem is these guys themselves think they are awesome. They are not. Case in point: they came back to TechCrunch because they were failures without it.
These guys are really bad for the startup ecosystem because they are not intellectual and move the focus from the story/startup to themselves.
Now this is good work if you can get it. $12m talent acquisition and then he quits in 3 months.
Maybe im just not a valley insider but what exactly has Kevin done that was successful? I'm not trying to be critical here, just don't see what warrants the hype around him.
But mostly I think what Kevin offers is a very 'industry insider' perspective. He's created startups, he's worked with a lot of them, he's funded many more. So, experience and opinions/insight mostly.
He also seems popular from his TechTV days, and then his time on TWiT, and then of course Digg Nation or whatever his video podcast for Digg was called only made him more famous among technology enthusiasts. He seems like a good face and name to have around when you couple the insight with the fame.
In the end doing things count. For all the reasons you'll find in the recurring "Why you should quit school and start a startup in SV". You can't do the kind of investments he's been doing without the experience and network that comes with staying "in the game" for a long time.
I'm in the same boat. He basically made Slashdot for web 2.0. Digg can't be the sole reason why he is considered so valuable and is so highly sought after.
Digg pulled down ridiculously high amounts of user engagement for a long while, which given everyone's ridiculously short attention spans is impressive.
Plus he had one of the most recognised podcasts with actual large sponsors. And a successful investment record. He seems to try engage with the community at large as well.
He does alright essentially, and has a decent reputation amongst start ups.
I'm surprised no one has brought up his ability to generate hype. Other than actually building the product, one of the biggest problems startups face is being able to get users.
Do you remember how much publicity Milk got without a single product and just from having Kevin attached to it?
Digg was pretty successful for a while, and you could consider Pownce successful if you consider that he probably made a bundle when it sold to sixapart (IIRC)
