ajit_singh

This trick is used all the time. In my previous SaaS company we used to write case studies to show the impact caused by our product on the business' bottomline. A typical impact used to be like conversion increased from 10% to 12%. However, this impact used to seem very tiny and absolutely not case study worthy.

Hence, we would deliberately calculate impact by taking not the previous sales but the previous conversion rate as the denominator. Thus, would 10 to 12% growth would go like "we increased Y's conversion rate by 20%."

Can't be mathematically disputed and totally clickbaity at the same time.

Wow! so much scientific conversation and not one thought about gazillion of animals who live in those trees. Did you guys know earth was doing pretty fine with just trees and animals before all these tech, or even their talk, appeared in the scene.

I have that technology. Do plenty useful job in my backyard. We call it 'Tree'. Elon can go head and call it 'Treesla"

Great initiative. Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads.

They randomly change distribution models, ignore the bot traffic, and present eye candy line graphs to show "tremendous" impact from ads. And this keeps on running until cash graph goes below the threshold and CEO goes into the "introspection" mode.

This immediately follows the Slack acquisition which was sold at at price that is almost 1/10th of Pakistan's GDP. Keep in mind that Pakistan has 220 million people.

One individual company with less than 2k employees is valued 1/10th of what 220 million people collectively produce in a year. How can one explain this asymmetry. No doubt it was the biggest tech acquisition in the history but tech executives in the US bolstered by Fed's dollar printing have been breaking paper records almost every year.

Maybe I do not understand the economics of this well so I would gladly accept any roast of my above observation.

$1 billion!

I understand that the valuation of a company is also determined by its earning potential but did Boston Dynamics have that so much that it justified this crazy valuation.

From what I know it barely made any revenue while being in business for more than 25 years. It couldn't find a customer to produce any of its hyped robots at scale. It was clearly a loss-magnet entity for Softbank which is in a selling mode in the wake of Uber/Wework disaster.

In any other country valuation like this would have become the subject of enormous assessment because outside the US, $1 bn still means a lot of money. But I think USA is beyond but I really do not understand the system which facilitates such transaction without the corresponding exchange in value. How is the money being made?

Truely believe that Tony Hsieh wasn't a cynic or a wannabe. My question was centred around their financials because I still believe that the culture that Zappos famously practiced is impossible to imitate without dangerously compromising the company's productivity. So I want to know did it work for Zappos either? Because I think it didn't but I don't have any data.

Disclaimer- Nothing against Tony Hsieh. I am sure he is a good person as I have rarely heard anything other than nice stuff about him.

Don't want to sound harsh and insinuate anything but did Zappos make any profit? I think the merits of 'Holacracy' that Zappos and Hsieh vehemently propagated can only be validated if it made any impact on the bottomline.

The reason I am saying this is because I worked in a startup which tried posturing like Zappos- flat hierarchy, no cabins, boozing, chilling et al, while being run by a cynic CEO. The startup failed badly so this cool culture never got the limelight but my hunch is that if they had raised enough money and survived another 5 years somebody would have included them in their book or dissertation.

This is a story of every second household. My wife's nieces are stuck on phone practically 24 hours. The day their internet balance gets exhausted is when they peep out of their phone screen and raise all hue and cry forcing their parents to recharge their phone immediately. Their sleep cycle doesn't exist and if their kid brother even if playfully hides their phone then he risks getting killed by them.

Another toddler in my extended family just had his eyesight treated because of addiction to mobile phone.

There is a reason why tech billionaires are sending their kids to schools devoid of screens. The general horde who are making these billionaires even richer by buying their phones and seeing virtue in being able to afford it should introspect the damage they are doing to their kids.

I just changed my mind about what he did being sleazy. We are subjected to what he did everyday and we won't consider it a problem even if somebody reminds us that it is.

Was a segment user around two years ago. Felt like a software that is made at exactly the moment when it should have, for a really hungry audience. Their success never surprised me. They also had a capable alternative- mParticle. Not sure what are they upto.

"Optimizely died of indigestion rather than starvation" while it might be true, not sure if Dan ever admitted anything close to that in public.