mlyang

What a waste of an article and opportunity. The journalist had the opportunity to sit with 30 other tech visionaries listening to them talk about their vision for the future, and he just..forgot everything they said because he was hungry, and spent most of the article writing about his own hunger?

This is a fascinating article. I wonder to what, if any, degree this methodology stifles innovation because innovators aren't rewarded. It seems from the article that ATLAS did not think the Nobel Prize was awarded properly to the correct people...would that affect their research in the future?

I find it interesting how YC is trying to increase its classes sizes significantly and YC partners are traveling all around encouraging everyone to apply (which would seemingly reduce the standard for getting in, unless qualified applicants are significantly increasing every year) in light of pg's point about gaming the system. Getting into an incubator, for many applicants, is effectively like "playing house" at starting a company or gaming the system, when really what those people should be focusing on is just building/growing their product, rather than figuring how to get into an incubator before they have a validated product. Especially given the predictors on a YC app that might increase an applicant's chance of getting in (prestigious school, work experience, etc.), seems like there are still lots of opportunities for "gaming the system" in YC.

(Per above comment, I work at the VC that invested in Airwatch): Because Insight is a growth stage VC deploying a significant amount of capital with each investment (in AirWatch's case, it was 200M), it's aiming for virtually all hits (unlike an earlier stage VC that's aiming for 1 out of 10 of their portfolio co's to succeed wildly)-- which it almost always succeeds in achieving. This also means that it gets lower returns on its funds relative to an earlier stage VC. Given the growth stage focus, that's to be expected and its LPs prefer the reliable (and relatively substantial) upside given the fund sizes. AKA Insight's not dealing with 55%-100% losses on other investments.

I work at the VC that invested in AirWatch last year. We're happy with the investment given that it was a relatively quick and clean exit given our typical 3-5+ year exit timeline.

Great! In my experience, the most inspiring talks by female tech entrepreneurs were ones where you would have had no idea whether they were female or male based on the content of their speeches/talks (e.g. "This is how we got our first 1000 users" rather than "This is how I navigated being in an all male board room"). This conference is a great opportunity to hear the experiences and perspectives of female entrepreneurs-- I hope that its content focus is more on their achievements and strategies rather than their gender. Actionable insights like how these entrepreneurs navigated their Series A or hired their first employees give a less explicit, but (in my opinion) more resounding affirmation that women have just as much credibility to succeed and achieve in the tech space. Excited to tune in!

Fantastic! Will this be streamed? For women not based in Bay Area (and therefore realistically women with even more limited access to female tech/entrepreneur role-models), this would be a great resource to be accessed remotely and real time, and could definitely be the catalyst for some quality Twitterverse discussion/encouragement for female tech entrepreneurs.

Dropbox really needs to accelerate its enterprise sales to justify this valuation long term. Given the tight integration that Box has with so many enterprise software solutions and Box's focus on enterprise, it'll be interesting to see how these two firms fair against each other on the public markets eventually (inevitable at this point given their valuations). Maybe just being a household name will do it for Dropbox even if Box can close more/better enterprise deals.

Will Nest customer data be shared with Google? Our privacy policy clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest’s products and services. We’ve always taken privacy seriously and this will not change.

This phrasing is pretty ambiguous/vague if you ask me. "Taking privacy seriously" will not change-- though I'm sure few behemoth Internet companies, including Google, would say that they don't take privacy seriously.

I think the best summary of Nest's answer is: Yes, we will share customer data with Google. But we'll take it seriously.

The thinking about MOOCs and their success metrics is flawed. We wouldn't measure the success of Wikipedia by the percentage of people who've read an entire Wiki article top to bottom for a particular topic they've searched for, why would we expect the same for MOOC courses? The reality is that it's just a great social good that these courses are available online and accessible to the select few who should choose to fully utilize them.

Everyone's too fixated on the completion rates for these courses. The reality is that the people who are checking out these courses are doing it mostly out of intellectual curiosity at this point, so they have no reason to finish certificates, or finish courses, or watch lectures that they're not interested in. These people have no incentive other than to pick and choose, and to idealistically expect that people will put themselves through the downsides of education (HW, exams, watching the boring lectures when they can just pick the interesting lectures) is unrealistic, and certainly not an indication that "MOOCs have failed."

according to the snapchatdb page, they've blurred the last two numbers of the phone numbers so as to not cause complete damage.

I never implied that the reporter was culpable. He isn't, RapGenius 100% is. But if I were in the original poster's shoes-- for me at least-- I would've initially found breaking the story to be fun and interesting, but seeing how Rap Genius as a business is basically screwed for the foreseeable future, I would've definitely thought twice. I agree that Rap Genius is 100% wrong in its shady tactics, but as a lot of the other commenters in this above thread (who have not been down-voted to oblivion) have stated, this is a pretty harsh punishment on Google's part. Knowing the harshness of the punishment after the fact, I was just pondering as to how the original poster felt, that's all.