snarf

Bruce Ames is a renowned scientist, but he also has an anti-aging nutritional supplement company on the side named Juvenon.

True, one of the X projects like Glass would be a better direct comparison in terms of resources and headcount. Google Scholar was just the first thing that popped into my mind when thinking of a Google product that is a social charity. Which, of course, is not the right way to think about Maps since the location data they collect is probably some of the most valuable data for their ad targeting.

Google has plenty of low revenue, unprofitable products, some of which are social charities like Google Scholar. I don't think Mayer deserves as much credit as a visionary as you are suggesting. It was more about empire building after a sudden demotion and not paying increasing licensing costs to a third party vendor for turn-by-turn data. But I agree that the end result is a mapping platform that is far ahead of anyone else thanks to Google's significant investment and resources.

I don't expect Google to pull its map app from iOS because it is a very valuable demographic to collect data from and target. Also, Apple already has a large hole on its balance sheet trying to catch up to Google in mapping. It started around the time they very publicly fired Forstall for the whole iOS 6 maps fiasco.

Exactly this. For those who weren't around in the first dot com bubble, he has a certain reputation which he has managed to bury. Benchmark used to be a much bigger firm back then, and due to poor fund performance, they had to scale back and "reboot" the firm. Along the way, he managed to bury his lesser know reputation. This was critical to getting deal flow in the current investing environment which is much more founder friendly given the increased availability of capital and competition for deals. Tolia also managed to rehab his reputation after lying about completing his Stanford degree and working for McKinsey (and teaming up with Gurley to screw over his other Epinions cofounders). He's now running NextDoor with significant investment from Gurley.

I, too, don't get the hype about voice assistants. There are a few uses cases where they may be genuinely useful like if you are driving and don't want to take your hands off the wheel, but for nearly everything else, it is usually faster, more accurate, and more reliable to use a GUI with touch or a keyboard.

It's also a matter of principle. You can always argue that if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear in support of more surveillance. But that's a slippery slope.

He is naturally a bit puffed up and that was a common critique of him from back in the Google days. I think this personality type is somewhat common among successful seed investors where being a "tech personality" helps with getting deal flow. Name brand institutional investors like Jurvetson and Horowitz don't need to rely on such tricks for deal flow.

If Forbes is accurate, then so is Sacca, although I imagine some non-trivial amount of that is in Uber, which is facing downward pressure on its private market valuation.

Once you have a one big win under your belt, it becomes easier to hit other big wins because you have greater access to capital to diversify your bets as well as much better deal flow. He did have an incredible run, which I would attribute to equal parts hard work, skill, and luck.

Trilogy Software in the late 90's had the exact same model with cultish hype aimed at graduating students at top universities who mostly didn't know any better and bought into the hype.

The funny thing is that the author of this article is a former (longtime) investment banker. I found the line where he describes the lack of liquidity in private shares "falls especially hard on early investors who are not company employees, those so-called 'series A' or 'series B' venture-capital investors" especially amusing. As if we are supposed to feel more sorry for VCs who are diversified in many investments than employees who aren't.

Given that key HR people at Uber come from Google, is it possible that Uber senior management actually knew about the issues surrounding their star SVP hire from Google when they hired him and were OK with it until reporters were tipped off due to current events and they started sniffing around? I am a little dubious of Uber's narrative that they first found out about this from reporters and fired him soon after.