Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It didn’t take a startling expose about mismanaged sexual assault claims for women to know that Uber is not the most female-friendly service in this, our sharing economy. But when BuzzFeed News got a hold of some leaked screen shots from Uber’s internal customer support interface, seeing the words “rape” and “sexual assault” appear more than 10,000…
paging_filter Online publishing start-up Slant News is shutting down, sources confirmed to POLITICO Media. The publishing platform, founded in February last year, paid freelance writers 70 percent of the advertising revenue generated by the articles that they wrote for the site. Slant was co-founded by Amanda Gutterman, the former special projects editor for The Huffington…
Photo Credit Henning Wagenbreth AT HubSpot, the software company where I worked for almost two years, when you got fired, it was called “graduation.” We all would get a cheery email from the boss saying, “Team, just letting you know that X has graduated and we’re all excited to see how she uses her superpowers…
In recent years, venture capitalists have funded all manner of improbable ideas. An app that lets random people call and wake you up. A bathroom scale that posts your weight on Twitter. And then there is Doug Evans’s brainchild. With no experience running tech companies and a bungled juice-bar chain under his belt, he has…
Soundcloud just introduced a $1o per month streaming music service called Go ($13 if you sign up through the iOS app), which adds only two new features to the existing offering: the ability to listen ad-free and download music for listening offline. Is it dead in the water? Oy Soundcloud. Soundcloud has been struggling over…
You can always tell when you’re in a WeWork office. The one I’m visiting is a new one in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. Like many offices of today, it’s spacious and open. There’s a check-in desk staffed by people who appear to be in their early 20s, a wood-paneled, subway-tiled kitchen to my left, and…
Before we get to why many on-demand apps have struggled to achieve mass-market prices, it is important to remember why anyone ever thought they could: because Uber did it. The ride-hailing company that is valued by investors at more than $60 billion began as a luxury service. The magic of Uber was that it used…
But running an office made up exclusively of millennials, it turns out, is not without its snags. His philosophy was tested when Mr. Pavelski, Mic’s director of programming, requested a week off, ostensibly to attend a wake back home in Wisconsin. “I went to talk to Joel and said, ‘So sorry about your loss, take…
For the better part of the last decade, Silicon Valley tech companies have seemingly been on a mission to make up for the down years following the burst of the dot-com bubble, spending money at a record clip. The new offices have been stunning, the sales kickoffs have been larger than life, and the holiday parties have…
Picture a startup founder. Chances are you went straight for a Mark Zuckerberg-type: male, white, nerdy and, above all, young. Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, three years after the collapse of the dotcom bubble, at the age of 20. Twelve years later, the company he founded is worth $270bn, and the tech world is in…