Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
When it comes to ad-supported services, pundits everywhere are fond of the adage “If you’re not the customer you’re the product”. It’s interesting, though, how quickly that adage is forgotten when it comes to evaluating the viability of said services. Twitter is a perfect example. In response to my piece How Facebook Squashed Twitter I…
Begin: WordPress Article Content The startup gold rush of the last ten years is over. Sorry. Those hordes of ambitious entrepreneurs still stampeding to the Bay Area in the hopes of building their Minimum Viable Product, getting into Y Combinator, and growing their app into the Next Big Thing–they’re already too late. That era is…
Uber—despite ignoring and dismissing literally thousands of complaints from customers and drivers regarding sexual assault within Uber vehicles over the past three years—would like us women to know that they’ve got our backs. Hey, thanks, Uber. In a blog posted on International Women’s Day, Uber Senior Program Manager Blair Mattson wrote a special thank-you to…
According to data provided by Uber to BuzzFeed News, the company received five claims of rape, and “fewer than” 170 claims of sexual assault directly related to an Uber ride as inbound tickets to its customer service database between December 2012 and August 2015. Uber provided these numbers as a rebuttal to screenshots obtained by…
Before Nathalie Miller decided to walk away from Instacart, the grocery delivery start-up now worth more than $2 billion, she made a spreadsheet to analyze how much money she was leaving on the table. She had been Instacart’s 20th employee, managing operations during a period of extremely rapid growth, and the sum could have been…
Last week, Vox Media’s SB Nation published “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?”, a 12,000-word profile of a 29-year-old former Oklahoma City police officer who this winter was tried for raping 13 black women while on duty; convicted on 18 of 36 charges of rape, sexual battery, forcible oral sodomy, and burglary; and sentenced to 263 years…
You may have seen a story kicking around these here internets over the weekend — that is, if you weren’t busy laughing at Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz celebrating their second-and-third-place victories in South Carolina. The story involved a Yelp employee who dared to criticize the company publicly for employee mistreatment, then was almost immediately fired….
Twitter’s chief executive Jack Dorsey needs Ann Feely, a 51-year-old wine marketer in California’s Bay Area, to keep posting about her favorite vintages if he’s going to convince investors that Silicon Valley’s once hottest startup has a future. The problem: Feely hasn’t tweeted since June. Twitter, she says, is corked. “It’s overwhelming,” says Feely, a…
Photo Joshua Reeves, a founder of the payroll management start-up Gusto. “Even in downturns, some businesses succeed,” he said of the shifting economic environment. Credit Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — Technology stocks are gyrating. Valuations for once-vaunted private companies have been slashed and some start-ups have shut down. Even Apple’s…
It has been just over two years since I became a full time investor at True Ventures (after being a venture investor for about six years). It seemed like a natural progression from being a reporter and then a company founder. My three different incarnations had a few things in common: I pray at the…