Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Snapchat’s valuation is based on a single flawed assumption I recently was reading a leaked email written by Twitter’s current CFO, at the time representing Snapchat’s investors, to Snapchat’s CEO which dissected Facebook’s recent earnings announcements. It’s clear from the mail that Snapchat’s investors view Facebook as the benchmark when it comes to the size…
I’ve never been a fan of the “sharing economy”. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Uber, Airbnb and their peers, it’s just that there doesn’t really seem to be much “sharing” going on. It’s more like adding a technological middleman to a rental market. Now having shaken up the taxi and hotel market, the…
FRANKFURT — Uber is rapidly expanding its ride-hailing operations across the globe. But here in this city of 690,000 — less than the population of San Francisco, Uber’s hometown — the company recently did something unusual: It retreated. In early November, Uber shut its small office in Frankfurt’s centuries-old city center after just 18 months…
Welcome to a very special edition of people are worried about unicorns. They really are! The most worrying unicorn of them all, Square, went public last night at $9 per share, below its $11 to $13 marketing range. That gives it a valuation of $2.9 billion, not even a tricorn, and a sharp fall from the $6 billion sexacorn valuation…
This hasn’t been a good week for Snapchat. News that the startup got a 25% markdown from a big investor dominated the first half of the week. And on Friday, Snapchat released a new version of its app that makes people pay to keep using certain “Lenses,” a special type of photo filter. When users…
he rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied…
Two weeks ago, we reported that one of the numerous “unicorns” prancing around Silicon Valley was about to have a very rude wake up call when Dropbox was warned by its investment bankers that it would be unable to go public at a valuation anywhere near close to what its last private round (which had…
Begin: WordPress Article Content Twitter Engineering Manager Leslie Miley, the only black engineer in a leadership position at Twitter, just publicly announced that he has left the company. In his post, he says his reasons for leaving have everything to do with the way Twitter is addressing diversity and inclusion. Though Miley was laid off as…
Begin: Right Rail Advertisement Container End: Right Rail Advertisement Container Begin: WordPress Article Content In California, a state built on the idealism and tacit cruelty of real estate capitalism, no one is innocent. That’s no different with Airbnb and Proposition F, merely the latest of San Francisco’s Brobdingnagian sagas over land-use politics that will go down in today’s election….
Startups don’t turn into unicorns — the buzzword for companies valued at a billion dollars or more — without a good story attached. For WeWork — which leases office space, divvies it up into desk-sized chunks, and rents it out month to month, largely in fashionable cities like San Francisco and New York — the…