Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
French taxi drivers overturned cars, burned tires and blocked access to airports and train stations in a second day of violent protest Thursday against competition from the ride-sharing service Uber. Hundreds of licensed cabbies, who say competition from the popular service is cutting into their income and threatening their jobs, converged on cities to stage…
Of the richest venture capitalists, all are worth more than $1 billion, and all are men. The majority of these have invested in Groupon, LinkedIn, Skype, YouTube, Paypal, Facebook and others. Chances are, you are legally barred from joining their exclusive investors’ club. More than 97% of Americans cannot invest in the latest startups, nor…
Black cab drivers gum up a London street to protest against Uber. Photo by Chem Squier. This article originally appeared on VICE UK. It was seven o’clock on a cold January evening when Orhan, a taxi driver for Uber, first realized he had a problem. Well into his second shift of the day, he tried…
Yesterday Twitter released very disappointing quarterly results, with misses on both user and revenue growth. From the Wall Street Journal: Twitter Inc. delivered its weakest quarterly revenue growth as a publicly traded company, casting a shadow on its fledgling advertising business, which until now has been a consistent bright spot. Investors, who sent the company’s…
Slack announced yesterday that it raised $160 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. The company hasn’t spent a penny of the $120 million it raised just last October. When Slack raised that money, founder Stewart Butterfield said it was enough to last them 60 years. Besides creating a Scrooge McDuck style swimming pool, why exactly would a company take…
What the online juggernaut can learn from Time, USA Today,and MTV Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer April 15, 2015 Before Nyan Cat, before “Imma let you finish,” even before rickrolling, there was a small startup in New York dedicated to finding pre-viral content online. The first employees of BuzzFeed wrote about Borat, MySpace, and the “highly…
Bravo for companies that are starting to focus on innovation again! It’s about time. But even with this renewed attention to innovation, some managers keep projects resource-starved, in the belief that scarcity drives creative invention. Although ingenuity can sometimes spring up when means are scarce, managers beware: It is a dangerous miscalculation to think that…
Arabelle Sicardi, who wrote a BuzzFeed post criticizing Dove that was later deleted (and eventually restored) at the request of editor-in-chief Ben Smith, is resigning from the site, according to an internal memo distributed by BuzzFeed Style editor Julie Gerstein. From: Julie Gerstein Date: Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 5:25 PM Subject: News about Arabelle…
Paul Tudor Jones—whose net worth is $4.6 billion—is one of the most famous hedge fund managers in American history. He is a heavy donor to Republicans. And he is warning of the possibility of class-based revolution in America. Also, he has some ideas. We will say this about Paul Tudor Jones: he is not the…
Income inequality is tearing apart the social fabric of the U.S., and plenty of people—not unreasonably—blame big corporations. Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, founder of a hedge fund and the much-lauded Robin Hood Foundation, which works on poverty-related issues in New York City, is worried. During a talk at this year’s TED Conference, he voiced his…