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Tag: #Uber

Where in the World Is Travis Kalanick?

Where in the World Is Travis Kalanick?

If your reaction to the above was ‘who cares?,’ do not pass go, do not collect $200. How can we so quickly forget one of the seminal unicorns of Web 2.0.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of four of the 11 counts of fraud brought against her (three of the charges were dismissed and the jury was deadlocked on the other four, so it may not be over yet), and while she may serve (a reportedly fairly negligible amount of) jailtime, did this send chills through Silicon Valley, which at this point has become a generic term, like ‘Band-Aid’ and ‘google,’ considering that Report: Californians Leaving for Texas So Rapidly, U-Haul Ran Out of Trucks?

Will this verdict be a wake-up call? The Elizabeth Holmes verdict: Silicon Valley’s reckoning or a single bad apple? Will the guilty verdict change “fake it ’till you make it” culture?, the Mercury News asked. “Experts say the guilty verdict and the potential prison sentence it carries are sure to send a chill down the spines of entrepreneurs and investors — especially in the health care field — and prompt them to tread carefully. But it may not be the major reckoning that some have been clamoring for in Silicon Valley, where criminal charges remain rare and money continues to flow.” Read More...

The Thing that’s Truly Driving Tech

The Thing that’s Truly Driving Tech

Silicon Valley is on the ballot this year – in its home state, no less.

California’s Proposition 22 is up for a vote November 3, where AB (Assembly Bill) 5, the state’s gig worker law that, among other things, forced Uber and Lyft to classify their drivers as employees, passed in September of 2019. Prop 22 aims to exempt ridesharing and food-delivery firms from AB5.

Said The New York Times, “Prop 22 would exempt the companies from complying with (AB5), while offering limited benefits to drivers. The law is intended to force them to treat gig workers as employees, but Uber and its peers have resisted, fearing that the cost of benefits like unemployment insurance and health care could tip them into a downward financial spiral. Read More...

Will “creepy” be the new norm for the 2020’s?

Will “creepy” be the new norm for the 2020’s?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Since it’s the beginning of a new decade, as a starting point, we thought we’d take a look at 2010 and see what the sentiment was then. Eric Schmidt set the tone when he famously said, “There is what I call the creepy line. The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

Said Business Insider, “If you don’t cross the creepy line, we suppose by definition you aren’t creepy. But making it a policy to go right up to that line “on a lot of things” is, well, something a lot like creepy.” So, where do we stand now and as for the creepy line crossed – how often and in how many ways was it breached, if not completely ignored? Some instances from the past year and the past decade:

The Digital Arms Race Read More...

The 20-Teens Were the Decade of the Unicorn. Let’s Look at the Ugly.

The 20-Teens Were the Decade of the Unicorn. Let’s Look at the Ugly.

Real unicorns were pretty ugly, too

The final few weeks of any year – what to speak of a decade – tend to give us pause to reflect on, in the words of Alexander Graham Bell, “What hath God wrought?”

We realize that, in terms of historic industries and major industrial transitions, tech is relatively new to the planet. Every major industrial shift prior to tech has done precisely what tech has done: basically, created efficiencies. But given the breadth, scope and speed at which tech has engulfed the global landscape, forgiving founders for their youthful business missteps has tended to create those efficiencies at great expense to some, and in many cases, quite a few members of the planet’s population.

Uber entered the ride-hailing space without consideration to local regulations (Ask forgiveness, not permission) and scaled quickly, following yet another tenet of technology: move fast and break things. Uber did make ride-hailing more convenient and, surge pricing aside, less expensive. However, their drivers were not all properly vetted, which led to, in several cases, criminal allegations. But Uber skated a fine line, insisting that it is an ‘app,’ and that their drivers were not employees – the same argument they made in order to avoid paying drivers employee benefits. Job creation? Uber did contribute to the swelling underclass: the money mostly went in one direction. The Next Web summed it up pretty well back in 2017: Uber: The good, the bad, and the really, really ugly. Given Uber’s (current) legal challenges around the world, it seems to be going to the lawyers. Read More...

The Technology Company Sniff Test

The Technology Company Sniff Test

Tech has long operated under the mistaken belief that you can barrel ahead, damn all laws and regulations, what to speak of the basic rules of business, ask forgiveness instead of permission and it would all work out in the end. That one might have flown – for a time – when tech was a nascent industry attempting to elbow its way to a seat at the table: the problem is that the waiter always comes around with the check.

There have been a spate of IPOs and non-starters, and IPOs that more or less turned out to be non-starters: Uber and Lyft have not exactly been great rides for investors; stationery so-called connected exercycle Peloton has been spinning its proverbial wheels. The We Company pulled its IPO because it turned out to be not about We after all, but rather I, I, me, me. Read More...

Fake It Til You Make It 2.0

Fake It Til You Make It 2.0

More and more we’re seeing founders without so much as a plan to profitability raise outrageous amounts of venture capital based mostly on, from what we can tell, hubris, being mediagenic and what may arguably be either a Napoleonic complex, a touch of bipolar syndrome, or some combination of the two.

There seems to be a clear pathway to success in technology without having to be bothered with showing profits or even having a viable or clearly defined product, but given the downfall of Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos), Travis Kalanick (Uber), and most lately Adam Neumann (WeWork), that pathway hasn’t been clearly defined, or refined. But we have been paying attention, and we believe we have come up with 12 basic rules for success in technology – even with little or simple tech required: Read More...

Invaluable Lessons Startups Can Learn from Trader Joe’s, a Food Retailer Who Created a Whole New Category

Invaluable Lessons Startups Can Learn from Trader Joe’s, a Food Retailer Who Created a Whole New Category

Ah, Trader Joe’s!

Ever notice the lines at TJ’s? We’re not talking about the ones at check-out. We’re talking about the ones that often spiral around the block, just to get into the store. You’d think that there was a celebrity inside perusing the avocados. Read More...

The Theranos Effect: The Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered Edition

The Theranos Effect: The Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered Edition

This past week, Theranos founder and Steve Jobs wannabe Elizabeth Holmes was charged with “massive fraud” by the Securities and Exchange Commission. She agreed to pay a $500,000 penalty, be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years, and returned 18.9 million shares she amassed during the alleged fraud.

The company, which raised more than $700M in funding, was “deceiving investors by making it appear as if Theranos had successfully developed a commercially-ready portable blood analyzer” that could perform a full range of laboratory tests from a small sample of blood…But in reality, we allege that after years of development, Theranos was able to process just a small number of blood tests upon its proprietary analyzer, and instead conducted the vast majority of its patients’ tests on modified commercial analyzers that were manufactured by others,” Steven Peikin, the SEC’s co-director of enforcement, told reporters, according to USA Today. Read More...

The Demise of the Age of Social/Move Fast and Solve Entitled People’s Problems: Notes from the Blockchain

The Demise of the Age of Social/Move Fast and Solve Entitled People’s Problems: Notes from the Blockchain

 

We all know the mantras. Fake it till you make it. Move fast and break things. Ask forgiveness, not permission. The check is in the mail.

Oops, wrong list, but not really. Truth be told, they’re all lies with a Silicon Valley spin, with the exception of the last point, which is a classic. Read More...

Tech and the God View

Tech and the God View

It seems that both users at large and governments are now turning against the tech megaliths, which includes Facebook, Google and Amazon. Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend We are beginning to understand that tech companies don’t have our best interests at heart. Did they ever?, wrote Noam Cohen in the New York Times. We don’t need to catalog what globalization, the exploitation of labor and the seemingly unbridled power of platforms such as Facebook and Google has done and is doing to world economies and people, individually. Wages have diminished or stagnated, verticals are being consumed and choked. They control the conversation, with hitherto unheard of collection of personal data on vast segments of the population globally – Facebook claims two billion users and how many people, besides Yours Truly, strenuously avoid Google search and all things Google, where and when possible? Voice activation may indeed make our lives easier, but again, at what price? Are we so accustomed to surrendering our privacy for the sake of convenience that we shrug it off? Head’s up, in case you missed it: Warning over iPhone apps that can silently turn on cameras at any time. And, as the article points out, “Google has recently deleted several apps that surreptitiously recorded users and masqueraded as legitimate apps.”

Wonder how many they missed…

Remembering the God View

A while back, when Travis Kalanack was CEO, Uber got into trouble with its customer-tracking God View app, which allowed the company to track riders’ locations and other data. In one case, Uber executive Emil Michael proposed digging up dirt on journalists who were critical of his company and spreading details of their personal lives. The issue was settled. Fines were levied and Uber promised to limit God View data. That was 2014. Read More...