Recruiting drivers from competitors isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's the tactics used here to attempt to kill Lyft by making it bleed cash that are unethical.
"Earlier this month, CNN reported that Uber employees around the country ordered and then canceled 5,560 Lyft rides, according to an analysis by Lyft. (Lyft arrived at this figure by cross-referencing the phone numbers of users who tried to recruit Lyft drivers to Uber with users who had previously canceled rides.) "
The amount of money involved in the cancelled rides is inconsequential to Lyft's success. 5,000 cancelled rides is what, about $100,000? Techcrunch reported a $100 million annual gross revenue rate at Lyft last December, with 6% weekly growth.
I think you should think about it as a multiple of what you would expect per-employee were the company to hire everyone off the street. So if you would get 10k options / employee off the street, what multiple of that is it worth to get the full team.
I've left something running on my phone and had it 'dump charge' overnight when usually it would last another day. There's all sorts of ways to unexpectedly lose charge.
This new rule will get them a lot of public kickback if they continue to enforce it. Bottles of water or nailclippers are cheap and have no personal attachment. Phones are expensive and people's lives are wound around them - not to mention that especially in this digital age, I wouldn't be suprised if more than a few people travel with no itinerary beyond what's kept on their phones.
I'm pretty sure there is already effective ways to track ESN/MEIDs via wireless means without having to resort to manually entering it. Heck there are even databases that can map the two to the individual owners.
That's okay -- I'm sure they'll have a wide assortment of convenient charging devices which you can use. Hope your phone isn't vulnerable to USB-channel attacks...
Not entirely. It's necessary to encourage any reasonably open and informal exchange of ideas. Upvotes should be enough to endorse and promote the minimally good ideas, or at least the well articulated ones, for discussion.
For what it is worth, I recently found a spam bot hacked into my unused twitter account. It was using my real name so I had to clean it up. I used a new email address to be able to move the bot tweets to new user name. When registering my original user name again the experience was as described in the article. Actually, in my case it was [frighteningly] accurate down to what the user thinks.
You get to a point where it tells you to follow a preselected set of celebrities and it wont take no for an answer. There is no skip button. (I'm sure there isn't one, it took me ages to not find it.)
What drove the decision?
I think what happens is that Google picks up the new twitter account, flags it as a duplicate and increases the celebrity page rank in stead of indexing yours. It seems a good trick to make bots less effective.
I already spend a lot of time talking to early stage startups (it's really important that we understand them well); this seemed like a good way to formalize that in a way that helps them too.
(That is, my hope is that this is good for Stripe, for YC, and for the startups.)
In general, I'm very leery of distracting time commitments, and I don't sit on any boards or anything like that. I think this is a (pretty rare) example of one that makes sense for all parties.
I guess its the spirit of giving back. Y Combinator helped shape Stripe, get it investors, and all that, so he is kinda carrying the torch forward. I don't know him personally, but seeing the rate at which Stripe is growing, he must feel pretty strongly towards YC to have this level of commitment for it. YC ftw!
hire yourself out of every job, filling every spot with someone superior to you at the task and you will have 1) opened up your time 2) a superior company
To be a successful founder or CEO you have to grow a startup support system (a Mafia) around your startup. An active network of other entrepreneurs, investors, experts, can lead to opportunities for the company and mutually-supported survival when you really need it. You have to give before you get. Giving back to the startup community rises the tide for all boats in the long run. The wider the network, the better the CEO/Founder, the better off the company and its team.
I agree with you. It reminds me of an interview about Steve Jobs.
I don't have the link, but one of his executives was offered a BOD position in another company. Upon asking Jobs if he can take the board seat, Jobs told him he was barely making it at Apple as is...
I also don't buy the example of Musk and others, I think we have context as to how much better each of these companies would have run if they had put 110% of their efforts into just one.
Steve Jobs managed to be pretty effective as CEO of both Pixar and Apple at the same time for a while. Admittedly, his involvement at Pixar was mainly strategic whilst he was running Apple, but still.
Though Jobs was obviously the exception to so many rules.
CEOs and other high-level execs do take board positions in other companies, so the time commitment is not unusual. Admittedly, they're not usually startup execs.
