A fun puzzle: if today you take $10m of VC funding at a $20m post-money valuation (ie you sold 50% your company), how much will you get if you sell the company for $20m tomorrow?
Answer: typically, you’ll walk away with $5m (25%) or less. VC funds usually have a 1x preference, which means the get their $10m back (plus interest), and THEN they split the remaining proceeds with you 50-50%.
So if you take VC money, you might have to double your valuation just to keep your take-home value the same.
VC makes sense if you can grow fast and very large. But assuming you have scenarios to grow slower or to a smaller size, those scenarios often turn into bad ones if you’ve taken VC funding.
> VC makes sense if you can grow fast and very large.
I could also argue that such companies are often a blight on the ecosystem. They're an invasive weed that outcompetes a rich variety of smaller companies, sucking the resources required to sustain such companies without doing nearly as much to enrich the environment. And then they tend to die off (perhaps through acquisition and having their product cancelled/absorbed into the larger company's), leaving customers high and dry. If they hadn't been there, some of the smaller companies would have still been around.
A private, after-school extra curricular program. It’s a national company with many local branches (possibly franchised). Like Kumon, it’s a way for ambitious parents to buy extra academic classes and extra homework for their kids.
Today, we use instant messaging like we use voice conversation - especially for people who work remotely. Banning the use of ephemeral IM is sort of like saying “you need to record all of your discussions, no matter how trivial”.
Levine’s article makes a great point:
“It really is wild that the SEC’s official position is now that it is illegal to “use unofficial communications to do things like cut deals, win clients or make trades.” “Conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels”! Imagine if that was really the rule! You can’t have lunch with a client and talk about business, or have beers with your colleagues and gripe about work, because that does not create a searchable archive for the SEC to review.”
There’s a difference between avoiding discovery by tacitly moving conversations offline versus saying that you are doing so, in writing, in a discoverable channel, specifically to avoid discovery.
The spirit of the latter crosses a line of showing deliberate contempt for the legal process. Doing it in writing seems just as ill advised as discussing sensitive information in writing.
It just shows how problematic all this "surveillance" (voluntary and involuntary) has become. And it will become even worse. We now have cameras/door cameras at almost every private home/apartment and every street corner. We have cars who record audio and image/video inside and outside of the vehicle. There is almost no real privacy anymore. Everything can be used against you.
Honestly, it's getting a bit insane I think.
If we cannot communicate digitally in private and we cannot communicate physically in close vicinity to a car or a building, the only place left is in a remote forest.
As we have seen with Tesla engineers having access to videos inside cars (how can this even be legal) and we saw the 21 year old who leaked the secret Pentagon data, it's not that there has to be a decision by lawyers or government agencies that the data has to be provided. Any devops or admin can access this kind of data and spread as they like.
And how come Tesla and the Pentagon has no precautions in place to stop this kind if abuse?
To me it looks like a clearly-defined line between text and real-time voice/video. What the user experiences, not the technical background.
Ie it would have been perfectly fine for google to ban text chats, and just use calls/meetings; even with the same software. As inefficient and unpleasant as it would be.
I played around with the idea with my first Jeep Wrangler, a burly car with a perfectly exposed engine block. Never cooked anything, but I was endlessly entertained by the idea that I might. I suppose the transition to EVs will steal this particular daydream from my kids…
Upside is many EVs have 120v AC outlets so a portable induction plate is an easy add. It's actually an option for the Rivian truck in the pull out kitchen.
Unfortunately, "Rivian has deleted the Camp Kitchen, Tunnel Shuttle, and R1T Tent from its online gear shop. All three were previously listed as “not available yet” until earlier today when their entries disappeared."
That sucks. I wonder if it has anything to do with their ruggedness over time, which may result in recalls down the line if they vibrate whatever mounting components they have and become dangerous/unstable/easily-broken thus a maintenance nightmare.
What happens to the rear end kitchen in the event of a rear-end
plus with the through-tunnel - I wonder how easily the machine is completely totaled in the event of a crash causing the tunnel structures to warp/bend/buckle.
I love these trucks - but I hope they took them out for eaither engineering/safety or more simply suppliers/supply-chain issues.
I know something about this. I built and ran a service for carriers to help with “WiFi offload”.
It’s intended as a consumer-friendly way to increase capacity in dense areas (like a sports stadium or mall) where the carrier’s cell towers don’t have enough capacity.
Wifi offloading is not new. AT&T helped invent these standards back in ~2009 when their network was getting crushed by massive increases in traffic as iPhone usage took off.
WiFi offload networks are configured as “Managed Networks” which are lower priority than any user-selected networks. You can disable them by turning off “auto-join”. (Also these WiFi offload networks are secure; you can’t spoof them).
However it appears that the original poster’s carrier (presumably Xfinity Mobile or Spectrum Mobile) has done something new - they’ve disabled the user’s ability to turn off “auto-join” on iOS. Some overzealous team is trying to lower their cellular costs. That’s because both Comcast and Spectrum rent capacity on Verizon Wireless towers, but their MVNO cellular service is not profitable unless their customers are using the cable company’s own WiFi fairly often.
However this (disabling “auto-join”) is a dumb move. It’s obviously problematic for users whose neighbors are broadcasting the [Xfinity WiFi or Spectrum Mobile?] SSID.
To my knowledge, no major carrier does this. If you’re on AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon, the “managed offload networks” can be easily disabled. And the major carriers are using higher-quality commercial WiFi networks for offload, not random home cable modems.
Recently the term "consumer-friendly" became the synomym of "we shove it down your throat whether you like it or not!". If you wish to communicate some real user-friendly feature better find some other phrase. Reading "consumer-friendly" statements of providers makes me turn away and never look back.
See the above example. Hijacking the device we use for our daily operations, very important one with sensitive data, already in risk from multitude of origins, hijacking it remotely into some unknown channels along hidden organisational incentives is a very offensive and frightening move. The technology is not new and it is OPTIONAL for very long time. Shoving it down the throat is bad. Very bad.
(I am pretty disappointed with the population of the world that accepts anything from service providers for mostly marginal or never missed gains, accepting the elimination of choice. Providers feel they can get away with anything and became increasingly hostile.)
If the use case is as described (connecting to WiFi APs owned and controlled by the network in deadspots / hotspots - e.g. stadiums and large buildings - and not end-user APs in homes), it's not clear to me that this poses any significant threat above and beyond connecting to the same operator's cell towers. If you don't trust them to run a WiFi network, probably shouldn't trust their cell network either.
Having phones automatically and uncontrollably route via random 3rd party APs is a bad decision, but I didn't read GP as advocating for this.
The knowledge and equipment to hack WiFi-related systems is a lot easier to obtain on most of the world than the cellular equivalent.
In the US, at least, tampering with cell service risks getting the FCC involved, so very few people do it compared to WiFi hacking.
I'm very curious, for example, if the devices that connect to these APs are vulnerable to the WiFi client isolation bypass that was disclosed about a week ago.[1] That seems a lot scarier when there are potentially thousands of random people's personal phones connecting to the same WiFi infrastructure instead of a bunch of more or less trusted corporate devices in an office.
WiFi APs are not secure enough unless you're using another layer of security on top (a VPN, for instance). It's not a matter of trusting them to properly run a WiFi network. It's a question of if there's an additional layer of security on top. Is there?
Whilst I agree with what you're saying in premise, I think if you told most consumers "hey, when you have bad reception like at a stadium, your provider will connect you over WiFi instead of 4G", they simply wouldn't care and more importantly wouldn't want to know.
This probably is "consumer-friendly" in the sense of "provides the outcome desired for most consumers".
Sensibly and originally the consumer-friendly term is desirable, also the obvious and default behaviour from providers selling products to users.
Unluckily it is over and misused for things forced through regardless of wanted or not - but benefitial for the provider for sure -, being a routine misdirection (basicly bullshit) text.
To amplify this: a recognised problem with GSM/GPRS was that although the mobile device authenticated itself to the network. This introduced MITM vulnerabilities. As a response, 3G brought in mutual authentication. Do these managed WiFi networks have mutual authentication? As far as I know, no.
Yes, WiFi offload uses the Hotspot 2.0 spec with mutual authentication (EAP-AKA or EAP-SIM typically). Both the phone and the WiFi network will mutually authenticate with the carrier’s Authentication Server.
> If you wish to communicate some real user-friendly feature better find some other phrase.
The cycle of deception never ends. If a company misuses words, they'll do it again with new ones. We must resist by sticking to the plain meaning of words.
Sigh. Would you to someone this way were they were telling you this story at a conference lunch?
I really hope not.
They have chimed in to provide further context based on their personal experience. You’ve latched onto and have subsequently read way too much into two words that they used, and tried to offset your unjustified browbeating with “friendly remark”.
If someone tells me to my face that ignoring user preferences is actually 'consumer-friendly', I will tell them to their face that it isn't. 'Friendly remark' is passive aggressive and can be left out.
Frankly, I don’t know. This thread is the first I’ve heard of it.
Carriers ask phone makers for config changes all the time. It’s possible this is a new capability that was requested by certain carriers.
To be fair, it’s also possible that the OP and I are misinterpreting what’s going on. For instance, iOS syncs your preferences across devices. Perhaps there’s some bug that’s causing the wrong setting to propagate back to this person’s phone because their iPads, etc are still set to allow “auto join”.
This happened in India. So one day mobile data was quite slow on my non-Apple phone. I asked my friend to enable hotspot on his iPhone. We were stumped when we couldn't find the "Personal Hotspot" option at all in ios settings. Called Apple support who informed us that Hotspot option is only available if the carrier enables it. They asked us to contact the carrier.
We were outraged and thought the carriers in India had suddenly decided to charge us extra for this option. Or maybe just for iPhone users. (In india, no carrier charges us extra for this option - and that is how it should be right? We are already paying more according to the bandwidth (3g/4g/5g speeds) and they also already limit how much data we can download. Imagine being charged extra for the "privilege" of sharing your data and consuming it faster!). We were prepared to yell at the carrier if they wanted more money from us for this but their customer support explained to us that this is a common complain they have with Apple iPhones, and all we needed to do was add some more info in the mobile data settings, which she provided us.
That's when we realised that it is a very American / Apple thing because the US business model of mobile phone and carriers are very different from India. In the US, most mobile phones are sold through the carriers and Apple and its competitors have to work with them closely. Whereas in India, consumers purchase their mobile phones independent of the carrier.
Every now and then, maybe every year or two, my iPhone says it needs to update mobile settings from the carrier. Fo those settings they asked you to change, it sounds like the Indian carriers probably could update them through that mechanism, or possibly that they were going to do so but hadn't got round to it yet.
That happens with indian carriers too. From what I understood, Indian carriers don't bother with the HotSpot settings because it is enabled by default for all users at their end. This works fine with Android phones but often not iPhones (in my personal experience).
Confirmed. I’m on one of the major carriers and after multiple hours, auto-join is still disabled after I turned it off. Though, I haven’t tried rebooting.
I’m in the same boat as you. It’s been off for almost 24 hours and I rebooted my device. I’m not using an eSIM like OP maybe that’s the difference, I don’t think so.
I wonder if those with the problem were to restart or reset their device, if they would still have the problem?
Answer: typically, you’ll walk away with $5m (25%) or less. VC funds usually have a 1x preference, which means the get their $10m back (plus interest), and THEN they split the remaining proceeds with you 50-50%.
So if you take VC money, you might have to double your valuation just to keep your take-home value the same.
VC makes sense if you can grow fast and very large. But assuming you have scenarios to grow slower or to a smaller size, those scenarios often turn into bad ones if you’ve taken VC funding.