I was really excited to open this thinking it would be a thought experiment on how to restart all of Google's services if they ever went down all at the same time. Was mildly disappointed to find that this was about starting the next Google.
According to Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" publication -- it was 60-80 cents on the dollar:
Hedge funds are offering to buy startups’ deposits stranded at Silicon Valley Bank for as little as 60 cents on the dollar, pitching expensive but crucial lifelines to founders unable to access their cash after the lender collapsed yesterday, people familiar with the matter said.
Firms better known for investing in distressed debt, including Oaktree, one of the people said, are fanning out to startups in the wake of the bank’s failure and seizure by the Federal Insurance Deposit Corp. on Friday. Its collapse left hundreds of startups — as well as the venture funds that backed them — unable to access their cash to meet payroll and other expenses.
Bids range from 60 to 80 cents on the dollar, the people said, reflecting a range of expectations for how much of the uninsured deposits — those that exceed the FDIC’s $250,000-per-customer cap — will ultimately be recovered once the bank’s assets are sold or wound down.
The primary difference is that they decided (like SAP and a few others) that rather than solving a particular vertical well they would produce a generic thing that could be used to tackle all business types, and then build an ecosystem of consultants and providers that sell and implement the product for them. So you have a thing that was originally for sales people now doing the loan application and credit approval workflow at banks[1] for example.
So the tradeoff is most b2b saas products which are special-purpose tend to be easier to deploy and more directly suitable for their purpose vs salesforce being a "do-everything but maybe not that well" solution.
[1] https://www.ncino.com/ have built an entire business out of getting salesforce to do this
Speaking from personal experience the "there's no stigma in layoffs" bit is not always true. Many places have asked me why I was laid off upfront with an assumption that it was due to performance reasons unless I'm able to prove otherwise.
> birth control became commonplace and socially acceptable
Birth control is not a standard practice everywhere. (And its history is ancient, with "social acceptability" involving some cultures and times - as opposed to being some "general state of things".)
The fertility rate in Niger is over 6.5 children per women; that of South Korea is near 1; the rounded quintiles are 1.5 .. 4.0 .
I think the answer is that the marginal benefits of a better ISA were less than the marginal benefits of better node process and faster iteration that Intel enjoyed. But for various reasons Intel no longer enjoys those advantages. With TSMC Apple has the process advantage, and their smartphone business has given them both the motivation and cash to iterate their architecture faster than Intel. The simpler ISA has compounded those advantages.
"Politics in the state is in many ways closed off to different ideas. We grew weary of California’s intolerant far left, which would rather demonize opponents than discuss honest differences of opinion."
I disagree with much in this article, but I do agree with this specific point. I've had many conversations in San Francisco that have turned me off from discussing politics.
It's very difficult for some to accept that others can have more moderate viewpoints on certain issues. Just because one doesn't agree with another to the extent they do doesn't mean there isn't a middle ground.
I am not sure it is a culture “sneaking” anywhere as much as openly and aggressively taking over. This is very true at least in Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix. The intolerant far-left employees openly discuss personal politics on employee mailing lists and forums, unprofessionally spending paid company time on activism, strategizing on how they can control the company and use it to further their political agendas. They achieve their political ends by pressuring executives, pressuring HR, altering the company’s products, pushing policies (both internal and external) that support their views, etc. It is very hard to escape - you see it in mandatory “equity training”, in work conferences that invite far left speakers, and even in trivial things like where to get food for a team lunch (a vocal employee might demand that no money be spent on businesses whose owners don’t pass their purity test). Given how vocal and ruthless activist employees can be (due to the psychological safety of echo chambers), there is no room for any other view whatsoever. It is exhausting, unprofessional, and a big reason why claims of bias from big tech companies are real, not imagined.
I'll add HashiCorp to that list. When we were small, we had #random and other general Slacks where being open and yourself was the norm.
Then we grew a little more, the left-wing activist employees started flooding in and things quickly got ugly. You highlighted and chronicled almost exactly what I've seen over the past four years I've been at HashiCorp. Vocal and ruthless is spot on.
Now they're ushering in the mandatory "equity training", and they removed the open channels.
I've been looking for a new job for the past two weeks, will probably leave at the end of the year.
As a Silicon Valley company employee, I don’t think talking about politics at work is professional. But whenever I hear an opinion that is different from far left, most of time it has discrimination. I guess as a SV immigrant SWE and father , I probably only care about a limited scope of political topics. But what can be the middle ground between discrimination and non-discrimination?
I don't know about your views or any of the opinions you are referring to obviously, so take this as benignly as possible. Have you questioned that what you perceive as discriminatory may have a far left bias?
The whole point of a progressive tax system is to distribute wealth from the wealthy to the poor. A very small percentage of the population controls the vast majority of the wealth in this country. I'd argue that the wealthy (myself included) should be paying _more_ taxes.
With that said, in California, there's a lot of problems that can't be solved by simply throwing more money at it -- for instance, homelessness.
