Within the first minute of his talk at XOXO back in 2012, he mentioned 4chan being about anonymity and ephemerality, not a blanket endorsement for freedom of all type of speech.
If you haven't heard it, it's worth a listen (20:59).
Anecdotally, it seems like they are moving out of there and moving in here. (Disclaimer: there's an alarming number of people here that are opposed to that. I'm not one of them.)
Thing to consider, though. There still isn't nearly the concentration of VCs (and thus networks) here as there are there. Depending on where you're at with your project/startup/company, that's got to be a sizable consideration when thinking about moving to/moving from the valley.
Anecdotally, the Northwest has been complaining about people from CA moving up and "ruining the place" for decades. (see: "Californians driving up our housing costs", "Californians don't know how to drive", etc. I grew up in the Seattle suburbs, and it was a common refrain in the 80s and 90s, and I'm sure it goes back at least to the 1962 World's Fair, if not the early days of Boeing.
Also anecdotally, I moved to the Bay Area, my parents moved (back) to SoCal after 40 years in the Northwest grey. Plus, I have 4 dot-com era friends who have moved from the Seattle tech boom to the Bay Area tech boom, all in their late 20s/early 30s (so not just-out-of-college types), and I know a few others who are considering the same. And I don't know a soul from here who moved north, except for people who came down here for college and then returned home.
I guess it's like they say, "the plural of anecdote is not 'data'".
I'm having a hard time understanding this, but comments here and other places make it very apparent that most users use Foursquare in different ways. That makes growth and innovation quite the challenge.
What doesn't make sense to me: at the core, users that (still) use Foursquare use it to check in. From there we vary, but we check in. More importantly, that's the perception around the app. Changing perceptions with an existing brand is difficult. Why move the existing user base to a new app built around checkins (Swarm) and try to rebrand the checkin app (Foursquare) to attract new users and compete with Yelp?
The devil will be in the details. The Apple lease program to me isn't interesting because a) the minimum lease term is 24 months and b) the minimum order is $3,000.
If I have an option to subscribe on 6-12 month terms and upgrade my machine on each release cycle, that'd be really interesting.
You'll pay for a shorter lease term with a much higher monthly payment. Depreciation isn't linear; both a car and a computer will lose value much faster during the first 6 months than during the second 6 months (much less months 12-18.) So if you lease for say, 6 months rather than 24, the rate has to reflect that higher depreciation (plus the risk and cost associated with reselling the item at the end of the lease, spread over a much smaller number of periods.) I could easily see it costing double the rate Apple charges for a 24 month lease to rent for 6 months.
Example: $2000 machine that depreciates to $1500 after 6 months, 1200 after 12 months, $800 after 24 (keep in mind much of the value loss happens when you "drive it off the lot" and turn it from new into used). $100 overhead on accepting the return, cleaning it up and reselling it to extract that value.
6 mo lease: ($2000 - $1500 + $100) / 6 mo = $100/mo
12 mo lease: ($2000 - $1200 + $100) / 12 mo = $66/mo
24 mo lease: ($2000 - $800 + $100) / 24 mo = $50/mo
(Yes, I"m ignoring interest here. But rates are low.)
The coach/player metaphor is an extremely weak analogy for Software Engineering. Sports aren't changing nearly as rapidly as software engineering is. If you don't watch a soccer/basketball/football/baseball for 10 years and come back, it's basically the same game. The last 10 years of software engineering have changed so much with mobile, map-reduce, responsive design, P/B/S/I/A - aaS offerings, dev-ops tools, cloud computing systems, new languages, etc...
I remember a specific example of a manager I had (great Guy) who wanted to build a searchable database of public certificates. When he asked me about what we should build, I said -- Just make one search box (like Google) and allow them to type in whatever they want and we can do the parsing on the backend. He counters saying, well I think we should go with the 50+ input form (That's what he was used to building on all of his old projects). If it was now, I would definitely be more vocal about his software design decisions because he was just rusty and not in touch with the current state of design/dev. I actually got permission to build both interfaces, since it wasn't really much work to build the single search box, and 95% of the usage came though the single search box.
I don't think managers need to program, but they need to be doing the equivalent of watching tape, studying other teams, understanding new/changing game rules, learning tradeoffs of different equipment, and keeping up with their domain. All of my experiences with managers that are active in the development community have been amazing. Managers that weren't have always been terrible.
>The coach/player metaphor is an extremely weak analogy for Software Engineering. Sports aren't changing nearly as rapidly as software engineering is. If you don't watch a soccer/basketball/football/baseball for 10 years and come back, it's basically the same game. The last 10 years of software engineering have changed so much with mobile, map-reduce, responsive design, P/B/S/I/A - aaS offerings, dev-ops tools, cloud computing systems, new languages, etc...
Watching? perhaps. Coaching? No. And that is why I don't think the analogy is weak.
I'm very familiar with two sports, basketball and football. I'm intimately familiar with football. The subtle changes that most fans, particularly casual fans, don't see is what makes coaches who they are and what makes great coaches worth their weight in gold. Not to mention coaches that can get the most out of specific skillsets of players[1].
As just one example. The pistol became all the rage last year with several running QBs running it for their teams. The good teams could, for the most part, coach their players on this style of offense and how to counter it. It was a different style of offense that wasn't used in the NFL and the teams and players had to react...the coaches had to to actually coach them on how to play the zone reads etc etc.
Even further, a coach has to be ready to adapt mid-game, mid-drive and in situations. Game conditions dictate them be ready for quite a bit and ready to coach up their players at an instant...or better still...have previously coached them on such a situation. The game, to the fan, might look the same, but not to the coaches.
This is why for people who are familiar with coaching and managing software, they do hold up. Both are at their core about leading a group of people to a common goal, articulating the goal, the way and (sometimes) the how.
So, in summation, you still don't want your coach running routes. You want your coach getting ready for the game and coaching everyone in that manner.
[1] - I mentioned specific skillsets of players. The pistol was an example of this. You have young, inexperienced mobile QBs who can do a few things well. You adapt to their skills b/c you know, while they have potential, they don't have Peyton Manning's situational football IQ yet (if ever) and ability to read defenses. So you simplify, mold the system around their skills. Good managers do this with developers as well. A manager is not going to just "off you go" to a developer. They need to know strengths and weaknesses. Even with my experienced managers, directors and such, I have a firm grasp on personalities, trigger points, strengths and weaknesses.
If Spotify is worth $4B, that means the labels have made an "extra" ~$600M in addition to the 70% royalty. Over its lifetime so far Spotify has paid out around $1B in royalties, so an extra $600M is pretty significant.
(I also work at Facebook) We have systems that block spammy apps that are 99.9% of the time really incredibly sophisticated and get a ~0% false positive rate.
This is a case of the 0.1%. :( Folks here are scrambling to undo this. Very, very sorry. Things should now (17:47 PT) be all set. Please do comment on the bug link if you're still having issues.
This bug did not disable all dev accounts. My personal one stayed active, the one tied to work did not. I'd love to hear a technical post mortem from Facebook, but that's pretty unlikely.
And just for clarification, this has been marked as resolved.
