The overwhelming opinion* seems to be that he's brilliant at what he does. The post said it's obvious he's bad at business. If it's really that obvious, how did everyone else get things so wrong?
A more transparent post would have said something like "Based on my world view, assumptions, and preconceptions, he's bad at business. The common narrative of Dorsey is XYZ. Here's why that's wrong."
Saying "it's obvious" when you're expressing an uncommon opinion doesn't set a good tone for a discussion. Makes it seem like "I'm smart they're dumb I don't need to explain my statement that runs counter to conventional wisdom".
* Not saying it's right, just that this is what the Twitter board / media / insiders / VCs /etc. seem to think.
That's not actually a response to my statement, even though it may be true. You're just providing an excuse to downvote without bothering to engage in discussion as to why to downvote. I want to hear the reasons for the downvote.
Just thinking I can downvote and not respond because of the "obvious" problems of the statement is just as bad as your example of saying "it's obvious" about an uncommon opinion is not good for discussion. You're just telling me "it's obvious" why the other guy's "it's obvious" is wrong.
Back up the bus - I didn't downvote. I start a new HN account well before I ever get that invested.
There really wasn't an argument put forth beyond "he's bad at business, can't you see it's obvious". His tone and lack of content other than an unsubstantiated opinion are why there was no interesting discussion.
I never said "it's obvious" in any way shape or form, but I do believe this is my stop. Have a nice day.
> His tone and lack of content other than an unsubstantiated opinion are why there was no interesting discussion.
It was not unsubstantiated. If I define a good business as a business with profits, this definition has a lot of substance. Jack Dorsey obviously achieved a lot of personal success and money from Twitter, I am not blind about his amazing achievements. Amazing because they are statistically difficult to obtain at this scale. BUT, being a public company is a different stage of the game. As an startup you can be amazing while the finances are hidden but when you are public you need to build a sustainable business and this is not happening.
I think of it like a rough heuristic. It's a coarse-grained, single metric, but it does have some meaning if you don't use it as the end-all, be-all.
Replying to your comment made me wonder: what would a better metric be? The requirements are that it has to be numeric, a single number, and represent the "success" of any company, in all lifecycles (before fit, growth, mature, yellowpages, etc.)
If Company A hires lots of juniors while Company B only hires seniors, Company A is going to need a lot more people to achieve the same level of 'success'. So using this as a 'rough heuristic' would suggest Company A is doing much better than Company B, even though their wage bills may be about the same. What's more, we know nothing about the performance of either company.
In another scenario, Company C has outsourced most of its operations work, while Company D does it in-house, so Company D has more employees. Again, this tells us nothing about performance.
What's wrong with using net income as a single number?
While I don't think the actual number is $16/hr per the calculations in the rest of this thread, I do feel strongly that $16-21 / hr for a largely unskilled labor force is perfectly reasonable. (Not for SF, but SF isn't the majority of the country.)
Add in the flexibility of the hours (most drivers I query list that as their #1 thing they like most), and the lifestyle provided seems very reasonable.
It's worth remembering that a lot of these folks are generally service workers. In their other work, they get paid shit (usually close to min. wage), they get treated like shit, and they are at the mercy of the schedule maker. That last point cannot be underemphasized: little fiefs of power bestowed upon the scheduler make for really ugly fast food office politics.
Unbranded generally means generic, off-brand usually signifies it's branded, but not with a recognizable brand. Generic products are generally cheaper, but off-brand products can try to masquerade as higher-market items (especially when you're dealing with a purchase as infrequent as a mattress) and can claim higher margins.
What would you call something made in the 3rd shift? Where they use the same materials and factory they use for making branded gear, but don't put the brand on it?
Generic or unbranded, depending on how the product is labeled. The thing with those two labels is that, since you don't have someone actively trying to maintain those brands, you as a customer don't know if they're actually using the same materials and factory (or at least that's the theory behind why a brand would be worthwhile at all).
But don't we have to create those laws, sometimes? I'm thinking about the difference between homicide degrees, which include a subjective perspective: the intent of the accused.
We do develop standards for manslaughter versus murder 1, but my understanding is that the accused killer's mindset (their "intent") is an important distinction.
Not parent, but here's how I learned to understand snapchat.
Think like a younger Millennial (18-25 right now). Their whole social lives have been in public on FB/etc. They're going through a horribly awkward time in their lives, but it's all public. When they act like an immature kid, or aren't sexy, or whatever, that is recorded for all time.
So they feel incredible pressure to be sexy/fit/cool/smart/doing interesting things. People take hundreds of selfies to find the one that meets (what they think) their peers expect.
The pressure to be cool and attractive is intense. With FB, there is no escape.
Now Snapchat offers the opposite. People can "let their hair down", not have to look sexy or be cool, because the message is just temporary.
Most of the time I want candids, not portraits. FB made everything a portrait (intended for consumption by future selves/others).
SnapChat brought it back to the present by making it temporary.
Israel is also a fairly close ethnicity, nothing like the diversity here in the US. And they are engaged in a struggle with a specific ethnicity that they can identify.
The US has so much more diversity in population and enemies that profiling would be less effective, more annoying/discriminatory, because the "us/them" divide is less clear here.
Israel profiles single white young European women as higher risk than "middle-eastern" young men based on past experience.
Israel is also very diverse ethnically even if you take the Jewish population, N. African, Black, Arab, European, Asia, Indian all Jews of various ethnic backgrounds.
The vast majority of airline related attacks against Israel were not perpetrated by Arabs, and the only one on Israeli soil was executed by a Japanese.
While I'm sure Israel's profiling metrics do take in ethnicity by all accounts it has little to no weight and metrics based on past attacks, your behavior and more importantly your general background and travel history play a much bigger role.
But that said the US can't adopt the Israeli approach, the security check at Ben Gurion might look fast but it's because they have more security staff than JFK and a 3 (4 if you count the fact that Israeli security gets the passenger manifest before any flight takes place) layered security screening that starts way before you even reach the terminal.
Israel's approach can work in the US and everywhere else but it would cost billions to implement and bloat the size of the TSA to rival the size of the US Armed forces, the TSA is already about twice the size if not bigger than the FBI, it's bigger than the CIA and NSA combined but it's not even remotely big enough to do the same thing Israel does given number of passengers US airports handle each year.
V interesting, thank you for your comment! It sounds like you have some knowledge in this area. Anything you'd recommend for me to read in the 30 minute timeframe that would level my knowledge up?
My GF used to be singled out on every flight to Israel, so I did some checking; the last attempted attack on an Israeli airline was a when a Syrian agent got a British woman pregnant and convinced her to fly to Israel not knowing that she had a bomb in her suitcase, in the majority of previous attacks European women often disguised as pregnant were used to smuggle the weapons past security (allot of Arab terrorist organizations of the from the 60's till the 80's were socialist and were aligned with the various left wing terrorist organizations in Europe).
About 5 years ago when I was living in Israel I've had an encounter with airport security myself I flew out to Amsterdam for a project, the project was canceled but as the flight was at 4am and the news arrived over the weekend I wasn't notified until I've actually landed.
So I didn't even leave the airport I just went to the KLM counter and booked a flight that left 3 hours later. When I landed 3 security agents were waiting for me at the door of the aircraft they had my details and they pulled me aside and questioned me about why did i book the flight last moment and why did i book the flight one way and some other details and it took me about 15 min to clear everything up.
To me this shows that they get notifications of last minute changes to the passenger lists as well as flag anyone who buys a one way ticket, both combined with potentially the fact that I flew out less than 12 hours before I got back probably raised enough red flags to come and question me immediately.
On that flight my carry on was searched after I landed and I was notified that my checked in baggage was not put on the flight and will be delivered to me later that day or the day after.
My personal theory is that they've suspected that I went to another airport that might have been compromised to get something that could be used in an attack at Ben Gurion.
The airline security is definitely top notch but the entire intelligence apparatus behind it won't be sustainable on any larger scale.
The TSA can't afford hire 200,000 agents, the TSA can't afford to hire agents from elite military units and US intelligence and the TSA can't afford to have a college degree as a requirement for all but the most entry level jobs which them selves would require a hefty LEO/Military service background, and I don't think that running a background check on virtually every passenger in the US would be doable on both practical and legal grounds.
I'm way out of my league, but would it be possible to distribute a Docker container with all the boilerplate? Tutorial users could run that at the start, then do the "fun stuff".
> I totally get your reluctance to rely on 3rd party, but the question is more for people who already do rely on 3rd party such as AWS or Azure.
Just a little input: Amazon and Microsoft are well known companies. I (and my superiors) think they can support us. Your company that I haven't heard of is not.
It may be dumb sounding, but I won't get in trouble if I used AWS and something went wrong. How could I have known?
With an unknown company, if something goes wrong, it's on me because I selected that vendor.
A more transparent post would have said something like "Based on my world view, assumptions, and preconceptions, he's bad at business. The common narrative of Dorsey is XYZ. Here's why that's wrong."
Saying "it's obvious" when you're expressing an uncommon opinion doesn't set a good tone for a discussion. Makes it seem like "I'm smart they're dumb I don't need to explain my statement that runs counter to conventional wisdom".
* Not saying it's right, just that this is what the Twitter board / media / insiders / VCs /etc. seem to think.