What a waste of an article and opportunity. The journalist had the opportunity to sit with 30 other tech visionaries listening to them talk about their vision for the future, and he just..forgot everything they said because he was hungry, and spent most of the article writing about his own hunger?
I hate this style of lazy tech journalism where the interviewer inserts themselves into the story. It worked for Hunter S. Thompson a lot better than this writer.
I'd not take the article that literally. The author probably remembers most of what occurred. The setting and the story about the dinner party act as a vehicle for commentary on the mindset of the winners in tech and how it'll impact our future as they use their influence.
I'm guessing the fact that his own hunger was the most memorable part of the evening is an indicator of the quality of conversation available at the dinner party. Billionaires are people, too, and I'd bet they just shot the shit for three hours and dipped.
This is a fascinating article. I wonder to what, if any, degree this methodology stifles innovation because innovators aren't rewarded. It seems from the article that ATLAS did not think the Nobel Prize was awarded properly to the correct people...would that affect their research in the future?
I find it interesting how YC is trying to increase its classes sizes significantly and YC partners are traveling all around encouraging everyone to apply (which would seemingly reduce the standard for getting in, unless qualified applicants are significantly increasing every year) in light of pg's point about gaming the system. Getting into an incubator, for many applicants, is effectively like "playing house" at starting a company or gaming the system, when really what those people should be focusing on is just building/growing their product, rather than figuring how to get into an incubator before they have a validated product. Especially given the predictors on a YC app that might increase an applicant's chance of getting in (prestigious school, work experience, etc.), seems like there are still lots of opportunities for "gaming the system" in YC.
> > which would seemingly reduce the standard for getting in This statement is fairly unfounded
This is basically just speculation (and rather uncharitable speculation at that). And, plausibly, if the YC partners manage to increase the pool of applicants faster than they increase class sizes (which is plausible because the class sizes have not expanded tremendously), it would only raise the bar
> unless qualified applicants are significantly increasing every year
(Per above comment, I work at the VC that invested in Airwatch): Because Insight is a growth stage VC deploying a significant amount of capital with each investment (in AirWatch's case, it was 200M), it's aiming for virtually all hits (unlike an earlier stage VC that's aiming for 1 out of 10 of their portfolio co's to succeed wildly)-- which it almost always succeeds in achieving. This also means that it gets lower returns on its funds relative to an earlier stage VC. Given the growth stage focus, that's to be expected and its LPs prefer the reliable (and relatively substantial) upside given the fund sizes. AKA Insight's not dealing with 55%-100% losses on other investments.
I work at the VC that invested in AirWatch last year. We're happy with the investment given that it was a relatively quick and clean exit given our typical 3-5+ year exit timeline.
It's definitely not a total win - first, the return isn't actually ~50% given the $365M in installment payments and assumed unvested equity; second, your LPs committed capital to your fund expecting a certain IRR over the length of the fund (7 years i'm guessing? 10?). Getting them a low- to mid-double digit IRR over 1 year is nice, but it also means that they now have to spend money figuring out how to redeploy that capital for the next 6 years.
Sorry I wasn't clear with my pronouns (?) - "they" referred to the LPs, not Insight. Meaning that now the LPs (not Insight) have to figure out how to reinvest the capital that was returned.
lol. Oh boo-hoo, I have all this extra money sitting around that I didn't plan to have for at least 6 years and I need to figure out how to use it. Woe is me, woe is me. ;)
But yeah, I do get what you're saying about having capital that isn't properly invested = loss of potential gains... I guess. Very first-world problem though :)
Fantastic! Will this be streamed? For women not based in Bay Area (and therefore realistically women with even more limited access to female tech/entrepreneur role-models), this would be a great resource to be accessed remotely and real time, and could definitely be the catalyst for some quality Twitterverse discussion/encouragement for female tech entrepreneurs.
Great! In my experience, the most inspiring talks by female tech entrepreneurs were ones where you would have had no idea whether they were female or male based on the content of their speeches/talks (e.g. "This is how we got our first 1000 users" rather than "This is how I navigated being in an all male board room"). This conference is a great opportunity to hear the experiences and perspectives of female entrepreneurs-- I hope that its content focus is more on their achievements and strategies rather than their gender. Actionable insights like how these entrepreneurs navigated their Series A or hired their first employees give a less explicit, but (in my opinion) more resounding affirmation that women have just as much credibility to succeed and achieve in the tech space. Excited to tune in!
Dropbox really needs to accelerate its enterprise sales to justify this valuation long term. Given the tight integration that Box has with so many enterprise software solutions and Box's focus on enterprise, it'll be interesting to see how these two firms fair against each other on the public markets eventually (inevitable at this point given their valuations). Maybe just being a household name will do it for Dropbox even if Box can close more/better enterprise deals.
As a customer of Dropbox for Business, I can confidently say they have a long, difficult road ahead of them here. The way they've defined their concepts seems hostile to the very things businesses need in a product.
Even being a company that spends 50k a year gets you next to nothing wrt feature requests or support outside of what would be given to a free user, aside from speed of reply. If you want any level of control over data and sharing, you're sent over to "sookasa", a shambles of a business, or you can look at non-recommended solutions like boxcryptor (an incredible product that unfortunately carries it's own administrative overhead).
If anyone from Dropbox is reading this, the things that make my life the hardest are:
1) removing shared folders from a user's account. (Impossible unless your IT department controls every shared folder in your organization. Difficult & time consuming if they do)
2) Deleting a corporate account from all devices, removing folders. (Impossible)
3) Offering any sort of encryption (need to use 3rd party, unreliable)
4) Managing/reverting changes. Terribly ugly, difficult, and time consuming process. It's bafflingly inefficient, and in an organization of any size clueless or new hires are going to create these problems on a weekly basis.
I'm the desktop client lead for Syncplicity. We are an enterprise file synchronization solution. EMC bought us in 2012.
1) Not only do we let you remove shared folders from a user's account, I designed our remote wipe feature that can go and delete those files from users computers. (It's a best-effort approach.)
2) We also support remote wipe from devices as well.
3) I'm not sure what kind of encryption you're looking for. In general, encryption with cloud storage introduces support difficulties, and makes it hard to do web-based access. We allow you to host your files on your own servers, so that might provide enough security to address your concerns.
4) We do allow reverting a folder to a known date, but you need to contact support.
5) Unfortunately, our APIs aren't public. Our management tools are in use at many large organizations, though.
I think all your points are very solid. I would, however, disagree with you about Dropbox or any other cloud provider implementing their own, in-house, encryption.
Now, if you haven't had a chance to use nCrypted Cloud, give us a try: http://ncryptedcloud.com. We do client-side encryption and work on top of Dropbox and shortly other cloud providers. We're free for regular consumer. The enterprise clients we have a usually more interested in the integration, management and control mechanisms we have in place.
Thanks,
-V.
PS: Please feel free to contact me if I could be of any help. My email is in profile.
We'll see. The only thing that actually looks new is "sharing audit log" and an audit log is a long way off from being able to effectively control sharing. Changing someone's password to log into their dropbox, delegate ownership of the folder to a shared account helpdesk controls, and then have helpdesk go through every shared folder to remove a terminated employee, then sending the original user a password reset, then requiring a helpdesk touch for every sharing change in the future isn't a valid business workflow. Furthermore, in the past Dropbox's audit logs have been paginated lists you click through online. Not the sort of thing you can automate. Here's hoping for a change.
Also, notice the phrasing: "With separate Dropboxes for personal and work, administrators can have the control necessary to secure company data, and you can still have your most important stuff at your fingertips." That sounds suspiciously like a sentence that says nothing at all, considering it's already easy to run two dropboxes, and all the problems I listed concern fully administered business accounts.
I work on a product that solves most of these issues you mentioned. Shoot me an email at marknutter at gmail dot com if you are interested in hearing more.
What you are asking for is the "management" of distributed unencrypted data - it's probably impossible, but likely a major rethink in how we distribute data.
>> Dropbox really needs to accelerate its enterprise sales to justify this valuation long term.
My first reaction to this was "How can anything justify this valuation long-term ? It's just cloud storage FFS" Then I found they have revenue of 200m 2013 (through growth rate is slowing). Which actually surprised me - and then I realised that I am getting Dropbox links for people who would previously have mailed me a file.
It's slowly dawning on me that "cloud storage" is likely to be something as ubiquitous as smartphones - everyone will have a small slice. I still suspect 10bn is waaaay over the top, but they are the clear leader in what I revisionist style realise is going to be a big (if frustrating) industry.
Which is weird as I started at Demon Internet and we "gave away" 10MB of web space and stopped in the early naughties as no-one used it or cared :-)
yeah, I think that was why it was a big surprise to the organisation to learn most people did not care (it was obvious from usage rates but organisations don't learn what they don't measure-promote)
Maybe just being a household name will do it for Dropbox even if Box can close more/better enterprise deals.
Maybe, but "Box" evokes "Dropbox". I saw some ads for Free 50GB of storage on Box! and the very first thing I thought was, Is that slang for Dropbox?
So, with the way Box is immediately reminiscent of Dropbox, that may reduce Box's disadvantage in terms of being a household name. Even though it's a new company, it feels familiar.
You may be in for a surprise: Box was founded a few years before Dropbox (2005 I think) and is still bigger, at least in terms of number of employees. I actually had a Box account before Dropbox's. Box also seems to be more popular with enterprise.
This appears to be their UK trademark record, http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmcase/Results/4/EU005097555. [The USPTO trademark search is too blunt a tool for me to be bothered hunting that registration down at the moment.]
This http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmcase/Results/1/UK00002215537 is a registration of the trademark "box" for the relevant computer and communication classes (inter alia 9, 38, 42) which was filed about 7 years before Box UK filed their application. TBH I can't see how the later one was granted RTM status except that this one appears to be an image mark.
"Box" is widely used as a trademark and other companies are using it in the same class. Box presumably can't make the case for infringement of their mark without also making the case that they're infringing someone else's - Boks™ belonging to a Norwegian company for example. It's pretty generic as a term for storage/term in computing.
That aside Dropbox would only be problematic if there was genuine confusion. For example Box UK had a series of offerings with trademarks using "box" as a suffix. If Dropbox were considered infringing, for example, Xbox would also be infringing as they operate within the same class - Box presumably haven't challenged the use of Xbox [which probably predates their use anyway].
I'm wondering if Dropbox could start using a slogan like "Add it to the box" or "Add it to your box"
Box is sufficiently generic that further commoditizing the word box as vernacular with respect to online storage would get people to use the word box (all lowercase) associated with Dropbox first.
Unless they (knowingly or unknowingly) are going to follow Apple's iPhone path where "private", home users started pushing their employers IT departments to switch to iPhone from BB. At the beginning, iPhone was not considered "secure" for financial and medical applications, but as iPhone market share grew, Apple started investing in "enterprise" features (Outlook integration, etc) that it became feasible to do the swtich.
Every few months we get an email from our employers telling us that we cannot install Dropbox on our office computers. Eventually, some higher-up who's using Dropbox at home will make enough noise that s/he cannot sync his work docs from home that it will become "ok" to do it (and the org will switch to it)
BitTorrent Sync on mobile seems pretty amazing actually, even just for point-to-pointing data between devices.
I wouldn't want to use it for all my files, but I'm setting it up for syncing photos and content to my PCs (i.e. things which are simple and don't get multiple offline edits and the like).
I'm not convinced they are strictly going to keep the file syncing business any more than Amazon has kept to only selling books. Drew has bigger things in mind besides just making the existing product more enterprise-friendly. He used to write poker bots during college after all, and wasn't Dropbox business number 2?
Will Nest customer data be shared with Google?
Our privacy policy clearly limits the use of customer information to providing and improving Nest’s products and services. We’ve always taken privacy seriously and this will not change.
This phrasing is pretty ambiguous/vague if you ask me. "Taking privacy seriously" will not change-- though I'm sure few behemoth Internet companies, including Google, would say that they don't take privacy seriously.
I think the best summary of Nest's answer is: Yes, we will share customer data with Google. But we'll take it seriously.
If they're being acquired it's now Google's data. So the question "Will Nest customer data be shared with Google?" is asking "Will Google share Google's new customer information with Google?"
The absurdity of the question should answer itself.
There will probably be a new customer agreement once the whole thing is finalized.
For many years data was actually siloed between different products within Google (probably by accident) and there was some blowback when Google announced that they were merging all of it. So the concept of internal firewalls does exist, but given that all other Google products were merged I would assume that Nest will be as well.
It's another case of just slightly affecting your wording so that customers believe that past returns will guarantee future returns. All that is said is true for the past and the present.
(If you really want to read it in PR glasses, "this will not change" means that whatever was effective today will not change for the period up to today; in other words, the past can not be changed.)
"We (Nest the company) have a stringent privacy policy. We've (Nest the company) taken privacy seriously and our (Nest the company's) actions will not change."
Four months later, [Nest the company] is dead and a Google subsidiary dealing with home automation appears. This subsidiary is no longer bound to [Nest the company]'s promises.
Also, since privacy policies generally aren't contracts that need the approval of all parties before being altered, pointing out what today's policy limits doesn't seem particularly reassuring.
Other "internet of things", "quantified life" or whatever failed buzzword you want to call it, has similar or identical EULA. The only thing they take seriously is astroturfing to reduce the blowback from this policy.
The thinking about MOOCs and their success metrics is flawed. We wouldn't measure the success of Wikipedia by the percentage of people who've read an entire Wiki article top to bottom for a particular topic they've searched for, why would we expect the same for MOOC courses? The reality is that it's just a great social good that these courses are available online and accessible to the select few who should choose to fully utilize them.
Everyone's too fixated on the completion rates for these courses. The reality is that the people who are checking out these courses are doing it mostly out of intellectual curiosity at this point, so they have no reason to finish certificates, or finish courses, or watch lectures that they're not interested in. These people have no incentive other than to pick and choose, and to idealistically expect that people will put themselves through the downsides of education (HW, exams, watching the boring lectures when they can just pick the interesting lectures) is unrealistic, and certainly not an indication that "MOOCs have failed."
If people merely wanted to get the information out there, and make it possible to self-educate, then they would develop... well... wikis. Websites. YouTube videos explaining concepts. And that'd be it: they'd judge their success on outreach, on page views and maybe comments and emails. You'd have Khan Academy, full stop.
But that's not actually all they want. They want to know that their students understood. And to do that, they need to have the student prove their understanding as feedback. That's what completion rate really means. It is the metric that professors and teachers are accustomed to measuring themselves by. They've been trained to recognize the quality of their work based on the pass/fail rate of their class.
It would be very interesting to see what types of things people go on to do with the knowledge that they've gained from MOOC's. The value created based on knowledge that otherwise wouldn't be accessible would be a very interesting metric to try and measure
