Yeah, I love tournament poker but can't imagine playing live tournaments for a living. I played a ton online before Black Friday too, pretty successfully, and then was one of the top online tournament players when I got back into it for a bit while I was outside of the US a couple years back.
As a last hurrah before getting back to startups I traveled to one big live festival..played terrible in the $10k main event due to poor sleep after travel and got 3-outed just before the money after playing great in a satellite to the $25k. It's one thing to miss the money after playing great for ~5 hours in a $500 tournament from the comfort of your own home...consistently walking away -$15k+ in the hole after expenses for days worth of effort? No thanks.
Wow, I didn't realize the software fix hadn't been rolled out prior to yesterday's crash. Yikes. Also count me among those who went through the rest of this year's (already booked) flights this morning to ensure I'm not on one of these things.
As far as I know, most airlines are seeing the 737-MAX 8 and its predecessor, the 737-800, as interchangeable (or they did until yesterday), so I doubt they will be able to say with certainty which aircraft type will operate a given flight...
Yeah, in my case it was a pretty straightforward situation with 1 airline not having the 8max at all (despite an article saying otherwise?) and my other flights being on 737-700's. I read a fair bit about this whole mess today and saw some posts saying there was a way to use SeatGuru to reliably distinguish between Max 8 / legacy 737-800, but I didn't need to dig that much myself and as you noted especially for flights far out, they can't guarantee equipment won't be swapped.
The MAX is pretty easy to identify visually. The engine nacelles have those chevrons like the 787 and the APU has a conical exhaust (look at the back of an older 737 and it's flat like a screwdriver turned sideways).
Sorry to see this. My last year of college, with absolutely zero experience in tech I tried to build a fintech startup that needed seamless processing of micro-payments and so I pinged Tristan in the early days of Square's beta program when they were just shipping out card readers asking if they might expose an API in the near future. Small interaction, but he got back to me and coming from the Midwest, that was my first experience with how open Silicon Valley can be, with a co-founder at one of the hottest startups taking the time to respond to some random college kid interested in kicking the tires on his project. My project went nowhere but I had fun exploring the tech involved, decided to learn to code, made it out here and am now running a venture-backed startup after a couple engineering jobs. I thought just the fact that he responded was really cool at the time and try not to blow off cold emails like that as a result.
I went to high school with him. That's how he was with me as well when I randomly said to him one day, "Hey you seem better at this computer programming thing than me. Let's hang out." I too credit Tristan with helping me transition from computer programmer novice to computer programmer professional.
UberEats has been pretty amazing for me support-wise. They've always made it right when I've had issues - and there typically aren't issues. I use it a ton - 3+ times/week - and of those times I've had issues, only 2 required me pushing them to do the right thing, and one of those was when I was traveling in Stockholm where they'd just rolled it out.
Postmates, on the other hand, has absolutely disastrous support and consistently laughable "resolutions" as the parent comment noted. Postmates is one of those things that felt like magic the first time I used it in the early days when they were the only game in town, but they just got so surpassed by competitors to the point where I hate it. Their "taxes+fees" are ridiculous for an inferior product. UberEats gives me a flat $4.99 plus taxes that actually reflect legitimate taxes. Postmates, on the other hand, is a minimum of $3.99, often more, plus maybe it's surging, plus the "taxes and fees" is often some obscene amount (Tacolicious seems to have a $4-5 "fee" on Postmates), oh and if you're treating yourself to a small fast food order there will be another $2 "small order fee."
The last straw for me was when they started adding "walking" postmates, who would literally walk an order from ~40 minutes away when I'm paying them $10-ish to deliver it. Then when I complained and (half-jokingly) suggested they give people paying $10 for delivery the option to not have a walking postmate deliver it because my food was extremely cold, I got the typical Postmates support brush-off. Utter joke of a service.
UberEats grosses me out though. I've been in way too many Uberpools where the driver has food on the floor of the front seat and asks the passengers to not step on the food... Just doesn't seem sanitary. At least the other services seem to have insulated bags for transportation.
It was definitely an UberEats order--I asked them. And it's happened more than once so I'm guessing Uber doesn't have any strict policy about putting the food in a closed/sanitary container for transporting.
Yeah, they definitely put up their own money - it's also public record :)
This is how reporters know a firm is raising another fund (beyond just expecting them to every 2 years). The amount/percentage of the total fund that the partners pay in themselves varies by firm and fund.
So the Benchmark partners have 16% of that particular fund, though keep in mind VC funds have different economics than just a straight up equity split. 16% is pretty high compared to some other firms I've reviewed, but I admittedly haven't taken the time to sample widely.
Travis has lost the support of Ryan and Garrett apparently (per several reports over the last month/Garrett's statement/Ryan stepping down from operating role). Seems like a man on an island at this point.
I would doubt Uber's board wants a "serial entrepreneur". Uber is going to be a $12-15B (revs) company this year, potentially with an impending IPO. That's two orders of magnitude larger than Robin Chase's experience at ZipCar. I would bet they're looking for someone with experience at (growing) companies in the $15-30B range, probably from a logistics-centric industry.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that a guy that founded a massive company and drove it to unparalleled success only to be forced out while in the early stages of mourning his mother's unexpected death (and caring for his severely injured father) has not gone quietly into the night.
I think the passenger rape records issue was the straw that broke the camel's back and he had to go, but I don't think it needed to be done the way it was. Sure, there's a decent argument that he only has one speed and would be meddling regardless (as he supposedly was while he was supposed to be "on leave"), but doing it the way they did made Travis lashing out once he'd had a bit of time to process it an absolute 100% certainty.
You're completely eliding all the scandals and scummy behavior by various members of Uber under his watch. And while I sympathize with what his family is facing in their personal tragedy, that it occurred at the same time those various scandals came to a head is merely a coincidence in timing, if an unfortunate one for Kalanick.
Check the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph - I agree that he needed to be replaced due to the multitude of issues. I just think the execution of it was very poor coming within a week of his mother's death.
Remember, he was already "on leave" - whether he was honoring it or not. By public accounts, he wasn't. So the board said "ok, he's not going to change, let's remove him." My argument is they should've given him a couple weeks and then sat him down and had the "the well has broken, we need a new face for the good of the company, please support this" talk. Instead, they blindsided him at a hotel that he'd flown to halfway across the country to try to help the company (recruiting a COO) while his father's still severely injured. Had they done it in a more humane way, they might have been able to secure more cooperation in the long-term, and they could've begun to quietly get their ducks in a row during that 2-3 week grace period before giving him the ultimatum. Instead, they executed it at a moment of maximum weakness for him, which got the job done in the moment but set themselves up for him to go scorched earth in the long-term, undermining the whole exercise. Again, I do think they needed to fire him, but they'd bought a bit of time with him "going on leave" and I think it might have been more effective had they leveraged it rather than going for the immediate KO.
Perhaps we would've ended up here regardless, but maybe not.
Can we address the fact that Travis not honouring his leave was him calling for the resignation of a board member who practically personified the issues surrounding Uber at the time?
>Earlier in the day at an Uber staff meeting to discuss the company’s culture, Arianna Huffington, another board member, talked about how one woman on a board often leads to more women joining a board.
>“Actually, what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking,” Mr. Bonderman responded.
It seemed like uber was receiving weekly PR body blows up to that point. Bad stuff.
If you decide to fire somebody, does it ever make sense to wait? Not layoff, but firing an individual. If it's come to that, you pull the trigger. it's just messy, a reasonable period or mourning is different between different people and it's not clear that he was actually doing that anyways. Weeks will matter to the future valuation for the new CEO.
> My argument is they should've given him a couple weeks and then sat him down and had the "the well has broken, we need a new face for the good of the company, please support this" talk.
If we think that the board had not already had that talk, several times, months before... that's a sign that the board's even more incompetent.
As a last hurrah before getting back to startups I traveled to one big live festival..played terrible in the $10k main event due to poor sleep after travel and got 3-outed just before the money after playing great in a satellite to the $25k. It's one thing to miss the money after playing great for ~5 hours in a $500 tournament from the comfort of your own home...consistently walking away -$15k+ in the hole after expenses for days worth of effort? No thanks.