

Waze Co-Founder Skips Google to Try Startup World Again - gwendolynregina
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-24/waze-co-founder-skips-google-to-try-startup-world-again.html

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jack-r-abbit
That article has four links to other articles but not a link to the company it
is profiling. I hate when they do that.

[https://www.feex.com/](https://www.feex.com/)

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privong
It is annoying. But on the flip side, if the link was included, someone would
have invariably commented that the "article reads like an ad". The authors
can't win.

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jonathanjaeger
I disagree. I think it's MUCH worse when, for example, you read an article
about a Kickstarter project on Mashable or TechCrunch only to find that
clicking on the hyperlink leads to other articles on those sites about
Kickstarter and not the actual project link. I think those sites have gotten
better at linking directly when commenters complain.

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privong
Oh, I wasn't saying one was better than the other. Just observing that no
matter what one did, someone would be unhappy about it :)

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up_and_up
> the 49-year-old

Given the prevalence 'youth worship' articles on here lately it is good to
point his age out to people.

Get out there and make an impact regardless of your age or situation.

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josefresco
Like you I immediately thought of the recent ageism articles on HN and
specifically PG's comment about the "cut off" age for consideration for tech-
investors being 32.

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harel
What a silly thing to have a 'cut off' age for techies. Like a good Single
Malt or Wine, we get better and better with time. Age delivers on certain
pragmatism not found in the youth of today :)

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mathattack
Awesome idea. The fees on 401Ks are awful. My company has fees on index funds
4 times the competition. When I asked why, I was told, "Because that's the
only way we can make money." Umm...... Fidelity does fine with 1/4 the fees,
so does Vanguard.

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technotony
This could be a scale effect. Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost
business to run, so if your company only has 1/4 the assets under management
then their comment might be true.

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zhte415
> Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run

It is, but not an overly expensive one. I worked for a couple of years in an
asset management operation where we managed a variety of funds, all with
different risk-return mixes. The smallest fund was a few hundred thousand
pounds, the largest around three billion. Total assets under management were
about five billion pounds, the most complex of which was a pension fund.

Front office consisted myself (the most junior member of the front office)
plus 4 others, including the chief investment manager. Middle office consisted
one person who was also the back office manager, and back office, including
the department secretary, was four people.

Total department budget was less than a million per year - including office
rent, taxes, information services (Bloomberg, Datastream, etc) yet we
substantially outperformed (usually within one standard deviation,
occasionally outside) performance and risk budgets, as they were defined to us
by trustees. And we worked eight hour days, a rarity in the City at any
institution.

In hindsight, what we did was quite simple - invest in what we thought was
wise, and not worry too much. Much mainstream investment management seems to
be embodiment-in-large of the Peter Principal: create work in order to seem
busy / important. The upside of the Peter Principal is to collect large
bonuses by virtue of seeming important, of which none of us did, as it was
simply a job - look after the organisation's funds and the pensioners'
pensions. This organisation was somewhat unique in both mandate and people
attracted to it.

tl;dr Fund management costs, for a collection of a pretty good performing
funds, was 0.02%. This excludes broker fees and management fees of indirectly
invested funds.

Byline: I am of course aware that having a single middle office manager is far
from ideal, and that the middle office manager managing the back office is bad
from an operational control perspective. This was changed after I left.

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d0ugie
Has Google done anything with Waze other than buy it, or with Google Maps,
incorporating some Waze treats? Haven't seen any noteworthy changes to either
Waze or Google Maps that one might have (optimistically) expected as becoming
both feasible and worthwhile from the deal.

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snarf
I'd be really surprised if they do a whole lot with it. My impressions was
that the main reason they bought Waze was to keep Facebook from acquiring it.

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eliben
Your comment looks really silly in light of the two directly above it.

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Tloewald
A little more than [the customary] six months, but not much.

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philip1209
Are golden handcuffs not typical at that deal size?

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brown
2-4 years is standard. I bet he left a lot of cash on the table.

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oznathan
They did a successful pilot in Israel this past year. A lot of people use them
and saved significant amounts of money. They use the Waze founder for PR but
he is not the real story, the service is.

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coreymgilmore
The guy has drive, can't doubt that.

