I believe your generalizations go too far. The "crazy" founder who succeeds despite all odds is only one archetype. There are others. Many outliers are successful by creating new markets.
This guy (T.A. McCann) has successfully built and sold a startup, so he doesn't lack the will -- he just lacks the will for this business.
Markets can be so tough that the time/cash/energy to succeed in them means the opportunity is not as attractive as others.
You're right. That's true the before the acquisition and after. Your employer can say you have to accept a reduced package or get fired.
The difference is the starting point of the negotiation. If the acquirer wants to keep you, the "right" language in the option plan means the starting point is your original comp package. You have to explicitly agree to a reduced package for it to change. If you have the "wrong" language, there is simply no deal in place to start the negotiation.
The author notes (a) ways Harvard could spend its money that might have more public benefit and (b) that other non-profits are more deserving of donations. Even if all true, that doesn't mean it should be stripped of its non-profit status. Perfect management to optimize public benefit isn't the standard for whether an organization gets non-profit status.
The more interesting argument is about what organizational traits our government should require in order to be blessed with special treatment.
We will not spam your contacts, sell your or your contacts' email addresses or personal data, or otherwise sell data about you to third parties.
Down the road, we will offer premium plans with professional search tools. An example use case is if you want to reach CIOs in northern California at companies greater than 100 people, we will identify those people and tell you the best person in your network to ask for an intro. At the moment, we're focused on growing the size of the network and making it valuable for users.
One other subtle point I wanted to mention: We don't expose email addresses via the product. The only people you can email are those for which you already have an email address. The same is true for people trying to contact you. So you won't get a bunch of spam recruiter emails.
Re permissions: We use IMAP to access email data, so there is no granularity. It's all or nothing. We never move or delete messages and only send messages with your express permission. (Google offers a Gmail API that has slightly more granular permissions, but it is not peformant for our use case.)
Re deleting an account: Yes! You can delete your account and all of your data from our system with a couple of clicks. You can do that from your account page.
Interesting research that seems directionally true, but I wonder if this overstates the case. The sample set is people who are willing to download an Android app and share data with Stanford researchers. Those people likely have more info online than the average person.
Hey. One of the authors here. Our data set for this experiment is not the set of numbers owned by people willing to download the app, but the set of numbers that they have called and received calls from. This means that a large amount of the data set is things like spam numbers, voicemail numbers, and customer service numbers. Its not too hard to figure out that you bank with Bank X if you are receiving Two Factor Authentication texts from them, for example.
There are potential biases in the data set, but we don't think that they dramatically affect the results that we are seeing. Your mother probably receives spam phone calls and reminder texts from airlines just like I do.
The article only seems to suggest you matched names to phone numbers by googling or paying to look them up, I read nothing about meta research of putting together profiles of people based on data/sms traffic and calls they received.
A future project you guys should attack Basebands and see what kind of evil you can do because our govts are already doing it to track us
We used data collected from voluntary users' phone logs as our phone number data set. This means that if Joe called number X a few weeks ago and then decided to participate in our study, number X was in our database. We then used a couple techniques too see how well we could identify who number X belonged to.
We didn't put together actual profiles of users, though that is a possible next step. However, I think it is clear that putting together profiles of users is possible given how easy it is to identify who you are calling and receiving calls from.
If your friend knows of instances where Silicon Valley firms (1) double-billed travel time or (2) billed as you stated in the value billing section, consider reporting those to the CA State Bar. These are ethical violations.
This is important advice. Spend time finding someone you trust and that you feel comfortable talking to. You won't run into any of the unethical things mentioned in this post with a good attorney. In fact, some of those things are against the rules of professional conduct.
Another important point: You can always negotiate your bill. It is very common to pay less than the billed amount.
Full disclosure: I'm a former WSGR attorney. Now a WSGR client.
How do you find someone you can trust? Or do you mean someone who appears trustworthy?
Also noting that the parent comment says that they stopped checking the bills. There are cases in business where people know this dynamic and once they aren't being checked they tend to take more chances. Hence even the person who relates "he is great and I trust him" may not be aware of what is currently happening with billing (if they are not checking).
I agree that that is the standard and typical advice that people follow.
But people tend to, in addition to doing the subjective "good work" [1], they refer people that they like personally or who encourage the type of relationship building that leads to more work. [2]
Also, in theory at least, if an attorney ends up being referred a great deal and has a nice book of business they would raise their rates and/or push work off on subordinates, right?
[1] And how, with legal work, do you know if it's "good" until the shit hits the fan or there is a problem?
[2] Even physicians are susceptible to this (but less so). I don't want to know who you like personally or who you know but who you think does a really good job as a clinician. And maybe you hate that person or their personality. That's fine. I just want someone who is good I don't care if you like having him over for dinner. (Had a girlfriend once whose father was a surgeon and they were always entertaining the family practice doctors so they could get referrals. He was a jerk to his family but he was sweet as sugar to the other physicians who he needed.
I'd say, try to identify people in your network who are sophisticated legal clients, who have engaged substantively with a number of attorneys over time, especially if they themselves are also attorneys. They should be able to distinguish attorneys who do great work and make their clients happy. When they recommend an attorney, ask for details about what impressed them with that attorney's work and service.
Agree. The way I identified my attorney was by asking someone who wrote a legal blog (this was years ago) in my industry (blog writer who was a tenured law professor) who they would recommend. They gave me several names.
The attorneys he referred was from personal knowledge of what they had done for clients as well as their own interactions in the past (was a federal prosecutor).
I didn't know the person who wrote the blog (at the time) just cold emailed for some suggestions.
The problem with this traditional method is that it relies on the judgement of people who are not legal professionals.
If my friends and cofounders tell me "John S is an excellent programmer!(or marketer, or designer)" I cna trust that. They know the industry, they know the skills, and can formulate informed opinions.
If those same people tell me "John S is an excellent attorney!", I can't trust it. They don't know anything about the legal profession other than the bill they get. They don't even necessarily know what to look for to indicate that John S is an untrustworthy git .
I'd recommend taking introductory meetings with several attorneys. You should be able to quickly get a sense of what kind of person you're dealing with. Then check references. Yokum, for example, has a lot of clients who will say nice things.
Good point re point of failure. If LinkedIn doesn't put a lot of resources into the proxy servers, mail delivery could be very slow or fail completely.
I"m still impressed with the creativity from a technical standpoint.
I'm not overly impressed by the architecture; it's basically a de luxe version of the IMAP push-proxies that were common in the early 2000s, such as Nokia Mail ( I think it was called ).
Phone <------ Proxy <----- IMAP hosts
Same problem; all your lovely lovely communications flowing through the Proxy. And your tasty credentials, too.
LinkedIn have taken the old pattern and injected some data at the Proxy point, enriched from their databases.
Even if it has a lot of resources behind it, if it experienced an outage, the end user would be unaware that their mail service is still up, and since they didn't change the settings, they wouldn't know they could remove the proxy to access their mail until the outage is resolved.
This guy (T.A. McCann) has successfully built and sold a startup, so he doesn't lack the will -- he just lacks the will for this business.
Markets can be so tough that the time/cash/energy to succeed in them means the opportunity is not as attractive as others.