Definitely not the good guys. While I totally sympathize with Numair's story, I can actually see scenarios where both Numair and Chamath would be telling the truth.
We were sitting in the record label's offices with the biz dev guys (and even the CEO!) telling us how great this partnership was going to be, and somewhere else in the building the general counsel was issuing threatening statements. The business side had very little control over the legal side.
'Chamath had been previously known to me from my friends at Winamp as "the guy who fucked Winamp," (after Winamp had been sold to AOL) and seemed like a pretty lame dude.'
I believe that "bad-mouthing" does not imply "lying". There are no laws against vilifying, criticizing severely, speaking unfavorably of big, powerful businesses as long as you have some backup in facts.
Edit: Supreme courts (or equivalents) in most countries make it very clear in their verdicts that protecting the right to expose scoundrels is very high on their priority list. Especially if the scoundrels are big and powerful. Public interest and all that.
That's why nowadays in almost every company in the agreement the employee signs one of the terms is that he is to never talk about the company in a way that will affect it's reputation negatively.
IANAL, but it sounds like a clause like this flies directly in the face of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. I very seriously doubt that any company can control its former employee's true speech.
"If you are entrusting your life data to Facebook, or if you are depending on Facebook and its platform for your livelihood, beware."
I think you should always be careful when you are entrusting any third party with your livelihood. You can only plan so much, but when your business plan requires that one crucial system and you have no way to even have a contingency plan, then you have to realize that it could easily be a make or break deal at any point in time.
On the other hand that doesn't mean you can avoid them altogether. In the ideal case, you have the option to choose among competing platforms. The problem with facebook is that since the end of myspace, it's still the largest web app platform.
> In the ideal case, you have the option to choose among competing platforms.
My ideal is not to entrust my livelihood to any third party.
Obviously, it depends on what I want to build, but so far I'm happy not using any social platform beyond, say, email. The free, open platform of the Internet, LAMP stack, a web framework, and search engines is fine for me. I almost, but not quite, regret the time I've put into using Facebook at all, never mind basing my livelihood on it.
Spoken like someone whose business was never impacted by a search engine update, or whose email was never filtered by a major email provider.
While some platforms are more free and open than others, our livelihoods are all somewhat dependent on third parties. Hope for the best and plan for the worse.
Totally agreed about search engine updates. I also agree that we all have some dependence on others as part of living in society, but that's at a different level-- I don't need to worry about Safeway returning "access denied" next time I try to buy a box of cereal.
I disagree about email filtering. A friend sending another friend an email that says, "Check out this cool thing I saw" does not get filtered by anyone. Email that borders on spam gets filtered, sure, but overall, email serves as one of the most open communication platforms we've ever had. It's a drastic difference from Facebook or Myspace.
Have you ever tried to send bulk e-mail? Even if you're doing everything right with double-opt-in, watching your sender scores, managing your bounce-backs, etc, etc, etc, you will get banned by some major e-mail provider (say Yahoo or Comcast) and spend days to weeks (sometimes months) working to get it sorted out. So, no, I don't disagree with the e-mail thing at all.
I was talking about interpersonal email ("A friend sending another friend an email"), but by chance, yes, I have sent bulk email. I don't dispute that bulk messages can be banned, sometimes capriciously, by the big guys. My point is that for social emails, i.e. emails between people, the email system is a very open, free system. Overall, that's the kind of system I want to base my livelihood on.
To give a concrete example: a few years ago, I set up an email server in my garage using an old computer that was being thrown away at work. I used all free software. It successfully sent email. None of my emails were blocked. I engaged with my social network, (my "friends") using it. If my ISP had blocked my email sending, there were many, many other providers willing to send my email for the price of the connection. Given that spam cannot be eliminated, despite decades of trying, I think it's fair to say that I won't run out of alternatives, especially given that the email I want to send is innocuous.
By comparison, I cannot set up a Facebook server in my garage. If Facebook blocks me, I'm done. If that was my livelihood, I'm fully screwed.
I don't think you should avoid those situations either, the thing is you need to set your expectations to what is realistically possible. A startup is a gamble, we all know that - and you are increasing the odds against you when you are relying on some third party. It doesn't mean everyone should stop working with third parties, but it does mean that it is a sizable risk that you are adding to your business model, and you need to be aware of that when analyzing the risks you are willing to take.
For how long? I casually mentioned deactivating my facebook account over dinner in Mexico last weekend. Two strangers from elsewhere in the world perked right up as they had just done the same thing. None of us had any specific reasons; we just 'felt' like turning it off.
So, it doesn't matter if Facebook is evil or not - I simply don't like it, and it seems that others share that sentiment. I had seen notable figures for a recent up-tick in deactivations, but I was very interested to find other people flipping the switch with a shrug.
How much time should I invest in anything exhibiting that kind of trend?
Would be cool to have a website that list people who just turned off their facebook account :).
The latest Facebook Timeline feature is creepy and I'm starting to think in your direction as well. But having said that, I'd like to know what my friends are up to once in a while and have casual sudden conversation with them.
tl;dr: Facebook offerings are skewed by corporate politics and whoever can score a better partner deal.
No surprises here. Large companies are heavily staffed by biz dev people whose job it is to make partnership deals. The key essential ingredient in all partnership deals, the brass ring, is "exclusivity" without which there often is no deal to speak of. This particular individual unfortunately was not awarded exclusivity.
Seems strange that Chamath was 'evil' wanting to get his friend's business in as the music app for facebook, but it was totally fine when the author was getting his friend in? Seems like a double standard
I missed the part where the author asked his friend to have other music apps pulled on order to promote his own app? Apparently this is what Chamath did, and what Morin tried to keep from happening.
While Dave Morin worked quietly and bravely to defend me against the moves of iLike and Facebook executives to shut down Audio, he eventually found himself as a casualty in a greater power play quietly orchestrated by Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg, in which he was demoted and replaced by Chamath Palihapitiya.
Do the two guys that run the company really need to "orchestrate" a "power play" to promote one person over another? I think this sounds far more Machiavellian than it likely was.
As a facebook app developer i am aware of what shaky ground it is. I must attest the best days of the platform was when Morin was in charge, people were actually flocking to make apps and the platform was adding features. Ever since he left, feature pruning started, policies were not enforced, facebook changed their designs every month and the platform team inexplicably started reinventing the wheel. Then at some point facebook banned our AdSense revenue stream, and soon after they required 30% cut of our virtual goods.
We have now switched to an external website using facebook connect and are happy with it. I am thrilled that Google+ is building a competing platform.
If you're looking to Google for a solution then I think you're looking in the wrong direction. Just look at the latest crop of anti-competitive complaints against them -- like Yelp for one.
There are very strong parallels with the Facebook platform and companies building their business model around free traffic from Google. Small guys get walked all over while bigger ones that reciprocate dollars back to the traffic source (such as Demand Media in Google's case, or Zynga in Facebook's) suspiciously get the red carpet.
As a business owner you should absolutely exploit every opportunity you can to get those users from wherever the traffic is flowing from. However, if you don't hedge your bets, you may find that in 3 years instead of having a nice business you have absolutely nothing.
Could have happened at any other big company. No biggie. "Facebook" here is just headline making.
I don't deny it being u-g-l-y and bad, just that it's not a Facebook issue.
I once worked for a startup that got screwed trying to build a Facebook music platform - promised the world, then the rug was pulled out from under us (by both the labels and FB, and our two major investors were the labels themselves... it was quite ridiculous). I think we were probably just a pawn used as leverage for their negotiations with other players.
Anyway, yeah, I have little doubt that this story is legit.
or one could conclude that he has a history of publicly blaming higher-ups and corporate management for failures in which he was involved. what's brave about embarrassing your boss and your company publicly? or making unsubstantiated claims about conspiracies against you?
what's brave about embarrassing your boss and your company publicly
Without saying anything about his character or motives, it is a given that public criticism of your current or former boss and/or company will have negative consequences for your career.
Knowingly doing so is brave and/or foolhardy regardless of whether your motives are noble or crass.
See Gruber[1] on being a middle man. If your business is reselling someone else's content on someone else's platform, you're going to get fucked right quick.
This is true.Being originally from the Bronx NY i have been in connection with a few people who know how FAT JOE does business.
Allegedly Puerto Rican and African American rappers from the Bronx were getting signed to FAT JOES label and then being kept on the back burner for publication.
Turns out the plan was to make sure to not have any new rap icons come from the Bronx so that he can get all the notoriety of being the Bronx icon. The music business is no joke. This is a true story.
I kind of get the strategy, but it seems risky and expensive to try and "catch" all (or at least enough to be effective) bronx rappers before they got famous.
To be honest, if it was a foolish plan, that sort of makes it more scummy in my mind: to care so little about others that you execute a crappy plan just because you can.
I’m not saying the author is wrong here but I think he’s unfair in attacking just Facebook.
The one thing I learned from my time in the valley is that EVERYONE is looking out for themselves. That isn’t meant as negatively as it sounds. People go there to prove themselves. Either by making money or making their mark on the world (which is why people like Sean Parker stick around even after they’ve made money). But whatever the case they’re in it to win at all costs.
That’s why people work 18 hours a day and pour every cent they have into their startup.
But that’s the relevant point. If people are going to give up everything in their lives to win you can’t assume they’ll then hinder their chances by looking out for your needs. In this story the author is upset because Facebook decided they had a better chance of winning by partnering with iLike. But could you really expect any company in the valley to act differently?
There are plenty of places in the world where the environment isn’t as competitive and if that appeals to you then you should go there. But if you decide to start a company in the heart of the startup world you should expect everyone to be working towards their own goals and plan accordingly. That means NEVER relying on ANYBODY more than you have to and ALWAYS having a backup plan.
All the more reason not to be a sharecropper and build your application on an open platform. If you know you're working in an environment in which everyone is looking out solely for their own interests, you might as well start out on even footing rather than with a Facebook or Microsoft holding the keys to your project's success.
Just make facebook a social plugin/driver to your stand alone web app that you can swap out with ease. Make adding your app to G+ be a 1 week/ 2 day project for features available on both.
You can look out for yourself without lying, cheating, or backstabbing others. You can operate as a moral, ethical person, and not have to mislead people, or break your promises.
Looking out for yourself is not the problem, dishonesty is.
This becomes a bigger problem when dishonesty becomes part of the culture.
I'll agree with outright lying in that a person knowingly lying to another person is wrong. But with the rest I'm not sure I can agree.
Because again the Valley is a kill or be killed environment. The assumption is that others will look out for themselves. So, for example, if someone were to promise me something I'd ask for a contract. If I don't get a contract I'd assume that person was planning to violate that promise some day. Because that's how that environment works.
And I'm not sure it could be any other way. Because the stakes are so high. It is human nature for people to forgive themselves if they feel they're acting for a higher cause. So if that person believes their company will make them billions of dollars and make the world a better place then they're likely to forgive themselves for telling a lie here or there.
It may not be right but it's the way the world works (and honestly it's why I don't live there anymore)
That's an interesting point. I've always thought of contracts as being the mechanism by which two honest parties clarify the terms of their agreement, such that the main value was getting the details written down, and agreed on, where they might otherwise be missed.
It depends on the business, of course, but while I won't sign something I disagree with, I'd never trust that a court would have my back in a dispute. I'm more more concerned with whether the other party has integrity, and has interests aligned with mine, than specific terms of an agreement.
In large part, I think of contracts as unenforceable, though maybe this comes from working at startups so much where you sign contracts, but you know that at your current size you couldn't afford the court case to enforce the contract, if it came to that.
Mediation makes them more viable, though, since it lowers the barrier for getting a dispute heard.
I think you and I don't live in Silicon Valley for very similar reasons. Plus, I just find the high risk focus a distraction from building a scalable business.
I try to avoid contracts because they're a huge timesuck and potentially expensive to get reviewed, not because I intend to screw you. If it's a really big deal in terms of potential monetary damages, though, then you're probably right.
Agreed. And as a San Francisco startup guy for a dozen years, that balance between honesty and self-interest is generally what I have seen here. There are assholes wherever you go, but I've benefited a lot from the relatively collaborative environment here, and try to give back in turn.
> without lying, cheating, or backstabbing...not have to mislead people, or break your promises.
From my time in the valley, I'd say dishonesty, misleading clients, breaking promises, not delivering on time, all of that is very much a part of the sv culture.
At Sun, we'd tell all our clients that Microsoft was evil, out to crush us. Our CEO Scott McNealy sent around a famous email about the sizes of MS & non-MS file formats. "Sun will win" had 12 chars * 1byte/char = 12 bytes as a textfile, 24 bytes as an Openoffice file, and 100,000 bytes as an MS powerpoint slide! While entirely factual, it was quite a dubious example, considering that internally within Sun, we happily used Wintel machines, used powerpoint for presentations, emailed Word files around instead of PDFs, and dissed openoffice as a piece of junk :)
When Java was in its infancy ( 1997-2000 period ), a lot of promises were made & fell by the wayside. Sun was building up its consulting arm, so we'd go out to customer sites and say Yes Java can do this, that and the other. Then we'd come back & Javasoft would tell us, look this feature is simply not part of the forthcoming API. Sometimes they'd get an old wise Unix/C hacker to write C code to do whatever was necessary beneath the covers, and then write a JNI wrapper atop that and thus claim Hey Java can actually do telnet & ftp natively ( Ha!).
I had to deal with a lot of graphics code that was routinely promised & arrived DOA. One of the primary requirements for most financial sevices firms was a table widget to display spreadsheets. AWT didn't have one. Someday there was suposed to be something called Swing, and it would have a powerful table API that would rival the MFC widgets in its power. That's what Sun told us, and that's what we as Sun consultants sold to all our Wall Street clients. But the damn thing took so long to build, every firm had their own proprietary table APIs.
At GS I worked on something called GSTable ( God those horrible memories make them go away! ) So this godawful GSTable was a homecooked solution to display tabular data. I started with something stupid - create an array of Label ( AWT labels ) and put them in a Panel. This created m x n + 1 components per table - too heavy & memory intensive. Then when Swing came out & didn't have a table, we made m x n JLabel's and put them into a JPanel. Over the summer, a Princeton computer graphics intern coded up a canvas ( just 1 custom Component ) that overrode paint() and drew all the cell contents. That worked so well, GS made the teen a six figure offer while he was still in his junior year. All he'd have to do is maintain that table widget! He wisely turned them down & went on to become a computer graphics heavyweight. Meanwhile, I worked on that GSTable as it went through various iterations, until it was actually capable of displaying rows and columns with different sizes, which was apparently a very common requirement in finance. Then finally the Swing JTable arrived! I was like Hallejulah end of all my misery! But alas, Sun's promises & its deliverable were so far apart. That JTable couldn't display multiwidth rows, the paint code was riddled with scaling bugs, it was a bloody mess. There were actual fuck this and fuck that blocks of code in the repaint...the frustrated Javasoft developer wrestling with repaint math! So we stuck with the GSTable. Then IBM came out with their SWT, you had Marimba with their desktop widgets...but everytime we decided to adopt something as the standard, that company would just vanish into thin air...Marimba decided it wanted to get out of AWT widgets business and stick to push technology so that was that...so many broken promises and toy widgets, certainly none of them worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees.
Everybody likes to paint wall st as a paragon of evil while the poor honest tech genius slogs away in the valley working on the cutting edge of technology. In reality, greed is rampant on both sides, money flows from main st to ...
public void setRowHeight(int rh, int row)
{
setRowHeight(rh);
// FIXME: not implemented
}
So that was actual code that Sun shipped. A method setRowHeight(rh,row) that allowed you to change the height of row number 'row' to 'rh', instead changed the height of ALL rows to 'rh' because the alternative was too hard and therefore not implemented! So much for multi-height rows.
"From my time in the valley, I'd say dishonesty, misleading clients, breaking promises, not delivering on time, all of that is very much a part of the sv culture."
Vaporware comes to mind.
As well as my own personal experience being told not to inform mfg. reps and vars about known bugs and problems (this was early 90's). Not knowing the ropes at the time I was threatened in a meeting for suggesting we do something that is more or less routine today.
And this type of dishonesty brings much pain and frustration on people using the product.
I worked with Steve at a company. Steve isn't a nice guy. Steve is definitely a win at all costs type of person despite how he might try to portray himself right now. He brought men and women to tears and belittled them as did many of the people under him at his apparent approval.
In his mixergy interview, he was a nice, great, caring guy, but when Andrew took a wrong step, Blank sort of lost it on air. I chalked it up to he having a bad day or being highly stressed, but it was interesting to see such a quick shift in character.
It reminds me of that scene in "Inside Job" where Columbia Dean Glenn Hubbard changes tone after a question he doesn't like. It's as if he pulled a mask off and became a monster.
It's those small behavioral observations that make humans so interesting to me.
Note: Steve Blank has chosen to be a public figure so I don't believe talking about his behavior is equivalent to gossip.
It's been a while since I've watched it, but I didn't get the impression that Blank lost it. As I remember, Andrew just made a big deal out of his minor misstep and focused on the misstep rather than getting the interview back on track. I think most interviewees, not just Blank, would find this annoying.
Thanks - I will watch the entire clip later (looks interesting) but a quick scan and I would say what appears to be the part of the interview that was referred to seems to be somewhat ambiguous. And I think you're right I wouldn't characterize it as "lost it" either. Although he
does appear irritated and says he was "blindsided" I don't think this is really representative of the Steve that I remember and commented about (no clips of that sorry..)
It starts at about 20:10 and Steve says he was "blindsided" at about 21:00 approx. as if he was misled or something by Andrew. I thought the question Andrew asked was a good question.
That type of behavior is representative of someone with an anger problem. And you're right this could also be chalked up to someone, anyone, having a bad day. But in this case (as you described) he was doing an interview and is for all intents and purposes retired and having a great time being toast of the startup town. He's didn't just get fired from HP or anything. (And of course what you described is what I did experience.)
But that video appears to have vanished. If you can find a link I'd like to see it.
(BTW, if you save everything you find interesting, you realize just how much disappears from the Internet. The half-life of the average link is about 4.5 years.)
>But if you decide to start a company in the heart of the startup world you should expect everyone to be working towards their own goals and plan accordingly. That means NEVER relying on ANYBODY more than you have to and ALWAYS having a backup plan.
couple quotes come to mind by association:
"Never believe them. Never fear them. Never ask them anything."
"You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself."
In general I think SV has a nice culture: people help each other. For example, Jonathan and Laura from Hackers and Founders.
The competitive environment does not require behavior which is dishonest and win at all costs. There is a simple rule in business: if you are not sure whether to lie or not, tell the truth. Follow that rule and soround yourself with people like that you will be fine.
Yes there are some assholes (and they ended up rich - go figure). Just be smart and avoid people who are not transparent and dishoest.
This is not new, there are tons of tales online of Facebook cutting off apps because they were working on a competitive product. Just this summer a ton of photo apps got their access removed with no explanation, only to find out that Facebook was revamping their galleries.
Sharecropping is kind of a weird analogy to use here.
In farming, sharecropping is the low risk way to grow your business. It is the landlord that takes on much of the burden if the crop fails. But with small risk comes small reward.
In technology, "sharecropping" is the high risk venture. The landlord here assumes no risk at all if your application fails. The burden falls squarely on you. However, with the high risk, if you hit it big, the payoff potential is huge.
So while there are some parallels, from a business point of view, working with someone else's platform is nothing at all like sharecropping.
You lack the resource to grow your business, so you borrow someone else's and operate at their whim.
Contracts aside, the sharecropper's entire livelihood could be undermined on the whim of the landowner. Someone else has power over your ability to produce.
Not at all. Sharecroppers are typically protected by contract law; landlords can't just arbitrarily evict them in the middle of the growing season. By contrast Facebook can change their API or terms of service at any time. Facebook developers have no way to seek redress (except the court of public opinion).
Sharecropping exists when landowners have limited access to capital, but extensive land holdings and abundant access to indigent labor. It was a technique devised to keep the tenant around until after harvest time.
Poor farmers have lots of children, and the large resulting labor force gives the landlord an incentive to evict the tenant or jack up the rent immediately after harvest. It was popular in places like Scotland, Ireland and the Reconstruction South, so you can be sure the system is/was more beneficial to the land owner.
Sharecropping is an arrangement with a land owner who rents out their land to a farmer for the payment of a percentage of the crop instead of cash.
It reduces the risk for the farmer because they only have to pay based on what they are able to grow instead of a fixed amount as seen in most cash-rent arrangements. The landowner stands to lose if the crop is a failure, but can make more if the crop is a success.
The term may also come with some historical meaning, but that is what sharecropping has come to mean today.
Edit: Down vote me if you wish, but that is what sharecropping is in the rural community. Speaking as a farmer, sharecropping is a great way to access land in a low-risk way. I don't know why sharecropping land is seen as a negative.
I accept that in response to abuses, the practice may have evolved over time. However, that does not in any way diminish the value of the metaphor, because the vast majority of people who encounter the word “sharecropper” think of the kind of farmer who can be evicted after harvest and often were.
Further to that, I strongly suspect that most of those who are aware that the practice has evolved since those draconian times read the metaphor and immediately grasp that the metaphor refers to the historical meaning of the word and can go on to extract value from it without belabouring a pedantic point.
I will go further and challenge you: When you read the above posts, were you unaware of the historical behaviour of landlords and sharecroppers? Is it news to you that this practice was so abused that the word has pejorative overtones even though the practice may have evolved in modern times?
Or is it simply that you wish to share with us the interesting news that times have changed for farming sharecroppers even if they haven’t for developers on proprietary platforms?
The term computer used to mean a person who sat at a desk doing mathematical calculations. When someone talks about their Amazon computing cluster, I don't picture a huge office building full of people putting pen to paper, crunching numbers all day long, even though that is exactly what computing cluster would have meant at one point in time.
When the term sharecropper is used, one will naturally turn to the meaning of sharecropping today, not hundreds of years ago. I am familiar of the stories of "sharecroppers" of the past, but sharecropping does not refer to those people anymore. Words are evolving all the time and present day usage is what is important when communicating with others.
When the term sharecropper is used, one will naturally turn to the meaning of sharecropping today
Only people who know that this term is still being used today and in what context. I suspect that most people don't know this, and will revert to the historical meaning.
The first one is the modern day practice. "He's a sharecropper because he uses share cropping in his business" refers to the modern day agricultural practice. Whatever economic system they use is irrelevant.
In almost all other cases, particularly in regards to Technology, it refers to the old school practice of share cropping and is using it as such.
Present day usage has nothing to do with it. It is all about context. If 80% of HN agree that sharecropper means X, then it means X. Sharecropper in this sense has become a piece of jargon among business and technology folks.
The old-school practice is the same as the modern-day practice: the landlord rented his land to tenant farmers in exchange for a share of their crop. randomdata's statement:
> In farming, sharecropping is the low risk way to grow your business. It is the landlord that takes on much of the burden if the crop fails. But with small risk comes small reward.
is just as true of sharecropping in 1911 as of sharecropping in 2011.
The difference he draws between sharecropping on a farm and sharecropping on a web site doesn't make sense, though.
I think this is an American thing. When I think of sharecropping it makes me think of farmers under a landlord in medieval England or something. Not a great power dynamic but the word isn't all that negative, it just emphasises (when used as a metaphor elsewhere) that you work and stay at the landlord's pleasure.
I've heard americans use the word before but didn't realise it came loaded with all this historical meaning from the slavery era, turning it into a highly negative concept.
In USAmerican schools, children are taught that sharecropping was an unethical farming practice (ab)used by former slave owners. Perhaps modern day farmers are aware of the modern sharecropping practice, but it certainly isn't taught in schools, nor is it in the common experience.
Thank you. At least in the United States, sharecropping has historical associations with racism and Jim Crow. Suggesting that sharecropping is a low risk way to farm is ignoring the cultural implications if the term. As if former slaves and their descendants made a rational economic decision to become oppressed.
the term everyone means is not sharecropping its Farm renting...the Big farm owner rents out certain parcels because he has neither the time nor the labor and equipment to plant and harvest...
But, like the much maligned sharecropping its heavily tipped in the Farm owners favor.
And that is why it is first result for keyword reader? or feed? They use search to support RSS.
Not to mention Checkout.
And those messages in Gmail about Firefox being not optimal?
It's is the same thing: using one product to support another one. I dont give a damn if Chrome is google's or not.
I want to say that they all do that. I don't support it, but it's not unique for Facebook.
This is not endemic to Facebook. It applies to any platform. Apple, eBay, Amazon, etc.
When you build a business on their platform, you don't have a business. You have a product on their platform and it is their product. They are simply taking a hands-off approach and reaping the benefits. They can shut you down at any time and they will, when it suits their interests.
That is the key here. That conflict of interest. Most of the time, it isn't an issue ... but when it comes to the surface, you will be thrown under the bus.
Also, the customers you think you have ... they're not your customers. If you went to a different platform, those customers would not come along. The customers, they are their customers, not yours.
If you were big enough to be a threat, then you have a pretty good problem on your hands. Yes your platform host might throw you under the bus, but I'm betting you could turn it around.
This is not endemic to Facebook. It applies to any platform. Apple, eBay, Amazon, etc.
I'm not sure this is really true. If you build a regular application for Windows, Linux, or OS X, Microsoft, Red Hat, or Apple can't control whether I install your application. No one "approves" Firefox for OS X. Curated, for lack of a better term, applications only appear on particular platforms -- cell phones, sub-sections of websites, and so forth.
The desktop is moving in this direction as well. Your example of OS X is shaky in particular, given the App Store. Even if it's still _possible_ in the future, acquiring apps outside the official channel will be exceptional, done only by enthusiasts.
The time has come when Microsoft does think they can get away with it. All Metro apps on Windows 8 will have to go through their app store approval process.
I really hate this trend. That's one thing good that Java brought to the table. Everyone had Java installed, so getting my apps "installed" was just a matter of getting them downloaded.
If only this was the year of the Linux deskto... oh, nevermind.
This is why I always help people crack their devices, even if they're mainly interested in warez. We need to ability to work around censorship which we'll lose if we let ourselves be locked down.
I definitely sympathize with the story - that just flat out sucks...
but...
Making a "feature" product is always a bad idea, IMHO, for reasons even beyond the ones the author points out. You should never build a feature for a product, if history is not a lesson on its own - very few of them make a successful exit. At any point, the company might decide they can do it better than you or it would be cheaper to build the feature than acquire you - or, most importantly, your hacks and external servers might not mesh well with their vision of an integrated platform.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadWe were sitting in the record label's offices with the biz dev guys (and even the CEO!) telling us how great this partnership was going to be, and somewhere else in the building the general counsel was issuing threatening statements. The business side had very little control over the legal side.
Does anyone know more about this back story?
Edit: Supreme courts (or equivalents) in most countries make it very clear in their verdicts that protecting the right to expose scoundrels is very high on their priority list. Especially if the scoundrels are big and powerful. Public interest and all that.
http://www.minnpost.com/braublog/2011/03/14/26584/johnny_nor...
http://minnlawyer.com/jdr/2011/03/21/is-the-special-verdict-...
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/news/2011/06/06/johnny-northsid...
http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=12002
http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2011/60000-ruling-against-tr...
That's why nowadays in almost every company in the agreement the employee signs one of the terms is that he is to never talk about the company in a way that will affect it's reputation negatively.
If you live where there are, then there shouldn't be
I think you should always be careful when you are entrusting any third party with your livelihood. You can only plan so much, but when your business plan requires that one crucial system and you have no way to even have a contingency plan, then you have to realize that it could easily be a make or break deal at any point in time.
My ideal is not to entrust my livelihood to any third party.
Obviously, it depends on what I want to build, but so far I'm happy not using any social platform beyond, say, email. The free, open platform of the Internet, LAMP stack, a web framework, and search engines is fine for me. I almost, but not quite, regret the time I've put into using Facebook at all, never mind basing my livelihood on it.
While some platforms are more free and open than others, our livelihoods are all somewhat dependent on third parties. Hope for the best and plan for the worse.
I disagree about email filtering. A friend sending another friend an email that says, "Check out this cool thing I saw" does not get filtered by anyone. Email that borders on spam gets filtered, sure, but overall, email serves as one of the most open communication platforms we've ever had. It's a drastic difference from Facebook or Myspace.
To give a concrete example: a few years ago, I set up an email server in my garage using an old computer that was being thrown away at work. I used all free software. It successfully sent email. None of my emails were blocked. I engaged with my social network, (my "friends") using it. If my ISP had blocked my email sending, there were many, many other providers willing to send my email for the price of the connection. Given that spam cannot be eliminated, despite decades of trying, I think it's fair to say that I won't run out of alternatives, especially given that the email I want to send is innocuous.
By comparison, I cannot set up a Facebook server in my garage. If Facebook blocks me, I'm done. If that was my livelihood, I'm fully screwed.
So, it doesn't matter if Facebook is evil or not - I simply don't like it, and it seems that others share that sentiment. I had seen notable figures for a recent up-tick in deactivations, but I was very interested to find other people flipping the switch with a shrug.
How much time should I invest in anything exhibiting that kind of trend?
Where is this data you mentioned that shows an uptick in deactivations? I'd be interested in taking a look at it.
The latest Facebook Timeline feature is creepy and I'm starting to think in your direction as well. But having said that, I'd like to know what my friends are up to once in a while and have casual sudden conversation with them.
No surprises here. Large companies are heavily staffed by biz dev people whose job it is to make partnership deals. The key essential ingredient in all partnership deals, the brass ring, is "exclusivity" without which there often is no deal to speak of. This particular individual unfortunately was not awarded exclusivity.
Do the two guys that run the company really need to "orchestrate" a "power play" to promote one person over another? I think this sounds far more Machiavellian than it likely was.
We have now switched to an external website using facebook connect and are happy with it. I am thrilled that Google+ is building a competing platform.
The Yelp case, whatever you may think about it, is in a completely different realm.
As a business owner you should absolutely exploit every opportunity you can to get those users from wherever the traffic is flowing from. However, if you don't hedge your bets, you may find that in 3 years instead of having a nice business you have absolutely nothing.
Anyway, yeah, I have little doubt that this story is legit.
Knowingly doing so is brave and/or foolhardy regardless of whether your motives are noble or crass.
[1]: http://daringfireball.net/2011/03/dirty_percent
Allegedly Puerto Rican and African American rappers from the Bronx were getting signed to FAT JOES label and then being kept on the back burner for publication.
Turns out the plan was to make sure to not have any new rap icons come from the Bronx so that he can get all the notoriety of being the Bronx icon. The music business is no joke. This is a true story.
To be honest, if it was a foolish plan, that sort of makes it more scummy in my mind: to care so little about others that you execute a crappy plan just because you can.
The one thing I learned from my time in the valley is that EVERYONE is looking out for themselves. That isn’t meant as negatively as it sounds. People go there to prove themselves. Either by making money or making their mark on the world (which is why people like Sean Parker stick around even after they’ve made money). But whatever the case they’re in it to win at all costs.
That’s why people work 18 hours a day and pour every cent they have into their startup.
But that’s the relevant point. If people are going to give up everything in their lives to win you can’t assume they’ll then hinder their chances by looking out for your needs. In this story the author is upset because Facebook decided they had a better chance of winning by partnering with iLike. But could you really expect any company in the valley to act differently?
There are plenty of places in the world where the environment isn’t as competitive and if that appeals to you then you should go there. But if you decide to start a company in the heart of the startup world you should expect everyone to be working towards their own goals and plan accordingly. That means NEVER relying on ANYBODY more than you have to and ALWAYS having a backup plan.
Looking out for yourself is not the problem, dishonesty is.
This becomes a bigger problem when dishonesty becomes part of the culture.
Because again the Valley is a kill or be killed environment. The assumption is that others will look out for themselves. So, for example, if someone were to promise me something I'd ask for a contract. If I don't get a contract I'd assume that person was planning to violate that promise some day. Because that's how that environment works.
And I'm not sure it could be any other way. Because the stakes are so high. It is human nature for people to forgive themselves if they feel they're acting for a higher cause. So if that person believes their company will make them billions of dollars and make the world a better place then they're likely to forgive themselves for telling a lie here or there.
It may not be right but it's the way the world works (and honestly it's why I don't live there anymore)
It depends on the business, of course, but while I won't sign something I disagree with, I'd never trust that a court would have my back in a dispute. I'm more more concerned with whether the other party has integrity, and has interests aligned with mine, than specific terms of an agreement.
In large part, I think of contracts as unenforceable, though maybe this comes from working at startups so much where you sign contracts, but you know that at your current size you couldn't afford the court case to enforce the contract, if it came to that.
Mediation makes them more viable, though, since it lowers the barrier for getting a dispute heard.
I think you and I don't live in Silicon Valley for very similar reasons. Plus, I just find the high risk focus a distraction from building a scalable business.
From my time in the valley, I'd say dishonesty, misleading clients, breaking promises, not delivering on time, all of that is very much a part of the sv culture.
At Sun, we'd tell all our clients that Microsoft was evil, out to crush us. Our CEO Scott McNealy sent around a famous email about the sizes of MS & non-MS file formats. "Sun will win" had 12 chars * 1byte/char = 12 bytes as a textfile, 24 bytes as an Openoffice file, and 100,000 bytes as an MS powerpoint slide! While entirely factual, it was quite a dubious example, considering that internally within Sun, we happily used Wintel machines, used powerpoint for presentations, emailed Word files around instead of PDFs, and dissed openoffice as a piece of junk :)
When Java was in its infancy ( 1997-2000 period ), a lot of promises were made & fell by the wayside. Sun was building up its consulting arm, so we'd go out to customer sites and say Yes Java can do this, that and the other. Then we'd come back & Javasoft would tell us, look this feature is simply not part of the forthcoming API. Sometimes they'd get an old wise Unix/C hacker to write C code to do whatever was necessary beneath the covers, and then write a JNI wrapper atop that and thus claim Hey Java can actually do telnet & ftp natively ( Ha!).
I had to deal with a lot of graphics code that was routinely promised & arrived DOA. One of the primary requirements for most financial sevices firms was a table widget to display spreadsheets. AWT didn't have one. Someday there was suposed to be something called Swing, and it would have a powerful table API that would rival the MFC widgets in its power. That's what Sun told us, and that's what we as Sun consultants sold to all our Wall Street clients. But the damn thing took so long to build, every firm had their own proprietary table APIs.
At GS I worked on something called GSTable ( God those horrible memories make them go away! ) So this godawful GSTable was a homecooked solution to display tabular data. I started with something stupid - create an array of Label ( AWT labels ) and put them in a Panel. This created m x n + 1 components per table - too heavy & memory intensive. Then when Swing came out & didn't have a table, we made m x n JLabel's and put them into a JPanel. Over the summer, a Princeton computer graphics intern coded up a canvas ( just 1 custom Component ) that overrode paint() and drew all the cell contents. That worked so well, GS made the teen a six figure offer while he was still in his junior year. All he'd have to do is maintain that table widget! He wisely turned them down & went on to become a computer graphics heavyweight. Meanwhile, I worked on that GSTable as it went through various iterations, until it was actually capable of displaying rows and columns with different sizes, which was apparently a very common requirement in finance. Then finally the Swing JTable arrived! I was like Hallejulah end of all my misery! But alas, Sun's promises & its deliverable were so far apart. That JTable couldn't display multiwidth rows, the paint code was riddled with scaling bugs, it was a bloody mess. There were actual fuck this and fuck that blocks of code in the repaint...the frustrated Javasoft developer wrestling with repaint math! So we stuck with the GSTable. Then IBM came out with their SWT, you had Marimba with their desktop widgets...but everytime we decided to adopt something as the standard, that company would just vanish into thin air...Marimba decided it wanted to get out of AWT widgets business and stick to push technology so that was that...so many broken promises and toy widgets, certainly none of them worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees.
Everybody likes to paint wall st as a paragon of evil while the poor honest tech genius slogs away in the valley working on the cutting edge of technology. In reality, greed is rampant on both sides, money flows from main st to ...
public void setRowHeight(int rh, int row) { setRowHeight(rh); // FIXME: not implemented }
So that was actual code that Sun shipped. A method setRowHeight(rh,row) that allowed you to change the height of row number 'row' to 'rh', instead changed the height of ALL rows to 'rh' because the alternative was too hard and therefore not implemented! So much for multi-height rows.
Vaporware comes to mind.
As well as my own personal experience being told not to inform mfg. reps and vars about known bugs and problems (this was early 90's). Not knowing the ropes at the time I was threatened in a meeting for suggesting we do something that is more or less routine today.
And this type of dishonesty brings much pain and frustration on people using the product.
You don't have to be Machiavellian to succeed.
It reminds me of that scene in "Inside Job" where Columbia Dean Glenn Hubbard changes tone after a question he doesn't like. It's as if he pulled a mask off and became a monster.
It's those small behavioral observations that make humans so interesting to me.
Note: Steve Blank has chosen to be a public figure so I don't believe talking about his behavior is equivalent to gossip.
It starts at about 20:10 and Steve says he was "blindsided" at about 21:00 approx. as if he was misled or something by Andrew. I thought the question Andrew asked was a good question.
But that video appears to have vanished. If you can find a link I'd like to see it.
(BTW, if you save everything you find interesting, you realize just how much disappears from the Internet. The half-life of the average link is about 4.5 years.)
couple quotes come to mind by association:
"Never believe them. Never fear them. Never ask them anything."
"You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself."
The competitive environment does not require behavior which is dishonest and win at all costs. There is a simple rule in business: if you are not sure whether to lie or not, tell the truth. Follow that rule and soround yourself with people like that you will be fine.
Yes there are some assholes (and they ended up rich - go figure). Just be smart and avoid people who are not transparent and dishoest.
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
http://raganwald.posterous.com/the-freedom-to-eat-pizza
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...
That said, here is good opportunity to prosper on other peoples' platforms, but diversify.
Diversification is at their pleasure too.
In farming, sharecropping is the low risk way to grow your business. It is the landlord that takes on much of the burden if the crop fails. But with small risk comes small reward.
In technology, "sharecropping" is the high risk venture. The landlord here assumes no risk at all if your application fails. The burden falls squarely on you. However, with the high risk, if you hit it big, the payoff potential is huge.
So while there are some parallels, from a business point of view, working with someone else's platform is nothing at all like sharecropping.
You lack the resource to grow your business, so you borrow someone else's and operate at their whim.
Contracts aside, the sharecropper's entire livelihood could be undermined on the whim of the landowner. Someone else has power over your ability to produce.
Sharecropping exists when landowners have limited access to capital, but extensive land holdings and abundant access to indigent labor. It was a technique devised to keep the tenant around until after harvest time.
Poor farmers have lots of children, and the large resulting labor force gives the landlord an incentive to evict the tenant or jack up the rent immediately after harvest. It was popular in places like Scotland, Ireland and the Reconstruction South, so you can be sure the system is/was more beneficial to the land owner.
It reduces the risk for the farmer because they only have to pay based on what they are able to grow instead of a fixed amount as seen in most cash-rent arrangements. The landowner stands to lose if the crop is a failure, but can make more if the crop is a success.
The term may also come with some historical meaning, but that is what sharecropping has come to mean today.
Edit: Down vote me if you wish, but that is what sharecropping is in the rural community. Speaking as a farmer, sharecropping is a great way to access land in a low-risk way. I don't know why sharecropping land is seen as a negative.
Further to that, I strongly suspect that most of those who are aware that the practice has evolved since those draconian times read the metaphor and immediately grasp that the metaphor refers to the historical meaning of the word and can go on to extract value from it without belabouring a pedantic point.
I will go further and challenge you: When you read the above posts, were you unaware of the historical behaviour of landlords and sharecroppers? Is it news to you that this practice was so abused that the word has pejorative overtones even though the practice may have evolved in modern times?
Or is it simply that you wish to share with us the interesting news that times have changed for farming sharecroppers even if they haven’t for developers on proprietary platforms?
When the term sharecropper is used, one will naturally turn to the meaning of sharecropping today, not hundreds of years ago. I am familiar of the stories of "sharecroppers" of the past, but sharecropping does not refer to those people anymore. Words are evolving all the time and present day usage is what is important when communicating with others.
Only people who know that this term is still being used today and in what context. I suspect that most people don't know this, and will revert to the historical meaning.
The first one is the modern day practice. "He's a sharecropper because he uses share cropping in his business" refers to the modern day agricultural practice. Whatever economic system they use is irrelevant.
In almost all other cases, particularly in regards to Technology, it refers to the old school practice of share cropping and is using it as such.
Present day usage has nothing to do with it. It is all about context. If 80% of HN agree that sharecropper means X, then it means X. Sharecropper in this sense has become a piece of jargon among business and technology folks.
> In farming, sharecropping is the low risk way to grow your business. It is the landlord that takes on much of the burden if the crop fails. But with small risk comes small reward.
is just as true of sharecropping in 1911 as of sharecropping in 2011.
The difference he draws between sharecropping on a farm and sharecropping on a web site doesn't make sense, though.
I think this is an American thing. When I think of sharecropping it makes me think of farmers under a landlord in medieval England or something. Not a great power dynamic but the word isn't all that negative, it just emphasises (when used as a metaphor elsewhere) that you work and stay at the landlord's pleasure.
I've heard americans use the word before but didn't realise it came loaded with all this historical meaning from the slavery era, turning it into a highly negative concept.
But, like the much maligned sharecropping its heavily tipped in the Farm owners favor.
My grandfather's family were sharecroppers in Ireland, so I grew up with view of the practice that may be somewhat one-sided.
"Live your life as though it is the world's best-kept secret, as though you are living in an amazing TV show with an audience of one."
I want to say that they all do that. I don't support it, but it's not unique for Facebook.
That's worth the price of admission alone. Sounds like fun!
When you build a business on their platform, you don't have a business. You have a product on their platform and it is their product. They are simply taking a hands-off approach and reaping the benefits. They can shut you down at any time and they will, when it suits their interests.
That is the key here. That conflict of interest. Most of the time, it isn't an issue ... but when it comes to the surface, you will be thrown under the bus.
Also, the customers you think you have ... they're not your customers. If you went to a different platform, those customers would not come along. The customers, they are their customers, not yours.
I'm not sure this is really true. If you build a regular application for Windows, Linux, or OS X, Microsoft, Red Hat, or Apple can't control whether I install your application. No one "approves" Firefox for OS X. Curated, for lack of a better term, applications only appear on particular platforms -- cell phones, sub-sections of websites, and so forth.
I'm curious as to how the law is going to interpret this in the future. The closed ecosystem of ios may be a bad (in my mind) precedent.
If only this was the year of the Linux deskto... oh, nevermind.