Filthy Rich Investor Explains Why Being Rich Didn’t Make Him As Happy As He Thought It Would | ||
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As an immigrant in Canada, Palihapitiya grew up on welfare, living above a laundromat with his dad unemployed. Not being as privileged as some of his “rich” friends, Palihapitiya says the biggest thing on his mind at the time was “trying not to be poor.” He would obsess over the Forbes’ Billionaires List, dreaming of one day putting his name on it. “I grew up super poor. I thought I really, really wanted to be rich. But that was the only way I could see the world growing up how I did,” Palihapitiya told Business Insider. Perhaps because of this mindset, Palihapitiya quickly became one of the most successful tech leaders at a very young age. By 26, he became the youngest VP in AOL’s history and later joined Facebook in 2007, becoming the social media’s longest tenured senior executive. Along the way, he was able to build massive amounts of wealth, which is estimated to be nearly $1 billion. But once he finally became rich financially, Palihapitiya says it didn’t really make him as happy as he thought it would. He says he realized that unless he did something more meaningful with his wealth, and have a “massive impact,” he wouldn’t feel truly happy about being rich. “The most important thing I realized is you need something superficial like that (being rich) to act as a catalyst initially, so you are motivated to escape whatever you are trying to escape,” he says. “But then you need to use that as a bridge to a more meaningful, long-term, largely unrealistic goal that can keep you focused, grounded and helpful to others.” So after cashing out his Facebook stock, Palihapitiya founded his own venture capital firm called The Social+Capital Partnership. It takes a little different approach than other VC firms in that it mostly invests in companies that really tries to tackle serious social and global issues. For example, it’s invested in Glooko, a mobile diabetes management company, and Treehouse, a company that trains computer engineers and helps them find jobs. “I want to create a massive legacy,” Palihapitiya says. “I am fortunate enough that I can fund that and put the money back in the world.” SEE ALSO: Why Silicon Valley's Elites Are Obsessed With Poker Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder of The Social+Capital Partnership, is a classic case of a “rags-to-riches” story. Here's How Dominant Google Is In Europe | ||
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Yesterday, the European parliament passed a resolution to break up Google. Weirdly, the regulators never actually mentioned Google in the resolution, but it's pretty clear from their talk about search dominance which company they were thinking of. It's mainly a political move. The parliament actually has no power to split the company's search business from its other businesses, but this resolution places pressure on the antitrust regulators who actually do have this power, although some antitrust experts think it's logistically impossible. At the very least, these folks can place a bunch of restrictions on Google, like forcing it to bury its own products in search results. Big fines are also a very real possibility. Europe has been investigating Google on and off for more than three years now, based on complaints from Microsoft and other competitors. The details of these complaints and Google's actual behavior will probably influence whatever remedies are handed down. But it's also worth stepping back and looking at the big picture. Google is drawing this kind of fire because of its absolute dominance in a bunch of very important markets. It's arguably more powerful today than Microsoft was at its peak. Let's go to the charts. First, search. You may have the idea that Microsoft and Yahoo are putting up a decent fight against Google. That's true in the United States, where they have about 30% share between them. But in Europe, it's another story. Google has more than 90% market share, according to StatCounter:
Internet search is the most effective form of advertising ever invented. That's because Google knows exactly what you're looking for because you just entered it into a search box! If you happen to be looking for a product, Google has a pretty good idea of which ads to show you. So it's no wonder that Google is by far the leader in online advertising revenue. This is a much more fragmented market than search, but it's basically got 4 times as much revenue as its nearest competitor, Facebook. These stats come from eMarketer and are for the entire world, but the breakdown is probably similar in Europe:
But what about mobile advertising? Isn't Facebook doing better there? Yes, Facebook is growing its mobile ad revenue more quickly than Google, but overall Google is still way out in front, with more than twice as much market share. These stats are also global, not just for Europe, and come from eMarketer: It's logical that Google would be dominating mobile advertising, since Google also owns the Android mobile platform. It's got between 70% and 90% share, depending on market. Here's Android's market share in the "big 5" European countries — France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom — according to Kantar Worldpanel:
Last of all, in case you thought Firefox's move to swap Google for Yahoo as its default search engine would make a difference — not really. Although the statistics vary depending on how you count, but StatCounter looks at active usage on its millions of member sites. It shows that Google Chrome dominates in Europe, especially if you include mobile in the overall picture:
Dominating your market is not illegal. Dominating multiple markets is not illegal. Having one or more monopolies is not illegal. But using that dominance to raise prices and hurt consumers, or squeeze competitors, or enter new markets — well, those kinds of activities may in fact be illegal. And that's why dominant tech companies draw so much scrutiny from governments. The EU probably not be able to split Google up. But whatever happens in this particular case, Google's dominance means regulators are going to be looking closely at it for years to come. SEE ALSO: By The Time Europe Gets Around To Breaking Google Up, It Probably Won't Matter Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Sony Thinks North Korea Could Be Linked To A Cyber Attack Just Weeks Before 'The Interview' Hits Theaters | ||
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sony Pictures Entertainment is investigating to determine if hackers working on behalf of North Korea might be responsible for a cyber attack that knocked out the studio's computer network earlier this week, the technology news site Re/code reported. The attack occurred a month before Sony Pictures, a unit of Sony Corp, is to release "The Interview." The movie is a comedy about two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The Pyongyang government denounced the film as "undisguised sponsoring of terrorism, as well as an act of war" in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in June. Representatives of the North Korean mission to the United Nations could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday. Sony Pictures' computer system went down on Monday. Before screens went dark, they displayed a red skull and the phrase "Hacked By #GOP," which reportedly stands for Guardians of Peace, the Los Angeles Times said. The hackers also warned they would release "secrets" stolen from the Sony servers, the Times reported. Re/code said in a report late Friday that Sony and security consultants were investigating the possibility that someone acting on behalf of North Korea, possibly from China, was responsible. Re/code said a link to North Korea had not been confirmed but it had not been ruled out. A source familiar with the matter told Reuters that Sony Pictures was investigating every possibility, adding no link to North Korea has been uncovered. Sony acknowledged the computer outage in a statement on Tuesday. Emails to Sony were bouncing back on Saturday with a message asking senders to contact employees by telephone because its email system was "experiencing a disruption." "The Interview," scheduled for release in the United States on Dec. 25, stars James Franco as the host of a tabloid television show that is enjoyed by Kim, and Seth Rogen as the show's producer. When they are granted a rare interview with Kim, the CIA wants to turn them into assassins. KCNA, the official news agency in isolationist North Korea, quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman in June as promising a "merciless counter-measure" if the film is released. The government also wrote to U.S. President Barack Obama asking him to stop it, the Voice of America reported.
(Reporting by Ron Grover, Michelle Nichols and Jim Finkle; Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by Frances Kerry) Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Yes, You Should Get The iPhone 6 Plus Instead Of The iPhone 6 (AAPL) | ||
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In a break from its usual pattern, Apple released two new phones with two new screen sizes this year. The iPhone 6 has a 4.7-inch screen. The iPhone 6 Plus comes has a 5.5-inch screen. The 6 Plus has a slightly better camera, and a better battery life, otherwise, they are the same phone. Previously, Apple's best phone was a 4-inch iPhone 5S. Apple is famous for making decisions for consumers. It doesn't give users as many options as Android, which annoys some people, but makes life easier for others who get flustered by too many choices. With the iPhone 6, Apple has introduced choice, and, predictably, people are feeling flustered. On an almost daily basis either I am asked about the 6 Plus versus the 6, or I see someone else asking about it. So, here's my answer: Buy the iPhone 6 Plus. You will not regret it.
I ordered an iPhone 6 Plus on the day it came out, and I love it. It's the best iPhone I've owned by a mile. A few weeks after I got it, I sold my iPad Mini, and I haven't missed it that much. I'm not the only one that loves the iPhone 6 Plus. Of the seven Business Insider tech reporters that upgraded to the iPhone 6, five of us got the iPhone 6 Plus. None of us regrets it. We all think it was the right choice. Kara Swisher at Re/code just wrote a love note to her iPhone 6 Plus, saying, "I could not be more ecstatic about the 5.5-inch screen and its lovely and enormous heft. I can definitively say it has made me happier than I have ever been in a cellular relationship." Why are people unsure of which phone to buy? Because after using a 4-inch or smaller iPhone for years, the leap to the 5.5-inch phone seems gigantic. On day one, the big phone will be a little weird and oversized. By day three, you won't even notice. The smaller screen on the iPhone 6 is still bigger than the current phone, so it will feel like a nice upgrade, but eventually it too will feel small. So, go big. After the first day, I haven't thought to myself at any point that the phone is too big.
Aside from the giant screen, what's so great about it? The battery life is off the charts. If I only use the phone a light amount, I'm getting 48 hours of battery off a full charge. If I use it heavily, I get 36 hours. One thing to note: I keep my phone in "do not disturb" mode at all times, which eliminates notifications from popping up on my screen, thus saving some battery life. The iPhone 6 is a good phone and you'll be fine with it, should you get it. But, the iPhone 6 Plus is the better phone, and you'll be happier in the long run. So, fear not! Get the iPhone 6 Plus, the big screen is a good thing. SEE ALSO: How Apple Becomes A $1 Trillion Company Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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If you've ever looked into buying a new TV, you may have heard something along the lines of the following: Nobody ever regrets buying too big of a TV. The bigger screen is always better for a TV. It turns out that the same might apply to phones.
Some people seem worried about it fitting in their pockets. The phone can be a tight squeeze if you're wearing tight jeans, or pants with short pockets. But, it's fine overall. I take my phone out of my pocket a lot, but that's not that really the end of the world since I tend to be using it. I also take my wallet out of my back pocket when I sit at my desk. Here’s How Good Tim Cook Has Been For Apple In One Chart (AAPL) | ||
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In just three years, Tim Cook has done something truly remarkable at Apple: he's more than doubled its stock price. When Cook took over the top job at Apple on August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs' health was deteriorating. Some doubted that Cook could lead the company as well has Jobs had. And while it may be too early to judge the products Apple has made under Cook, the company's stock had soared since he became CEO. Last April, Apple announced a 7:1 stock split on its shares. Shareholders received six additional shares for every one they previously held. As you can see below, Apple's stock has risen from $53 to nearly $119 on a split-adjusted basis:
It hasn't been a easy ride for Apple's stock, which took a beating in the second half of 2012 leading into 2013. But investors turned bullish on Apple in recent months, largely because of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. There's no telling when Apple's stock will see this kind of growth again. But if Cook can do for the Apple Watch what he's done for the iPhone, Apple might become a trillion-dollar company not too long from now. SEE ALSO: It's Going To Be An iPhone 6 Christmas Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Mobile Advertising Is Exploding And Will Grow Much Faster Than All Other Digital Ad Categories | ||
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Mobile is growing faster than all other digital advertising formats in the US, as advertisers begin allocating dollars to catch the eyes of a growing class of "mobile-first" users. Historically, there has been a big disparity between the amount of time people actually spend on their smartphones and tablets (significant and growing), and the amount of ad money spent on the medium (still tiny). But BI Intelligence expects that this gap will narrow substantially, as enthusiasm grows for mobile-optimized ad formats (such as interactive rich media and native ads), as targeting improves, and more and more advertisers learn how to effectively use the platform. New data from BI Intelligence finds that US mobile ad spend will top nearly $42 billion in 2018, rising by a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43% from 2013. The report looks at the most important mobile ad formats, including display, video, social, and search. The report provides exclusive breakdowns on how spend on each format will grow and why, and examines the overall performance of mobile ads. It also looks at how programmatic ad-buying tools, including real-time bidding, are reshaping mobile advertising. Access The Full Report And Downloads By Signing Up For A Trial Membership » Here are some of the key takeaways:
The report is full of charts and data that can easily be downloaded and put to use. In full, the report:
For full access receive to all BI Intelligence's analysis, reporting, and downloadable charts and presentations on the digital media industry, sign up for a trial membership. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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STARTUP GOD PAUL GRAHAM: Mean People Fail | ||
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Paul Graham, founder of startup factory Y Combinator, has ignited a new debate in tech world with an essay on "mean people." It may sound like a trite idea, but it has deeper meaning right now as it is squarely aimed at Uber, though it never mentions Uber once. Graham is a man of stature in the technology startup world. His words matter. Y Combinator has created startups like Dropbox, and Airbnb. As of last year, Y Combinator companies were worth over $13 billion. Uber is the most dominant, exciting startup to appear since Facebook. It's also the most polarizing startup since Facebook. This month has been dominated by story after story of Uber executives misbehaving: From Uber's CEO proudly admitting to messing with a rival's fundraising, to an Uber executive suggesting the company spend $1 million to research and attack its critics. There are, of course, many more stories about the company and its executives that people like to gossip about off the record. Some people think that these arrogant, ruthless, jerkish characteristics are necessary for a startup to succeed. Graham seems to disagree. He thinks the opposite is true. He thinks people that are mean will fail: Why? I think there are several reasons. One is that being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems. Which is particularly painful to someone who cares how their brain is used: your brain goes fast but you get nowhere, like a car spinning its wheels. While this is an ideal view of the world, lots of people are already questioning how realistic it is. After all, Bill Gates was considered one of the toughest, meanest, most ruthless businessmen at the height of Microsoft's power. Steve Jobs was considered a jerk and a very difficult person to work with. Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, is a brutal businessman. It seems like there is a distinction between being a "nice" person and being a ruthless businessperson. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can been a good-hearted person who is kind to people in your circle, while still being a mean, ruthless arrogant businessperson. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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A Person Is Using Tumblr To Get People Who Post Disgusting And Racist Comments Online Fired From Their Jobs | ||
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A new Tumblr is taking the internet by storm this holiday weekend, and its cringeworthy content is enough to give you a massive post-Thanksgiving day headache. It's called "Racists Getting Fired," and the premise is exactly what you suspect it is: People who make racist comments on social media end up getting fired after this Tumblr's curator finds their employer and contacts them with evidence of their racist remarks. Here's an example (WARNING: LANGUAGE IS OFFENSIVE AND NSFW) A young man who goes by VA Truck Driver on Twitter tweeted the following remarks about the riots that took place in Ferguson, MO last week.
He then continued his racist diatribe, bragging about how the "trolls" would never find out who he was.
But scrolling through VA Truck Driver's tweets led to the following tweet from 2013:
That helped those behind the Tumblr page find his Facebook page, which also included the name of his employer. After his employer was contacted, he tweeted that he had been suspended from work "without pay" and that he was "very sorry." There are more stories like that on the Tumblr, which you can see here > Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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12 Surprising Things That Can Make You Successful | ||
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Sure, we all know that an Ivy League education, stint at a blue-chip firm, and stellar sales skills can help us get ahead. But it may surprise you just how many lesser known, seemingly random variables contribute to your professional success. From the month you were born to your comedic timing, the weirdest quirks can affect how successful you'll ultimately be. We combed through research on success to identify 12 surprising things that can influence your career trajectory. While some factors can be sought out, others are beyond your control. This is an update of an article written by Alison Griswold. For starters, your birth month is hugely important in determining success. There's a ton of research on what's variously called the "relative-age effect," "month of birth bias," or "birth-date effect." The basic principle is that kids born right before an annual cutoff date for starting school or sports are at a disadvantage because they're essentially a full year younger than other members of the group. That makes a big difference in physical, emotional, and intellectual maturity. On the other hand, just missing the date means you will be more developed than your peers. Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea in "Outliers," which explored how more professional hockey players from Canada were born in January, February, and March than any other months. The reason? Canada's cutoff date for hockey programs is Jan. 1. Similar research has shown that the number of CEOs with June and July birthdays is far below the expected normal distribution. That's because kids born in June and July are usually the youngest in school, putting them at an early intellectual disadvantage. Your birth order influences your personality and development. Research shows that first-borns are highly ambitious and competitive. They tend to excel academically and, according to CareerBuilder, are the most likely to earn six figures and hold a C-level position. Middle children are considered strong team players and negotiators. Career-wise, they're the most likely to work in entry-level jobs and earn less than $35,000. The youngest siblings are usually the most creative and entertaining in their families. Because of this, they often end up in creative roles or mid-level management. Finally, only children are most likely to be self-centered and success-seeking, and can also be unusually mature because they spend so much one-on-one time with their parents. Like first-borns, they often end up in C-level or six-figure positions, but can be less satisfied with their jobs than people who have siblings. Public or private school? It turns out that more expensive isn't always best. That's right, the latest data says that public schools actually outperform their costlier private peer institutions. University of Illinois professors Christopher and Sarah Lubienski published that surprising finding in their book, "The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools." According to their research, students at private schools generally do well because they come from wealthy backgrounds and families with more advantages. But public schools are actually better when it comes to teaching math and keeping their teachers trained in the latest instructional methods. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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A Gecko-Inspired Invention Lets Humans Climb Up Glass Walls | ||
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Everyone's wished they had a superhuman ability at some point in their lives. And on the super power scale, the ability to scale glass walls like Spider-Man is right up there at the top — and it's already possible, as shown by a new invention described in a recently published study in the journal Interface. Using gecko-inspired hand pads created by these scientists, a person can now walk up a glass wall. "This is one of the most exciting things I've seen in years," Kellar Autumn, a biomechanist at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, who wasn't involved with the study, told Science Magazine. Gecko feetTo build the devices that enable this wall crawling ability, researchers analyzed how geckos support themselves and then improved on that already-powerful adhesive ability. Gecko feet are covered in tiny little bristles or hairs called setae, which interact with the molecules of different surfaces to create an electric attraction called van der Waals force. This force helps the little lizards cling to vertical surfaces and even walk on some ceilings. Part of what makes this really amazing is that the structure of these connections allows the gecko to detach and reattach their feet at will, which is the special skill that actually lets them climb up the wall and not just stick to it in one place. At their strongest, these little hairs are able to create an insanely strong attraction. If each of the 6.5 million tiny bristles was operating at full power all the time, those little gecko feet should be able to hold up a 286-pound adult human — bigger than the average NFL defensive end. But as Science explains, geckos can actually only lift a maximum of 4.4 pounds: The bristles on their feet can't all be used at the same time. The physical structure of the foot means that only a few small hairs can be at their stickiest at once. So on a small scale, they are incredibly powerful, but it's hard to scale up that ability to bigger and heavier objects. A human trickWhenever humans have tried to replicate gecko climbing ability, they've run into the same problem — they can't replicate sticking power using only a tiny surface area, and it's especially difficult to create enough sticking power for something as large as a person. But a team of engineers at Stanford figured out how to make it work.
In the new contraption, the two hand pads are all that hold the climber (lead study author Elliot Hawkes in the image above) in the above photo. The footholds he stands on are connected to those hand pads, so that the pads themselves are holding his body weight and he doesn't have to cling to the wall using brute strength. He's actually just standing on the foot-ledges in the above image. Each of the two hand pads is covered by 24 small tiles. Each tile is covered in tiny silicon rubber hairs that mimic the gecko's setae, each about as tall as human hair is thick. Those little rubber hairs, or microwedges, as they are called, can attach and detach easily without breaking down — and there's something special about their adhesive force that makes them perfect for climbing. The adhesive is designed so it becomes stickier when more force is pulling on it but it becomes less sticky if you take that force away. So by stepping on a foothold connected to a hand pad, Hawkes causes that pad to generate adhesive force and stick to the wall. To detach and climb up, he just has to take his weight off the foothold.
In order to create pads that are small but still able to use that force to hold a person's weight, Hawkes had to figure out where the gecko and other attempts at replicating it were inefficient. "Engineers hate inefficient things," he tells LiveScience. Walk the walkThe key was designing the hand pads so that the 24 tiles would be able to fully attach to the wall even with a weight pulling on them. So he connected the tiles using a material that becomes less stiff and more elastic when it's being pulled on, the opposite of most natural fibers. This means that the pads can evenly distribute all the weight, instead of having the majority of the force pull on one gradually weakening connection. "To be able to climb glass felt a little bit magical — it feels like you're hooking this device onto a perfectly flat smooth surface, and it doesn't feel possible," Hawkes told LiveScience. There are still limitations. This particular version attaches easily to glass, but wouldn't work the same on a rougher or sandy surface. But he thinks that those problems can be solved using other types of bio-inspired design, like the mechanism that geckos use to self-clean their setae as they go. He said that next up is figuring out how to use this type of adhesive to pick up space junk before it smashes into a satellite or to build drones that can walk up and clean skyscrapers. But we're hoping he also takes a shot at harnessing the power of the spiderweb. SEE ALSO: Jetpacks Help Soldiers Run At The Speed Of Olympic Athletes Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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There's A Mysterious Field Of Electrical Energy Outside Google's Office In London (GOOG) | ||
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There's something very strange happening outside Google's office in London. Multiple people have reported being zapped by a field of static electricity outside the building, and they have started videoing it to prove the weird phenomenon exists. Google declined to comment on this story when reached by Business Insider. Reddit user "master_poop" was one of the first people to discover the strange electrical field, posting a video which shows his hair standing on end. There's even an audible "buzz" from what he guesses is static electricity. After posting the video online, he explained that both of the people featured in the video had since suffered from toothache, and he had even had a small nosebleed. Some people on Reddit dismissed the video as fake. After all, people often try and game the popular site by inventing weird phenomenon. They can earn money if enough people watch their videos through ads on YouTube. But more videos have come to light showing the same electricity field outside Google's office. Back in September, YouTube user "LessAmazingPhil" uploaded a video showing his hair standing on end at exactly the same spot outside Google's London HQ. And there's even a third video showing another man standing outside Google's office with his hair standing on end from some kind of static electricity field. There are a number of theories for what might be causing the strange build-up of electricity. Some people theorise that there could be a problem with electrical wires underneath the street outside Google HQ. Others guess that the design of the building could be to blame. They claim that the building features a mesh of metal poles that could generate static electricity.
Despite reports of painful tooth fillings and nosebleeds that may have been caused by the electrical field, UK Power Networks has investigated the area and declared it safe. Earlier today, workmen were seen outside Google's office, digging up the exact spot where the electrical phenomenon was taking place. Here's where you can find the spot on a map:
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This 21-Year-Old Helped Fund 30 Startups Before Landing $1.5 Million For His Own | ||
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It turns out, you don't have to drop out of school to join the most famous "startup school for dropouts" in the Valley, the Thiel Fellowship. You just have to be young and exceptional. Zachary Hamed is certainly that. The Thiel Fellowship is a startup accelerator program founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel that encourages brilliant kids to leave school and launch tech businesses instead. But Hamed finished his computer science degree at Harvard before he did the Thiel Fellowship, graduating high school at age 17 and breezing through Harvard in three and a half years. Hamed was part of the 2013 Thiel Fellowship class. And today, at the ripe age of 21, his NYC-based startup Bowery just landed its first venture investment $1.5 million from Google Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and others. Another 'Docker'Hamed launched Bowery with two young co-founders David Byrd also 21, previously an intern at Medium, and Steve Kaliski, 24, a former engineer at Palantir via Palantir's acquisition of Poptip. Word on the street is that Bowery is on track to become "another Docker," meaning a fast-growing startup that software developers love and bring into work.
The idea came from the cofounders' own experience. "I tried to install Ruby on Rails [a software language] on my Mac like 18 times, and every time I tried, I wanted to throw my Mac out the window. It was incredibly frustrating," Hamed tells us. Other software engineers agree. The three young founders are already attracting some interesting talent to work with them. They just snared Mitch Pirtle. Pirtle is best known as the creator of the open source project Joomla that has millions of users worldwide. Joomla is a website creation tool that competes with Wordpress and Drupal and has a loyal band of developers. Pirtle was working for MongoDB before joining Bowery. And Bowery also nabbed Francesca Krihely from Mongo, too, former community manager working with all of MongoDB's developers. This startup is worth watching for the tech itself. But Hamed's story is equally awesome. How a college grad got a Thiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship has become one of the most prestigious alternatives to going to college — in some cases, even to finishing high school. Each year 20 kids are accepted into the program, where they are mentored by some of the brightest minds in the Valley. Then they get $100,000 to work on their own startups, and they're off. With only 20 young people accepted, all under 20 years old, competition to get in is incredibly fierce. In Hamed's case, he doesn't fit the standard drop-out profile. "The public face is that everyone’s a dropout and that's the main goal of the program. But it isn't. It allows anyone under 20 to continue education with/without college," Hamed says. He's an advocate of college. "I took classes that formed my thinking around software development, design, education, around government, political science." He turned the fellowship's heads for two reasons. He was the first freshman to win Harvard's prestigious student business plan competition, he says. That experience helped him get a summer's internship at hedge fund Allen & Co, known for putting together the prestigious Sun Valley Conference. That's an invite-only show where the Valley's who-who descend on Idaho. And that experience caused him to work with his friend at Harvard Peter Boyce. Boyce was setting up a venture capital fund for Harvard students called Rough Draft Ventures, an offshoot of venture firm General Catalyst Partners. "I started that with a friend of mine in school. We eventually have done at least 30 investments and those companies have gone on raise hundreds of millions in investment," he describes. The idea was to get students seed money, from $1,000 to $25,000 to buy computers, or pay for other startup costs. "We went to General Catalyst and said. 'Boston is such a unique student ecosystem, no one is capitalizing on that providing investments they need,'" he describes. General Catalyst agreed and the fund was launched. The students are just advisors. They don't get a stake in any of the companies they fund. But Hamed learned a lot about the venture world, which came in handy when raising a round for Bowery. Rough Draft Ventures is still going strong today, with Boyce still involved and a new crop of students leading it.
The 10x engineer
Raskin talked a lot about the "10x engineer," those mythical engineers that are so talented and efficient, they are 10 times more productive than mere mortal engineers. While in San Francisco working at Jawbone, Hamed met his co-founders and the three of them wanted to make all engineers into 10x-ers. With Bowery, they are off to a good start. SEE ALSO: The 50 Most Powerful People In Enterprise Tech In 2014 Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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Bowery makes a tool so obvious you can't believe it hasn't been done before. It lets developers load all the tools they need to write and test software on any PC in about 30 seconds. It eliminates the huge amount of troubleshooting they typically have to do to get set up.
Hamed was also helped by doing other internships in the Valley, including one Here Are All The Gadgets You Should Buy People For The Holidays This Year | ||
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Here's this week's episode of the "Jay and Farhad Show." As usual, it's New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo and I running through some of the biggest stories in tech this week. Since there aren't many big stories this week in tech, we did our own tech buyer's guide. We ran through ideas for people looking for presents. And we talk about how to think about gift giving. We record this podcast on a weekly basis. You can subscribe to it in iTunes here. You should definitely subscribe. Here's an RSS link to the show. We use SoundCloud as a host, so you can listen to the show over there, too. iPhone cords! Why? Because you can never have enough of them. And most people don't want to spend the money to buy one. It's not the sexiest gift ever, but it's low-cost, and it's useful. Spotify gift card! Spotify is a great way to listen to all the music in the world (other than Taylor Swift, the Beatles, and a few others). It costs $10 per month, which might not be worth it for some people. Give those people a treat by getting them a gift card to Spotify. Google cloud storage This is admittedly a very boring idea. But it's practical! See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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This Man Was Supposed To Become Steve Jobs 2.0 — Here’s What Happened Instead | ||
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Steven Levy, the esteemed technology journalist, wrote in Wired: "When people talk about who might fill the vacuum left by Jobs’ death, Dorsey’s name keeps coming up. "Talented geeks once dreamed of working with Jobs; now they fantasize about working with Dorsey." Once, GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram saw Dorsey give a talk at conference. The next day, Ingram wrote a post saying that Dorsey “is at least a strong contender” to “don the mantle of the Apple co-founder and CEO." Ingram wondered, "Could Dorsey change the way we interact with technology and the world around us in as profound a way as Jobs?" Among all those who argued that Dorsey was on his way to becoming Silicon Valley’s “next Steve Jobs,” the person who did it with the most authority was a man named Randy Wigginton. When Wigginton was 14 years old, he used to wake up at 2:30 in the morning to work on software for a computer that he was building with some people he knew: Apple cofounders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Wigginton stayed at Apple until 1985, when Jobs also left the company. Later in life, Wigginton went to work for Google. By 2011, he was working at a new startup: Jack Dorsey’s second company, Square. When Steve Jobs died that year, Newsweek reporter Dan Lyons called Wigginton to talk about his old boss. At the end of the interview, Lyons asked about his new one. "You now work at Square, which is run by Jack Dorsey, a guy that many people say reminds them of Steve Jobs. Do you see that similarity?” Lyons asked. “Yes,” said Wigginton. "Jack has a vision for things that don’t exist yet … I truly believe he is the Valley’s next Steve Jobs." There are few reasons the comparison between Jobs and Dorsey was made so often back then. The first was that journalists loved the notion. Steve Jobs was not only Silicon Valley’s best CEO ever, he was also the most fun to cover. He was by turns inspirational, mean, competitive, and funny. We didn’t want to see him go. We hoped someone else in the Valley would step up and become as interesting as him. The second was that, in many ways, Dorsey and Jobs had similar life stories. Both dropped out of college. Both cofounded startups that would change the world. Both were fired from those startups. Both returned to those companies years later. The third reason for the comparison was that Dorsey seemed to encourage it, if subtly. In the summer of 2012, someone created a Tumblr blog called “Steve Jobs’ Spirit.” According to popular lore, this “someone” was an Apple employee or two. The blog published one post. Its title was "Thoughts on Jack Dorsey, by Steve Jobs." It was written like a letter and addressed to “Jack." "I have no problem with your success,” it began. "The problem is, you wholesale ripped off my identity. Grand theft. I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. You are not just trying to be the next me, you are trying to be me." Then, point by point, the post’s anonymous author goes over ways in which Dorsey had begun emulating Jobs.
It quotes Jobs telling Playboy, in 1987, that, after getting fired from Apple, "I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach.” It quotes Dorsey telling Vanity Fair that getting fired from Twitter "was like being punched in the stomach." It links to a video where Steve Jobs says of an Apple product, “No one has done this before.” It links to a video where Jack Dorsey says the same thing. The post goes on like that, showing how Dorsey seems to be constantly quoting Jobs without attribution. "Catch my drift?” the post concludes. "Stop trying to be me. Stop trying to be the next me. Be the first Jack Dorsey. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living my life." A funny thing has happened since that anonymous admonishment was posted to Tumblr two years ago. Smart people in tech stopped saying Jack Dorsey was the next Steve Jobs. Why? And what has he become instead? Terrible First-Time CEOsThe big thing people always forget about Steve Jobs’ career is that when the Apple board fired him in 1985 it was absolutely the right thing to do. At that point in his career, Jobs was petulant and rude and impossible to work with. He had great ideas for products, but he was unable to ship them in time or under budget. This is the way Jack Dorsey is most like Steve Jobs: He was also a lousy first-time CEO. Dorsey was bad at being CEO of Twitter for different reasons than Jobs was bad at Apple. Whereas Jobs was intemperate, Dorsey was inept. The first few chapters of "Hatching Twitter," New York Times columnist Nick Bilton’s book about the creation of Twitter, reads like an indictment against young Jack Dorsey’s management abilities. There’s a story about how, one day toward the end of Dorsey’s tenure, Twitter’s top engineer met with some of the company’s board members. “We have a bit of a problem,” he said. The engineer, named Greg, had discovered that there were no backups of Twitter stored anywhere. “If the database goes down right now, we would lose everything,” Greg told the investors, according to Bilton’s book. By “everything,” Greg meant ever tweet ever written, every user ID, and all of Twitter’s code. Panicked at how such a monumental mistake could be made, Twitter’s directors went out and met with other Twitter engineers and asked them about Dorsey. They were told: “Engineering and ops are a disaster." “He’s a great guy. A great friend. A fun boss. But he’s in over his head." “He’s like the gardener who became the president.” It would have been tough for anyone to manage Twitter in its early days. The company employed several anarchists. At one point, the company had a weekly “stand-up” meeting in which everyone stood up. Everyone except for the anarchists, that is. They would stay seated and curse at any manager who asked them to comply. One time, a clever manager decided to have everyone sit down at that week’s stand-up meeting. The anarchists spent the whole meeting standing up. Dorsey was never able to rein the chaos in. Partly this was because he was distracted. Bilton’s book reveals that Dorsey would often dash from the office at 6 p.m. sharp to go to one of his favorite extracurriculars: sometimes a drawing class, sometimes yoga, sometimes dress-making class. Partly, Dorsey could not control the anarchists because he was one himself. He had a tattoo on his forearm symbolizing his adherence to that philosophy. To be fair to young Jack Dorsey, he was never really CEO of Twitter. He held the title, sure, but while he did, most of the power that usually accrues to the CEO of a startup actually belonged to another Twitter cofounder: Ev Williams. Early on, Twitter was just a project inside of a company that Williams owned outright. When Twitter started to look like it could stand on its own, Williams asked Dorsey if he would be CEO of Twitter. Williams kept 70% of Twitter and gave Dorsey 20%. Throughout Dorsey’s tenure as CEO, Williams did for Twitter much of what startup CEOs normally do. Williams handled fundraising and acquisition offers. He made lots of hiring decisions. Dorsey, drawing a salary of $70,000 a year, was more like a product manager than chief executive. For most of his time, he managed a team of a dozen or so. One time, Dorsey set up a booth to “launch” Twitter at a dance party. According to Bilton’s book, he ended up slamming a bunch of vodka and Red Bulls and falling on his face. He had to go to the hospital. Finally, thanks to screw-ups like that, math errors with the finances, the missing backup of the site, and, most especially, because Twitter kept going down, Williams decided he wanted to be Twitter’s CEO. With the help of investors he picked — over Dorsey’s choices — Williams fired Dorsey and made him an “honorary” chairman. Much of Bilton’s book is about how this title allowed Dorsey to continue acting in public like he was part of the company, but that he was, in fact, hardly involved. Learning The Wrong LessonsDorsey was fired from Twitter in late 2008. In May 2009, he tweeted, “Getting ready to embark on something new and entirely different. Excited!” That "something new" eventually became Square. The official origin story of Square is that was created as a solution for a friend of Dorsey’s named Jim McKelvey. McKelvey was a glass-blower. One time, he was about to sell a $2,000 piece of glass. The shopper wanted to use a credit card, but McKelvey didn’t have a way to accept the card. McKelvey griped to Dorsey about this. And so Square, the startup that helps small merchants accept credit cards with their smartphones, was born. The conversation with McKelvey, a Square cofounder, probably actually happened. But as is often the case in startups, there is less poetry to Square’s real origin story than the official one, according to one employee who was there at the beginning. As prosaic as its origins may have been, Dorsey’s vision for Square was truly epic. He wanted to blow up the entire financial industry and reinvent the way the world bought and sold. After Twitter, says this employee, “Jack was looking to do something.” Dorsey started hiring people to figure out what that something could be. One early, promising project was an app called Log, “a private journaling type of thing.” Dorsey hired an engineer, Tristan O’Tierney to build Log. Then, for some reason, Log died. After about nine months, says this employee, Dorsey settled on a payments startup called Squirrel. Then he changed the name to Square.
“The vision was, payments suck, the entire financial industry sucks,” says an early Square employee. "It sucks for businesses, but it also sucks for the people who are trying to buy things or invest or have savings.” Dorsey believed that no one in the financial industry was “taking the user-centric point of view when they are making these financial products,” and that it was a “tragedy” because "payments are this thing that are actually quite intimate, especially when you’re talking about small businesses. Payments are their livelihood.” But Square was not just supposed to be a solution for small businesses; it was also supposed to be a product for consumers. "The goal, the ultimate vision,” says another early employee, was “to make paying for things easy around the world using technology that’s in our pockets.” Square wanted to own both sides of the network, says an early employee. The plan was, “Let’s disintermediate the whole thing." Square’s first product, a credit-card-reading dongle you could stick into an iPhone’s earphone jack, was supposed to be thinnest edge of a wedge Dorsey and his team could use to take over the payments world. Dorsey created the company, and ran it, in an almost exact reaction to how Twitter was built and run. He wanted to learn from his mistakes. Former Square employees say this commitment to change showed in several ways. Far from leaving the office at six every night, Dorsey pushed himself to work painfully long hours. He carefully selected venture capitalists who would not challenge his authority the way Twitter’s had. In contrast to Twitter, he hired up very fast, and was, within months, managing more employees than he ever had before. He decided that Square would not partner with nearly as many third parties as Twitter had. Dorsey felt that Twitter’s internal organization had been too slow to react to problems, too stagnant. So he consistently reorganized Square every eight to 10 months. Dorsey banned anarchy, or any semblance of it, from Square. He envisioned the company as one that would be run top down — a place where even top executives would be expected to submit their work to Dorsey for approval before going forward. Before the first Square dongle had launched, and when the company still had just 20 people, Dorsey sought to hire someone who could help him run the company’s operations in this manner. He met with Keith Rabois, a Silicon Valley veteran who had started out at PayPal and had held a big job at LinkedIn. During his interview, Rabois had explained to Dorsey the micromanagement techniques that Bill Walsh, the famous former NFL coach, had used to turn the San Francisco 49ers from a losing franchise into a winner of several Super Bowls. Recalling what he’d read in Walsh’s book, “The Score Takes Care of Itself,” Rabois said that one of Walsh’s first moves as head coach was to instruct all of the team’s secretaries on how to answer the phone. The point was that every role within the company had a “standard of performance,” and that if everyone knew what that standard was and strived for it, high performance would naturally result on the field, and the score would take care of itself. Dorsey quickly hired Rabois. As the company grew, every senior executive at Square running each of the company's major functions had to review their progress with Dorsey every week. The metaphor that Dorsey most liked to use to describe his controlling management style was that of a restaurant. In a gourmet kitchen, there are 10 people who touch a dish before it goes out. Everyone specializes. Someone sears the meat. Another person plates the vegetables. Someone adds the swirled line of sweet-potato mash. And so on. The final step in the kitchen is for the plate to go in front of a person holding a clean wipe rag. This person goes through a checklist to make sure everything about the plate is perfect. Does it have all the spices? Does the plate look spotless? Is anything out of place? Dorsey said that his role was to be that last person in the kitchen, for every decision the company made. Sometimes, Dorsey’s obsession with detail was effective, even charming. The week before Square launched a product called Square Wallet in 2012, Dorsey had an epiphany. When users opened Square Wallet for the first time on their smartphones, it should feel like the unboxing of a real physical wallet. To achieve that effect, Dorsey believed the wallet needed to be wrapped in virtual tissue paper. He suggested this idea to the Square Wallet product manager, William Henderson. According to an early Square employee, Henderson told Dorsey: “Dude, do you know how much work it’s going to be to render this tissue paper? And make it look realistic? Seal it all up? We have a week to ship and there are so many bugs. Why would we care about tissue paper?” Dorsey walked away from the conversation undeterred. Two hours later, he walked up behind the Square Wallet product manager while he was eating lunch. Dorsey leaned in. “William. Tissue paper.” He walked off. When Square Wallet launched, it was wrapped in virtual tissue paper. Sometimes Dorsey's style of management — combined with his seeming expectation that everyone in the company should work as many hours as he did — drove people nuts. In fact, the other way Jack Dorsey is a lot like Steve Jobs is that after he was fired from his first company, he went on to be a micromanaging, detail-obsessed CEO that lots of people hated working for. Remember, before Steve Jobs succeeded with Pixar and in his return to Apple, he failed at a personal-computing company called NeXT. In 2011, The Wall Street Journal’s Monica Langley reported that Dorsey would monitor the whereabouts of Square employees, and text them when he hadn't seen them for a few hours. Langley also reported that Dorsey told employees to stop going on vacation. She reported that he had told one employee to skip his bachelor party. Employees eventually confronted Dorsey. At an all-hands meeting, they asked why he “guilts” them into working 12-hour days and over the weekends. Dorsey refused to back down. "We have new competitors who want to kill us,” he said, according to Langley. "We have to hold them at bay and move faster than they can imagine." In 2012, Square employees began taking to public forums on the internet to complain about working conditions. On Glassdoor, a site that lets employees rate their bosses, and Q&A site Quora, they wrote that Dorsey was expanding Square too fast, hiring too many inexperienced managers, and pushing employees too hard. One or two took direct shots at Dorsey. One wrote: "There is so much BS flowing in the arteries here with Jack being 'GOD'. Maybe Jack is GOD, but if you don't believe that, you are going to be screwed." Another wrote that Dorsey "was pushed out of Twitter because he did not know how to run a company and he still does not." Very Different Comebacks
Dorsey’s return seemed to echo Jobs’ return to Apple, more than a decade after he had been fired. But Dorsey’s return to Twitter was much different than Jobs’ return to Apple. After Dorsey was fired from Twitter in 2008, he became something of an unofficial mascot for the company. He gave lots of interviews about how he created Twitter. He traveled the world as a Twitter representative. From the outside, it appeared as though he was still very involved in the company. He was not. A source who interviewed for a job at Twitter during this time remembers asking why Dorsey hadn’t been involved in the hiring process. This source remembers the interviewer saying “We don’t talk about Jack. He’s not involved. He’s off doing his own thing. No one cares about Jack here.” In 2010, that started to change. That summer Twitter executives had started to reach out to Dorsey to complain that Ev Williams was not a very good CEO. Dorsey told them to take their worries to Twitter’s board. Soon, Williams was fired, and Dorsey was brought back into the company as the head of Twitter’s product development. In Bilton’s telling, Dorsey arranged the entire coup from behind the scenes. Square employees we talked to couldn't believe that the Dorsey they knew could be so Machiavellian. Dorsey himself told The New Yorker's DT Max, “Was I thinking, Screw Ev? Emotionally, was I asking that? I don’t know. Maybe.” Whether Dorsey schemed his way back into Twitter or not, his return was — in contrast to Jobs’ — a failure. His disparaging words upset a lot of people in the room, according to Nick Bilton's "Hatching Twitter." According to Bilton, Dorsey never really recovered. By July, Twitter employees had "started to complain to Twitter managers that Jack was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product ideas.” For a year or so, Dorsey worked two full-time jobs, going into Square and Twitter for full back-to-back days, every day. This also made him seem like Steve Jobs, who continued to be CEO of Pixar for a time after returning to Apple. But it’s not really clear how devoted to Twitter Dorsey was then. In an interview, Bilton told us that one thing Dorsey did for Twitter was interview job candidates. Sometimes these candidates would later interview for jobs at Square. Bilton says that Dorsey always steered the most talented people to Square, the company he controlled. By 2013, Dorsey’s big return to Twitter was basically over. He was coming into Twitter only once a week, and no one at the company reported to him. Meanwhile, at Square, employees were not happy to share their CEO. During an all-hands meeting where employees were allowed to submit anonymous questions, Dorsey got grilled over his two-timing. There never was a single moment where Jack Dorsey stopped being the next Steve Jobs. But if there had to be one, that meeting could have been it. "I don’t think I have seen anything as contentious as that,” says a former Square employee. Handing Over The ChecklistsIn the beginning of 2013, a New York lawyer named Steve Berger told Square that it had failed to protect his employee from sexual harassment by Keith Rabois, Square’s chief operating officer. Berger said that his client wanted a multimillion-dollar settlement. According to a report from Kara Swisher, Square’s outside council, Richard Curiale, investigated Berger’s claim and found that Rabois’ relationship had been a “welcome” one. Still, Rabois had not told Dorsey or anyone else in Square management about the relationship. Dorsey asked Rabois to resign, which he did. Some say Jack was happy to see Keith go, but a former employee tells us that’s not the case. This employee (who is not Rabois) says that anytime Square had a big decision to make, Dorsey “would not even say a word till he would look to Keith for his advice on whether it was a good idea.” Another source says that up to that point, there had been "two adults at Square: Jack and Keith." Rabois’ departure created a huge hole at Square. There went the guy who, like Bill Walsh at the 49ers, had been going around holding everyone to high standards of performance. Instead of hiring a single COO to replace Rabois, Dorsey decided to hire a team. His two most impressive hires were Gokul Rajaram and Francoise Brougher. Rajaram is a veteran of Google, where he built the company’s first ad network. At Facebook, Rajaram was responsible for all advertising products. Brougher also made her career at Google, where she ran the same massive sales force that Sheryl Sandberg ran at Google, before she became the COO of Facebook.
During the summer of 2013, Dorsey put Rajaram in charge of product development and Brougher in charge of business operations. Suddenly, instead of two adults at Square, there were several. Dorsey started delegating. Things moved faster. They had to: By the time Rajaram and Brougher were on board, Square had nearly 800 employees. One former Square employee says the company changed "almost overnight — much for the better." Another says Rajaram in particular was “transformational” for Square. "If you talk to 20 people at Square and ask what impression Gokul had on them, 10 of them would probably say he literally changed their lives. He’s one of the top product guys in the Valley, he’s an exceptional individual, exceptional talent." Another former Square employee said that Rajaram’s strengths matched up with Dorsey’s weaknesses. "I think Jack is a better visionary than he is a product strategist. He’s really good at saying, 'This is the way consumers should be able to do something.' And with Jack it’s like, 'Hey, Jack, great, we know what the vision is, it's ambitious scale, it's a big deal, I think it’s a great mission.' But it’s hard to know what to do for the next two years. What do I prioritize? Is one product area more important than another? I don't think that's the stuff that's Jack’s strength. This is why we hired Gokul." Every time a new employee joins Square, they get a little gift box. In the box, there’s a book called "The Checklist Manifesto." The idea is, excellence comes from going through a checklist to make sure you’ve done everything right, every time. For years, the way Dorsey ran Square was to be the guy going over every checklist. "That’s the clearest thing that’s changed,” says a recently departed employee. "His desire to be a major part of every checklist seems to have changed. What requires a checklist has changed. They’ve gotten faster as a company." So what has Jack Dorsey become, if not the next Steve Jobs? He has become a much better CEO — someone able to hire talented managers, delegate to them, and focus on his own strengths. Intuit 2.0
In an interview, Bilton told us that, back then, Dorsey was as likely to be “the next Steve Jobs” as any "random programmer with headphones on and blue hair." But these days, Bilton says, his sources tell him Dorsey "is becoming, or is now, a capable CEO." "He’s had a lot of experience. [Square] is a big business. He’s made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of lessons." But now that he’s a capable CEO, is Jack Dorsey the CEO of the kind of company he wants to run? Last Spring, The Wall Street Journal published a story on its front page reporting that Square was unprofitable, running out of cash, and seeking a bailout acquisition from either PayPal or Google, perhaps even at a price lower than its $6 billion valuation. A couple of months later, Fortune’s Miguel Helft published a counter-story. He said Square hadn’t been negotiating with Google for a sale; it had been talking to Google’s venture-capital unit about possible investment. Helft said he looked at some of Square’s internal documents, and that they painted a much rosier picture of the company’s financials. He quoted an investor in Square who said that any time it wanted, the company could quit investing its revenues in growth and be profitable. According to these people, Square has about 1 million “micro” to medium-sized businesses using its credit-card readers to accept payments. Those merchants will do $30 billion in revenues this year, and $900 million or so of that money will pass through Square as gross revenues. Of that $900 million, Square will get to keep about $300 million in net revenues. These people say that Square could hang on to most of that $300 million and call it earnings (before taxes and all that), but that instead, it is reinvesting the money to try to develop new revenue streams. The gross revenues and net revenues are growing about 50% year over year, we’re told. Essentially, Square has a somewhat big, fast-growing, low-margin enterprise business with lots of customers. Like many enterprise businesses in a similar position — from VISA to LinkedIn to whoever provides payroll services to the company you work for — Square is trying to upsell its large customer base into higher-margin products. When Jack Dorsey started Square, he wanted to reinvent both sides of the payments network. He wanted Square to be both the way merchants accept payments and the way consumers make them. It’s never gotten real traction on the consumer side. Back in 2012, it looked like it might happen when Square signed a deal to power mobile payments in every Starbucks. But consumers hardly noticed, and Square was forced to call the deal a success because it helped prove that its payments systems would work with merchants of any size. Today, we’re told there are two factions within Square. One is led by Dorsey, who still believes that Square can still own both sides of the payments network. The other, perhaps more powerful faction, is led by Rajaram. Its view is that Square, a $6 billion company, could become a $25 billion company like Intuit, if it hunkers down and makes really great products for small businesses. Does Jack Dorsey want to spend the rest of his life making great products for small businesses? Through a Square spokesman, Dorsey declined to be interviewed for this article, so we were unable to ask him directly. A current Square employee tells us Dorsey finds the idea of running $6 billion — or even $8 billion — enterprise payments company “boring." Another says that, actually, Dorsey often talks about how he’s motivated by the idea that Square is helping small businesses thrive because small businesses create jobs. According to "Hatching Twitter," when Dorsey was running Twitter, he would daydream about quitting – sometimes to sail by himself to Hawaii, sometimes to become a fashion designer. Dorsey has also often talked about how he wants to be the mayor of New York City someday. Maybe he’s wondering what Steve Jobs would do.
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In 2011, there was a thing smart people around the technology industry used to say. 
It links to a photo of Jobs wearing his iconic rimless glasses with circular lenses. It links to a photo of Dorsey 
One obvious reason people started comparing Jack Dorsey to Steve Jobs a lot back in 2011 was that Jack Dorsey had returned to Twitter that year as an executive chairman in charge of product.
"Hatching Twitter" author Nick Bilton spent the first half of his book describing Jack Dorsey as an awful CEO of Twitter.
Yes, Google Does Use Its Monopoly In Europe To Distort The Market (GOOG) | ||
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If Google gets broken up because it's a monopoly, it will be mostly Google's fault. Today, the European Union took the first step in that extraordinary process: EU parliament members voted in favour of breaking up Google in order to end its monopoly in search. In Europe, 90% of search results come from Google. To be clear: We are a long, long way from actually seeing any part of Google hived off into a competing entity. It probably won't happen. But the fact that regulatory bodies here are even considering it tells you just how many enemies Google has made over the years, and how obvious its monopoly is. Google is more dominant in Europe than in the US, even though it is an American company with a towering stateside presence. Everyone admits that Google is a de facto monopoly. Peter Thiel, the libertarian tech investor, has said so. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer thinks Google is a monopoly. Yelp has lobbied the EU, arguing the same. The US FTC has investigated Google for monopoly practices, although it has concluded no significant antitrust action needs be taken. Even Google chairman Eric Schmidt has admitted "we're in that area." Schmidt and Page once declined to testify to Congress on the topic of their monopoly status. The fact that it monopolises search is not in itself a bad thing. Merely being a monopoly is not a transgression, even in Europe. (It's often a sign of natural success.) Rather, EU antitrust law applies when companies abuse their monopoly to manipulate markets around them unfairly. On that measure, Google has more than qualified for scrutiny over the way it distorts markets that have nothing to do with search.
Yelp's evidence was elegant and simple: It used Google's own search API to create a browser extension that displayed Google search results without results that include promo boxes generated from Google+, the unpopular identity/social network product that Google launched to counter Facebook. The extension shows you the "real" result generated by Google's algorithm, without the self-promotional fluff that Google layers on top of it.
You should take this argument with a punch of salt: Yelp is an avowed enemy of Google. Yet ... it's compelling. Yelp is not alone. Dozens of companies believe Google uses its search might to dictate terms in industries that Google itself does not compete in. Expedia, TripAdvisor, Microsoft and a bunch of smaller companies have complained that Google sets competition rules within their industries. Even adultery website AshleyMadison has a case: It cannot advertise on certain Google properties, but Match.com can. Google doesn't run dating sites, but it sets the rules through which they can advertise against each other. Over the years, all these complainers have piled up into a veritable tidal wave of discontent against Google. The company, because it is so successful and so dominant, has created an army of enemies that want to see it brought down. In Europe, they're making progress. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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The best evidence for that came from Yelp and a coalition of companies it has formed who believe they are being screwed out of their natural, "organic" ranking in search results because Google simply dumps its own — often unhelpful — content on top of the "real" search ranking of which sites are best.
The difference is alarming. Hotel review sites like Tripadvisor — which have hundreds of reader reviews per hotel, and are thus good quality search results if you're looking for hotels — get buried under Google's own Google+ review boxes, in which only a handful of people have written reviews. It's difficult to argue that Google is serving the "best" hotel results if its own algorithm is being crammed down under auto-generated promo boxes for Google's own properties. This Game Company Sold 30,000 Boxes Of Bull Poop As A Black Friday 'Deal' | ||
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Cards Against Humanity, which bills itself as a "party game for horrible people," decided that it wanted to help potential customers "experience the ultimate savings" on Black Friday by taking its game off its website completely. Instead, though, the site offered a bizarre and hilarious "deal": It sold boxes of bull poop for $6 each. This isn't the game company's first quirky special. Last year, Cards Against Humanity sold its game for $5 more than usual, and ended up getting a huge spike in sales. It's also holding a Ten Days Of Kwanza Or Whatever sale where for $15, customers will get ten mystery gifts throughout December. Here's what you see now on the company's main website:
The company's FAQ page was equally amusing:
(Hat-tip to Ars Technica, where we first saw this story.) SEE ALSO: Here Are Google's Big Holiday Sales Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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This Working Flying Car Prototype Is Absolutely Stunning | ||
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Flying cars might not be science fiction for long. Stefan Klein and Juraj Vaculik, cofounders of a company Slovakian startup called AeroMobil, have created a beautiful prototype that has already been on several successful test flights. We touched base with Klein and Vaculik to hear more about their amazing vehicle. AeroMobil cofounder Stefan Klein first started dreaming up designs more than 20 years ago. Here's one of his sketches from the early 90s. Fast forward almost 25 years, and here's the team with the AeroMobil 3.0. "To marry the car and the airplane is an interesting engineering and design challenge," Klein told Business Insider via email. See the rest of the story at Business Insider  | ||
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American Spieth wins Australian Open by six shots | ||
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Sydney (AFP) - Young American Jordan Spieth dominated the final round to win the Australian Open by six shots and leave world number one Rory McIlroy and third-ranked Adam Scott in his wake on Sunday. Spieth carded a sizzling new course record of eight-under 63 to finish the Aus$1.25 million (US$1.06 million) OneAsia co-sanctioned tournament at 13-under 271. It was 21-year-old Texan's second career tournament win and his first since last year's triumph at the John Deere Classic in Illinois. Spieth was runner-up at the Masters last April behind fellow American Bubba Watson, just missing out on being the first Masters rookie to win since Fuzzy Zoeller in 1979. Spieth took a grip on the final round with three consecutive birdies from the fifth to the seventh holes to go nine under and led overnight co-leader Brett Rumford by three at the turn. He had few problems holding on to his advantage in the homeward nine with four more birdies in his closing five holes to post his best tournament victory. With his comprehensive victory, Spieth's world ranking is expected to climb from 14 to 11. Australian Rod Pampling finished second at seven-under 277 with Brett Rumford third on six-under 278 and Greg Chalmers in fourth on five-under 279. Scott lost momentum with a double-bogey seven at the fifth hole to drop back to two under and could make little headway on the tearaway leader to finish fifth with four-under 280. The world No.3 had to take a penalty drop for an unplayable lie after blocking his tee shot into rough and then hooked his next shot back into the trees on the left. He speared through a narrow opening but was unable to get up and down, the double-bogey leaving Scott five behind Spieth at that stage. Defending champion McIlroy, who beat Scott with a birdie at the final hole at Royal Sydney last year, struggled with the course and the windy conditions and failed to make a final round charge, finishing joint 15th, some 15 strokes behind Spieth. The Northern Irishman had a total of 15 birdies, an eagle, 14 bogeys, one double bogey and a disastrous triple bogey this week at the Open. Only eight players finished under par over the 72 holes at the demanding Jack-Nicklaus designed course. Spieth joins past winners of the Stonehaven Cup such as greats Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Greg Norman, Tom Watson and Peter Thomson. He is the first American since Brad Faxon in 1993 to win the Australian Open. Last year Spieth won the John Deere Classic at age 19, becoming the first teen winner of a US PGA Tour event since 1931. Spieth also became the youngest player to win two Ryder Cup matches at the age of 21 years and 62 days at Scotland's Gleneagles in September. Rumford, Pampling and two-time winner Chalmers qualified for next year's British Open as the top three non-exempt players.
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