It's hard to tell given the private stock and all, but the article mentions that there's reason to believe the company hasn't taken quite as much of a haircut as comparable ones that are already on the public markets:
> In March, Fidelity, required to publicly update the value of its holdings, marked down Stripe by 20%. Most unicorns—startups valued at $1 billion or more—are trading on the secondary markets at 20% to 40% discounts to their last official venture capital rounds. But Stripe’s shares remain hard for new investors to obtain and in high demand, with recent transactions implying a valuation of as much as $165 billion, per New York–based EquityZen, a marketplace for pre-IPO shares.
Does buying private stock on EquityZen include any due diligence? I'm skeptical that it's helping with price discovery, but I don't really understand the platform.
The topic reminded me of a good episode of Invest Like the Best with Carta CEO Henry Ward[1], which included a discussion of their CartaX platform for offering insiders a chance to sell private stock to institutions.
> each person known by us to be the beneficial owner of more than 5% of the outstanding shares of our Class A or Class B common stock; and
It seems that Dmitriy owns less than 5%.
As usual though, the wording in here is unnecessarily opaque and overcomplicated — it's possible there's some other technicality that allows him to be omitted from the list.
Just to play devil's advocate — OOC, what do you think the end game for Álvaro would be under this scenario?
Under the most cynical interpretation, I guess he'd convert Ongres from a Postgres consultancy to a trademark troll and sue other companies who try to use "Postgres"? Maybe, but that's a pretty serious professional change, and seems a little unlikely, especially given that's a considerable chance that he loses the trademark again if it does end up in court.
For my money, the most likely explanation is that it was a land grab move for prestige purposes that went too far. (And one which may backfire as Google ties this press release to his name.)
I get the impression that Álvaro has issues with the governance of the core team and PGCAC and thus wanted trademarks to protect his consultancy that were under the control of his non-profit which he believes has stricter governance. He also seems to be interested in leveraging the trademarks to force governance changes on the core team and PGCAC.
Yeah. My comments are from before Alvaro started commenting in this thread, and I've since changed my position based on reading his responses.
> He also seems to be interested in leveraging the trademarks to force governance changes on the core team and PGCAC.
This is it. The strategy was to acquire the trademarks and then use them as leverage to force the dissolution of Postgres Core and its associated organizations, to be replaced with a new power structure which includes him as a key member.
The very last part is me editorializing somewhat (although it's not very much of a stretch), but he's been quite explicit about the rest of it.
Trademark trolling is specifically the use case for this. Sue every sub $300k/yr company than mentions that they use PostgreSQL in their stack. They won't have the funds to defend themselves, he makes off with $10k-$30k in settlements and goes on to the next one until a court stops him.
It's worth noting that (from the article) the offender in this case isn't some gigantic organization like Amazon — it's basically one guy, and one who considers himself to be a member in good standing whose part of the Postgres community.
I'd hazard a guess that by taking this public, the Postgres team is trying to create some pressure on him through public opinion in the hope that he sees reason and it doesn't have to become a long and arduous legal battle which benefits no one.
And it really shouldn't have to. It's not clear what Álvaro's actual motives are in trying to usurp the Postgres trademark — it could be some cynical profiteering thing, but hopefully it was just some momentary hubris that can still be walked back and resolved amicably.
I mean, assume good faith, strongest possible reading, etc etc: Isn't it perfectly possible that he's actually just doing exactly what he says he's doing?
The "PostgreSQL Community" is supposed to be decentralised, with no intellectual property held by any single entity to target in a hostile takeover, so he's just doing his bit to help decentralise holding of trademarks.
Seems a perfectly plausible reading of events; far from "cynical profiteering", nor even "momentary hubris".
Exactly this. The city's budget was $6.4B in 2010, and $12.6B for 2021-2022, which is down from $13.7B for 2020-2021 (only because of Corona). That's a _doubling_ in a decade, and speaking somewhat subjectively as someone who's been here the entire time, all public services and the state of the streets have continued getting worse. Even if you don't buy that, it's absolutely certain that nothing has gotten better.
It's not clear how SF can escape the situation, but there are a few things that are absolutely certain, and one of them is that more money is not going to fix the problem. We need a different approach.
Pretty much this. Regardless of how you feel about Uber/Lyft drivers' ability to access benefits, if the bill that does it has this many exemptions, you should oppose it on that basis alone.
The long exemption list is a naked method of making sure that AB5 only targets its intended victims — Uber and Lyft, without actually having to mention them by name. If this law is generally a good idea, then why should it have required any exemptions at all?
The ethical version of AB5 would have been to have California (and the broader US) move have a single payer healthcare system, paid for by taxes, as it already is for a huge portion (but not all) of the population. That way, everyone gets access to health care, and everyone pays for it.
But that's hard to do, so California's cynical lawmakers "solve" the problem by passing the buck in a much simpler way: pass regulation to target their scapegoats du jour (as an assemblyperson, I get _my_ healthcare from the state, but it's _those guys_ who are bad! yeah!) with laser precision through special carveouts. Thus AB5 is born.
> Was the COO fired? It sounds like she was, reading this article.
Knowing nothing about the internals at Dropbox, it does sound like it (on the surface at least). Having worked at a couple major tech companies now, executives never get fired. They "step down", or go on sabbatical ... and never come back. The usual hallmark of the action is that the email about it isn't sent by the leaving executive themselves, it's sent by their boss.
Normal employees don't tend to have these options, but executives are so high profile that it seems to be an informalized practice for both company and executive to save face. It's hard to worry about them too much though because their exit package is likely more than than most of us could make given ten years.
Also, the terms of whatever seperation gets figured out often includes keeping the exec as an employee (in a legal sense). They might not actually be doing any meaninful work, but but they still get the paychecks, extended time to exercise options/stock, health benefits, etc ...
Lower cost premiums maybe, but I doubt any low-premium marketplace plans will be lower deductible than the corporate/COBRA plans offered by a company like Dropbox.
Well, it feels weird to defend Instagram, but here we go. The important lines from the article are these ones:
> Instagram confirmed to Newsbeat that Kevin's handle had been changed in line with its policy.
> It allows it to make changes to an account if it's been inactive for a certain amount of time.
I tried going to the guy's new Instagram [1], but couldn't see any posts there at all. I visited his Twitter [2] instead, and except for a few posts he made from the exciting run in the last 24 hours, he hadn't tweeted since 2013.
I don't think they did a bad thing here — it's their platform, and they have some incentive to encourage a more lively and current community. Although it seems minor, one facet of this might be to help big users reclaim better names from the huge pool of defunct ones out there, especially given that Instagram has gotten so big that finding anything that's not a conflict is difficult.
Why does the absence of posts indicate inactivity? He said in the article he uses it to like posts, but not create content. That doesn't sound inactive to me.
In fact, Instagram basically encourages this type of account use. Any time you try to browse the site they try to get you to sign-up, even if you have zero intention of making your own posts.
It sounds like the guy would have given the account name over either way, so why couldn't they have simply contacted him first and asked?
"would you give up your account name"
"No"
"We have changed your account name"
Is 10x worse than "we have changed your account name". If you're going to do something and there aren't any alternatives don't act like it's a question unless an extremely high ratio will say yes.
But as far as I know, US citizens[1] don't recognize sovereignty of the British Crown since 1776… In that particular days, they even ratified a text saying “that all men are created equal”.
[1] (and Instagram is owned byt a majority of American citizens)
> US citizens[1] don't recognize sovereignty of the British Crown
While that is clearly true, a surprising number of US citizens do, in my experience, recognize the celebrity of British royals.
The number of times I've been asked about Prince William's children is, quite frankly, astonishing. To such an extent that I even Googled their names so I did't appear too much like I couldn't give a crap.
> they even ratified a text saying “that all men are created equal”.
Right, but those Founding Fathers were pretty good at words. They were very careful to not say that everyone is equal. Largely because most of them didn't actually believe that. What they were most concerned about was someone not lording it over them. They were entirely relaxed about lording it over others, for example.
The story is about a UK royal taking the handle of another UK citizen. Instagram must recognize the sovereignty of the UK crown while doing business in the UK.
Sure will you give up all my data, metadata and shadow profile? Oh and don’t forget to forward me all funds you have made selling my data and or serving me Ads to date.
I’d really like ICANN to take away the Instagram domain and reassign it to some royals at their request while we are at it.
I'm not talking about proposing a false question under the pretense that you're going to take it regardless of the answer.
Your assumption that Instagram can grab anything they want just shows the normalcy of this type of behavior. Maybe we, as the consumers of these products, should step up and say that is not cool? If you do it to that person, what is to stop you from doing it to another in the future, to me?
I think it should also be a signal to any one that creates a brand, a business, on Instagram. Instagram can instantly snatch your livelihood without even contacting you.
I'm proposing people being human and remembering that just because a URL path might be a technical creation, there is still a human being behind that and we should treat people as we want to be treated.
> Instagram has gotten so big that finding anything that's not a conflict is difficult.
I don't understand online services' obsession with making sure public-facing identifiers are unique. This is not close to true in any other area. How many British guys can be named Harry?
If there could be two World of Warcraft toons named Joe, maybe there wouldn't be so many xX_KillStealr69_Xx-es running around.
Wouldn’t the same issue apply to email addresses or domain names? At some point there needs to be a unique identifier or ID to locate the right destination.
How else could this be accomplished, especially when we are talking about URL structures that need to be somewhat short in length?
Blizzard accounts are Unique only in that they have a unique number appended to the end. For example there can be many 'eeeeeeeeeeeee' accounts, but only one 'eeeeeeeeeeeee#1432'. The games only show 'eeeeeeeeeeeee' during play.
Discord takes this approach as well and it seems to work fine there.
I tend to like the approach Valve takes with Steam, which is to completely separate the "account name" (unique, unchangeable) from the "display name" (non-unique, change more or less as often as you want).
It is kind of weird that the account name is unchangeable since it's really only visible to the account holder and not tied to anything else. I agree that it should be unique since it's a sign-on credential but it really ought to be a label for the account number.
Just because it’s relevent... although steam officially states that the account name is unchangeable; if you contact support with a good reason and get the right person they can and do change your account name to another free one of your choice.
I have uh personal reasons for having done this and I know of others who have as well.
I’m not sure why they don’t roll it out more wisely - though I can say it did cause a couple of bugs until I signed out and back in on every steam device.
Each steam account does have atleast 3 internal unchangable account numbers that are exposed through APIs for developers to integrate with and use for things such as enforcing bans etc.
In this particular case, I'm guessing -- based on the URLs -- that in order to have the Instagram username "sussexroyal", it's also necessary to be located at www.instagram.com/sussexroyal . This is a design mistake. The URL identifier does not need to be the public-facing identifier, and it shouldn't be. You can have the Duke of Sussex as sussexroyal at www.instagram.com/y6llflk9 and the guy in Sussex who roots for the Royals as sussexroyal at www.instagram.com/y2q9g6uo .
There is no need to have the public-facing identifier be the unique identifier, nor is there a good reason to do it. ICQ got this right, way back at the beginning. But somehow everyone forgot.
> There is no need to have the public-facing identifier be the unique identifier
Yeah, there is: it's a major UX improvement, because the URLs at issue are entry-point URLs, which need friendly names for the same reason domains for public-facing services (which are key components of entry-point URLs) do.
It's true that in the general case objects don't necessarily need a URL component that matches their friendly name, but this is not the general case.
It seems like a major UX improvement, but is somebody looking for Prince Harry's Instagram account going to know http://www.instragram.com/sussexroyal, or are they going to enter the app and search "Prince Harry", click the first link, and then "Favorite" that account for future reference?
I know I personally very rarely type a direct URL. Either it's already bookmarked, or I google it.
> It seems like a major UX improvement, but is somebody looking for Prince Harry's Instagram account going to know http://www.instragram.com/sussexroyal
Instagram accounts (and similar social media IDs) are often communicated in print, and parsing and accurately transcribing things that work like natural language is a lot easier than something like an arbitrary base36-encoded identifier.
They are also sometimes communicated via orally or via radio, where being able to hear and remember is even more affected by the using natural language.
But instagram.com/sussexroyal is a much more memorable URL than instagram.com/y2q9g6uo, and being able to find someone from remembering their handle is much better than remembering the handle and then wondering which of the multiple people called sussexroyal you're after when the search results come through
Needless to say, the most prominent and memorable identifier being non-unique has all sorts of uses for trolls and spambots too.
The option for a reasonable name still exists (and site owners don't have to arbitrarily confiscate it to give it to more PR-worthy people), it just might be a slightly longer reasonable name with a disambiguator built into it instead of a common first name or cool dictionary word, and you get a reasonable URL as a bonus. I'd probably rather be found at instagram.com/johnsmithspringfield than instagram.com/jh9fjhfgjhg (or 'search for "John Smith" and scroll through 300 entries') anyway.
Of course with unique identifiers you probably don't get to call yourself elonmusk, POTUS or amazon
> instagram.com/sussexroyal is a much more memorable URL than instagram.com/y2q9g6uo
Since there are a limited number of memorable names available, anyone late to the party gets stuck with non-memorable names. Why not even the playing field?
Most social networks would see rewarding early adopters as a benefit rather than a drawback. Besides which, TheThreeWordName or JohnBSmith1982 is still a lot more memorable than a random alphanumeric string.
As another person said further down, it's why we have domain names rather than IP addresses. Sure, the way in which they're distributed might be suboptimal, but not nearly as suboptimal as making everyone have to remember the IP address or rely entirely upon a search function that returns ever-changing results.
Sure, but Instagram isn't an email or domain name provider, so the point is that it doesn't _have_ to have this problem.
It's opted in to the problem by deciding that display names need to be unique. It's not right or wrong, it's apparently just been decided that that's desirable for the product.
Ahh yes, nothing more lively and current than watching senior citizens coo over monarchs.
In all seriousness, this is just another step towards instagram being another bland reflection of the media fun house in which we all live: famous people get air time to pimp products and movements.
> In all seriousness, this is just another step towards instagram being another bland reflection of the media fun house in which we all live: famous people get air time to pimp products and movements.
???
Instagram is a mainstream everything-is-an-ad site and has been since I've first heard of it.
Yeah, zero posts and doesn’t even have a profile pic. It’s a dead account, I don’t have much of an issue with Instagram’s policy to “steal” handles on accounts like this.
> Open offices clearly suck. So why are you (most likely) still working in one? Behind all the fluff, there is a simple explanation: they save insane amounts of money.
In the beginning, there was a lot of talk about open offices producing more collaborative environments, and I'm willing to give this charitable credence and believe that some people might really have thought that at the time. It was an emerging idea and the complete ramifications were not really understood.
These days though, I don't think anyone ingenuous would defend that idea anymore — it's all about money, and this is doubly so in dense tech hot spots like San Francisco where real estate commands a huge premium.
My large company is entirely open office, and has even been known to downsize standard desk size in order to get more of them into the same area. It's annoying, and there's no question that it creates a large productivity tax (desks are packed tightly enough that even a small group of people having a conversation at normal voice levels three rows over is pretty disrupting), but it mostly works, and giving everyone their own office in our central location would be pretty much financially infeasible. You learn to start working around it as best you can with sound insulating headphones, working from home where possible, or even reserving the occasional meeting room when you can.
I find some comedy in the fact that my parent's generation used to complain non-stop about being ousted form their offices and into cubicle farms. These days, my generation would kill for cubicles. Even a couple drawers to store a few personal items are a fantasy at this point.
I work in an open office and it is clearly more collaborative than if we were all in separate rooms. You can easily talk to people about things and interested parties often overhear and join the discussion when they wouldn't have even known it was happening otherwise.
Also, being honest, I'd totally waste more time browsing the news if I had my own office.
The key is:
1. Have plenty of space per person. We have big desks and are only at about 60% occupancy at the moment.
2. Don't make the offices enormous. I'd say never more than 100 people in one room. Ideally less.
3. Good acoustics. Carpets are essential.
I used to work for Dyson and they had 1000 people (no joke, I counted) in one enormous office (actually it was a repurposed factory building) with no sound absorbing material at all and it was awful. Current company is just insanely better.
The only issue I have is there is one guy with a really loud and penetrating voice... But it's not a deal breaker.
> In March, Fidelity, required to publicly update the value of its holdings, marked down Stripe by 20%. Most unicorns—startups valued at $1 billion or more—are trading on the secondary markets at 20% to 40% discounts to their last official venture capital rounds. But Stripe’s shares remain hard for new investors to obtain and in high demand, with recent transactions implying a valuation of as much as $165 billion, per New York–based EquityZen, a marketplace for pre-IPO shares.