> Unless you have an endless supply of conviction, it’s time to admit your company’s pivot probably isn’t going to work.
The dynamics around shutting down a company in Silicon Valley today are fascinating. YC and the market forces underlying the VC ecosystem as a whole have pushed things in the "founder-friendly" direction to a degree that's pretty amazing. Seed-stage VCs will tell you they invest in people, not ideas, and as a founder if you go to your investors and tell them that you've decided that your business isn't viable, the default response you're likely to get is "Got any other ideas you want to work on?" I think the list of hard pivot success stories (Slack, Twitter, Soylent, etc) and the general SV ethos of never admitting defeat drive this glorification of the hard pivot as well, but what I don't think gets talked about enough is just how psychologically difficult they are to execute properly. If you have an idea, develop enough conviction about it to quit your job, and spend the next several years of your life throwing everything you have into building a startup around that idea, then end up reaching the conclusion that your hypothesis was wrong, it's incredibly hard to switch gears within a few weeks and reach that same level of conviction about a completely new idea (unless you have Steve Jobs levels of confidence) -- but that seems to be the expected outcome today.
> Another tool in the arsenal of the rich and powerful to give them more of a voice than the average person, is another way to look at it.
The rich and powerful already have exponentially more of a voice than the average person -- media corporations are privately owned, after all, and no one is suggesting that we prevent them from making political statements. Banning political advertising is basically saying that people or groups with thousands or millions of dollars to spend shouldn't be able to get their message out -- only billionaires should be able to do that.
> Though I think the unstated single most important selling point for the Lime scooter over the electric bike is that you don't need to deal with the homicidal, low awareness, little education American driver and the abhorrent infrastructure (and policies) that enable them.
How so? Both Lime scooters and electric bikes are supposed to be ridden in bike lanes on the road, although enforcement can be hit-or-miss.
(Disclaimer: I left FB several years back, this may not be completely accurate today. However, I would be surprised if this in particular has changed.)
I worked on this system. Account deletion is a completely separate process from content deletion. The latter can in some cases just mark data as deleted or ready to be garbage collected, but the former actually deletes everything associated with an account. There are some nuances that are hard to explain well in front of a bunch of Senators though: your messages to other people will still stay in their inbox, it's not feasible to purge backups so there are tapes with your data around for several months. Also, derived data (ML models, etc) trained with the account data sticks around, although this isn't really identifiable info.
I worked on this system. It takes several months because it's infeasible to purge old backups etc, but eventually it's all gone. The process for deleting accounts is separate from the normal content deletion process and is quite robust.
I never understood why contributions by employees that happen to work at a certain company are treated as such a "gotcha" moment by the media. Facebook has 25000 employees. Presumably some fraction of those will choose to donate to politicians they support, largely liberal ones given the political leanings of Facebook's workforce -- over thousands of employees this adds up to a significant amount of money. Does anyone think that these scattershot individual contributions meaningfully influence any national politician in favor of Facebook?
The PAC donations are of course a different story, but honestly the incentives here just puzzle me. The limits on PAC contributions to candidates ($5000) just seem so piddling to a company like Facebook that I don't understand where the ROI comes from, especially after factoring in the negative PR. I doubt a $5000 campaign donation will meaningfully influence my local school board official, let alone a Representative or Senator. The only explanation that makes any sense is that the broad PAC donations are just an expectation for companies before their lobbyists' calls get returned -- an entrance ticket to the Beltway circles. Obviously this is problematic, but in this case Facebook isn't "buying" politicians -- at best it's paying them to be restored to neutral.
The dynamics around shutting down a company in Silicon Valley today are fascinating. YC and the market forces underlying the VC ecosystem as a whole have pushed things in the "founder-friendly" direction to a degree that's pretty amazing. Seed-stage VCs will tell you they invest in people, not ideas, and as a founder if you go to your investors and tell them that you've decided that your business isn't viable, the default response you're likely to get is "Got any other ideas you want to work on?" I think the list of hard pivot success stories (Slack, Twitter, Soylent, etc) and the general SV ethos of never admitting defeat drive this glorification of the hard pivot as well, but what I don't think gets talked about enough is just how psychologically difficult they are to execute properly. If you have an idea, develop enough conviction about it to quit your job, and spend the next several years of your life throwing everything you have into building a startup around that idea, then end up reaching the conclusion that your hypothesis was wrong, it's incredibly hard to switch gears within a few weeks and reach that same level of conviction about a completely new idea (unless you have Steve Jobs levels of confidence) -- but that seems to be the expected outcome today.
I think Fred Wilson's take on this is the right one: https://www.inc.com/fred-wilson/pivot-business-failure-start... -- failure is the norm when building a startup and we should encourage a culture of failing fast and moving on from it.