WHATSAPP COFOUNDER BRIAN ACTON ON WHY HE LEFT $850 MILLION BEHIND TO LEAVE FACEBOOK EARLY ★

via DF

Parmy Olson, writing for Forbes:

For his part, Acton had proposed monetizing WhatsApp through a metered-user model, charging, say, a tenth of a penny after a certain large number of free messages were used up. “You build it once, it runs everywhere in every country,” Acton says. “You don’t need a sophisticated sales force. It’s a very simple business.”

Acton’s plan was shot down by Sandberg. “Her words were ‘It won’t scale.’”

“I called her out one time,” says Acton, who sensed there might be greed at play. “I was like, ‘No, you don’t mean that it won’t scale. You mean it won’t make as much money as… ,’ and she kind of hemmed and hawed a little. And we moved on.” […]

When Acton reached Zuckerberg’s office, a Facebook lawyer was present. Acton made clear that the disagreement — Facebook wanted to make money through ads, and he wanted to make it from high-volume users — meant he could get his full allocation of stock. Facebook’s legal team disagreed, saying that WhatsApp had only been exploring monetization initiatives, not “implementing” them. Zuckerberg, for his part, had a simple message: “He was like, This is probably the last time you’ll ever talk to me.”

Sounds like a delightful place to work.

…………………………………………………………….


See, despair NOT !


Imagine working alongside some really stupid people, who would project their ugly inner monsters onto you, like they know you for ages. Because they know they are unaccountable when it is you the target, they expect you to stay put.


Despair NOT, stupid people are loud because they HAVE issues to prove to themselves.

Maybe Private Russian Hackers Meddled in Election, Putin Says || NYTimes

via DF:

PUTIN HINTS AT U.S. ELECTION MEDDLING BY ‘PATRIOTICALLY MINDED’ RUSSIANS

★

Andrew Higgins, reporting for The New York Times:

Shifting from his previous blanket denials, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Thursday that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks last year to help the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. […]

Raising the possibility of attacks by what he portrayed as free-spirited Russian patriots, Mr. Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the morning. If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions — which are right, from their point of view — to the fight against those who say bad things about Russia.” […]

Perhaps worried that American intelligence agencies could release evidence linking last year’s cyberattacks to Russia, Mr. Putin also put forward a theory that modern technology could easily be manipulated to create a false trail back to Russia.

Samsung SUCKs || GALAXY NOTE 7 VS. IPHONE 6S SPEED TEST

DF :

Hard to say how much of this should be attributed to the A9 SoC (hardware) and how much to iOS (software), but it is impressive that a year-old iPhone blows away a brand-new top-of-the-line Samsung.

WHICHCRAFT || That vs. Which | Mary Norris

via DF

Watch this on The Scene.

Mistakes

• via ★

This exchange from a Q&A session Steve Jobs held at WWDC 1997 is a classic. You’ve probably seen it before. But it’s one of those clips that never gets old, and is always worth revisiting. Jobs’s whole response is gold, and, in hindsight, he lays out that the sort of thinking that has guided Apple in the 18 years since. Consider this bit:

STEVE JOBS AT WWDC 1997

…

“Some mistakes will be made along the way. That’s good. Because at least some decisions are being made along the way. We’ll find the mistakes, we’ll fix them! I think what we need to do is support that team.”

…

The way to build a great anything — a product, a company, a book, a blog, an app, a service, a movie, anything — is not to obsess over not making mistakes. That leads to paralysis. Try to avoid mistakes, sure. But recognize that you’ll inevitably make some, and create a culture and work ethic where mistakes get identified and fixed.

I have interacted with people who do not know what intelligence "is", they associate mistakes with a supposed lack of intelligence,

crazy! isn't it?

- But the craziest thing is the length of shenanigans some people wilfully conjure just to hide the fact that they do make mistakes.
Crazy!

Obama on the Hoofbeats of History || Josh Marshall

via DF

Josh Marshall on President Barack Obama:

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This has been a long long seven years. What seemed like an uncertain list of achievements, long on promise but hacked apart by mid-term election reverses and Obama’s sometimes over-desire for accommodation, suddenly appeared closer to profound, like a novel or a play which seems scattered or unresolved until all the pieces fall into place, clearly planned all along, at the end.


…