Culture

Human Beings FTW: How Tech Companies Are Rediscovering the Power of Real People

On Monday I broke my third iPhone in the last six months. These slippery devils have now shimmed into puddles, toilets, and in this most recent case, off my lap and onto concrete. I know, I need a case. I bought two Monday, so stop with the lectures.

I am working in Vegas this week, so instead of my usual trip to the Union Square – Genius Bar (holla, guys!) I went to the Apple Store out by the Vegas airport. We didn’t have an appointment, and the service was tremendous. They worked us in and were incredibly nice.

And yet, there was someone standing behind me that was nit-picking about it not being even better. She said to another disgruntled customer the line something you hear a lot when you eavesdrop in Vegas, “Well, I work for the company that has the best customer service in the world so…” Continue reading

Social Media Allocations and the Facebook IPO Trickle-Down Effect

A rising tide lifts all boats.

For social media, Facebook is that tide. And thanks to the madness surrounding the company’s $100 billion IPO, it’s going to lift a lot of boats.

Plenty of VCs invest in social media and have for years. But public market investors, the ones that’ll be snapping up $12 billion worth of Facebook shares, have only begun to whet their social media appetites.
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How 6 Unlikely Investors Snuck into that Monster Evernote $1 Billion Round

As was reported two weeks ago Evernote has raised a whopper of a new round of financing: $70 million at a $1 billion valuation. Evernote’s founder and CEO Phil Libin has never been one to maximize the valuation for the sake of bragging rights. The price was a nod to two things: Evernote has built a truly impressive business, and it was a round many investors were dying to get into.

What hasn’t been reported is that amid this wildly oversubscribed round, Libin decided to carve out a $7 million allocation for a handful of mentors who helped him out when he’d just arrived in Silicon Valley and was a relative nobody. Continue reading

Should Financial Institutions “Like” the Dodd-Frank Act?

Over the course of the last year, I have spent a great deal of time working with several financial institutions as a result of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Why? Well, Dodd-Frank introduced the most dramatic financial regulatory reform measures since The Great Depression.

As the financial industry aligns around the new agency responsible for implementing and enforcing compliance with consumer financial laws, fear, relief and questions are rampant across the industry. At the same time, consumers trudge through confusion and misinformation wondering why the financial system and the government failed them.

Financial institutions are also faced with reform with many suffering, either deservingly or not, from a loss of trust among investors and consumers.

In a time of uncertainty, what consumers need now is clarity through leadership. Answers, transparency, and protection…three pillars of relationships … Continue reading

PandoDaily’s First Ebook Is Out Now! Your Definitive Guide to Facebook’s IPO

We had a lot of luxuries when we started PandoDaily. One was knowing without a doubt what the biggest story of the year would be: Facebook’s IPO.

We knew we had to do something special for it, particularly because several members of our staff and contributors are among the world’s leading experts on the company. So rather than simply bang out a bunch of blog posts and live-Tweet how the stock trades on Friday, we decided to do something a little more in-depth.

The result is published today. It’s our first ever eBook “Buy This Book Before You Buy Facebook: A PandoDaily Expert Guide to the Internet’s Biggest IPO,” available on Amazon Kindle right now, and on other platforms very soon. Continue reading

Advertising is Hated — and Failing

People hate ads, with two exceptions: A) Sometimes one particular ad campaign will strike the public fancy, or B) Sometimes people happen to be in the ad business and, thus, are paid to like ads.

In general, people hate ads so much that they’ve made ad avoidance an art. A tool that facilitates skipping ads is now part of a standard cable sign-up package. There is software that removes ads from webpages. Ads are used as a punishment, such as in the case of Spotify and Pandora, which will intersperse their music offerings with ads unless you pay them not to. Their ads might as well be cobbled together like ransom notes out of various typefaces from the newspaper. Continue reading

Dustin Moskovitz: “I Couldn’t Imagine Moving to Optimize for Taxes”

When Mark Zuckerberg decided to move to Silicon Valley for the summer to see how the start-up Mecca could help his fledgling company, Dustin Moskovitz came with him, Eduardo Saverin did not.

As Facebook continued to grow, Moskovitz stayed a part of the company; Saverin did not.

And next week when Facebook finally goes public, Moskovitz will become a very rich man because he spent every waking moment of those years helping build Facebook. Saverin will become a very rich man because he spent years in a court room. Continue reading

It’s Time to Stop Talking About Women in Tech

Over at CNET today, Molly Wood has a post about why we need to keep talking about women in tech. This time, some assholes in Copenhagen were sexist at a Dell conference. Wood is right about the bigotry, but she’s wrong about the headline. It’s actually time to stop talking about women in tech.

The imbalance between men and women in our industry has already been well documented, vigorously discussed, and appropriately fretted over. But despite all the Women in Tech conference sessions, the empowerment meetings and summits, the magazine articles, the searching blog posts, and the defensive ripostes, we haven’t got very far. Women are still underrepresented in startups, large companies, and especially in leadership. That’s pretty messed up, because by now it should be clear to us all that women make much better leaders than men. Continue reading

Google Overstates the Number of Reviews on Places: Lie or Anomaly?

Do a search for a restaurant in your city of choice. Let’s say for Fior D’Italia in San Francisco. What results do you get?

For me, the restaurant’s Website tops the results list. Under the Website title and link, I find that Google Places has helpfully included some contextual details on America’s oldest Italian restaurant. It gives me the address and the phone number, and it provides links to Menus, Directions, Reservations, and History. And it also tells me there are “124 Google reviews.”

The assumption would be that Google Places carries 124 reviews of the restaurant, right? Not so right. Clicking through, I found that there’s actually just 15 reviews. What the what?

I repeated the test with several other random examples and got the same results (for the record: Commonwealth, Lung Shan, Continue reading