Yeah, I love tournament poker but can't imagine playing live tournaments for a living. I played a ton online before Black Friday too, pretty successfully, and then was one of the top online tournament players when I got back into it for a bit while I was outside of the US a couple years back.
As a last hurrah before getting back to startups I traveled to one big live festival..played terrible in the $10k main event due to poor sleep after travel and got 3-outed just before the money after playing great in a satellite to the $25k. It's one thing to miss the money after playing great for ~5 hours in a $500 tournament from the comfort of your own home...consistently walking away -$15k+ in the hole after expenses for days worth of effort? No thanks.
Yeah, in my case it was a pretty straightforward situation with 1 airline not having the 8max at all (despite an article saying otherwise?) and my other flights being on 737-700's. I read a fair bit about this whole mess today and saw some posts saying there was a way to use SeatGuru to reliably distinguish between Max 8 / legacy 737-800, but I didn't need to dig that much myself and as you noted especially for flights far out, they can't guarantee equipment won't be swapped.
Wow, I didn't realize the software fix hadn't been rolled out prior to yesterday's crash. Yikes. Also count me among those who went through the rest of this year's (already booked) flights this morning to ensure I'm not on one of these things.
Sorry to see this. My last year of college, with absolutely zero experience in tech I tried to build a fintech startup that needed seamless processing of micro-payments and so I pinged Tristan in the early days of Square's beta program when they were just shipping out card readers asking if they might expose an API in the near future. Small interaction, but he got back to me and coming from the Midwest, that was my first experience with how open Silicon Valley can be, with a co-founder at one of the hottest startups taking the time to respond to some random college kid interested in kicking the tires on his project. My project went nowhere but I had fun exploring the tech involved, decided to learn to code, made it out here and am now running a venture-backed startup after a couple engineering jobs. I thought just the fact that he responded was really cool at the time and try not to blow off cold emails like that as a result.
UberEats has been pretty amazing for me support-wise. They've always made it right when I've had issues - and there typically aren't issues. I use it a ton - 3+ times/week - and of those times I've had issues, only 2 required me pushing them to do the right thing, and one of those was when I was traveling in Stockholm where they'd just rolled it out.
Postmates, on the other hand, has absolutely disastrous support and consistently laughable "resolutions" as the parent comment noted. Postmates is one of those things that felt like magic the first time I used it in the early days when they were the only game in town, but they just got so surpassed by competitors to the point where I hate it. Their "taxes+fees" are ridiculous for an inferior product. UberEats gives me a flat $4.99 plus taxes that actually reflect legitimate taxes. Postmates, on the other hand, is a minimum of $3.99, often more, plus maybe it's surging, plus the "taxes and fees" is often some obscene amount (Tacolicious seems to have a $4-5 "fee" on Postmates), oh and if you're treating yourself to a small fast food order there will be another $2 "small order fee."
The last straw for me was when they started adding "walking" postmates, who would literally walk an order from ~40 minutes away when I'm paying them $10-ish to deliver it. Then when I complained and (half-jokingly) suggested they give people paying $10 for delivery the option to not have a walking postmate deliver it because my food was extremely cold, I got the typical Postmates support brush-off. Utter joke of a service.
Yeah, they definitely put up their own money - it's also public record :)
This is how reporters know a firm is raising another fund (beyond just expecting them to every 2 years). The amount/percentage of the total fund that the partners pay in themselves varies by firm and fund.
So the Benchmark partners have 16% of that particular fund, though keep in mind VC funds have different economics than just a straight up equity split. 16% is pretty high compared to some other firms I've reviewed, but I admittedly haven't taken the time to sample widely.
Travis has lost the support of Ryan and Garrett apparently (per several reports over the last month/Garrett's statement/Ryan stepping down from operating role). Seems like a man on an island at this point.
Check the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph - I agree that he needed to be replaced due to the multitude of issues. I just think the execution of it was very poor coming within a week of his mother's death.
Remember, he was already "on leave" - whether he was honoring it or not. By public accounts, he wasn't. So the board said "ok, he's not going to change, let's remove him." My argument is they should've given him a couple weeks and then sat him down and had the "the well has broken, we need a new face for the good of the company, please support this" talk. Instead, they blindsided him at a hotel that he'd flown to halfway across the country to try to help the company (recruiting a COO) while his father's still severely injured. Had they done it in a more humane way, they might have been able to secure more cooperation in the long-term, and they could've begun to quietly get their ducks in a row during that 2-3 week grace period before giving him the ultimatum. Instead, they executed it at a moment of maximum weakness for him, which got the job done in the moment but set themselves up for him to go scorched earth in the long-term, undermining the whole exercise. Again, I do think they needed to fire him, but they'd bought a bit of time with him "going on leave" and I think it might have been more effective had they leveraged it rather than going for the immediate KO.
Perhaps we would've ended up here regardless, but maybe not.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that a guy that founded a massive company and drove it to unparalleled success only to be forced out while in the early stages of mourning his mother's unexpected death (and caring for his severely injured father) has not gone quietly into the night.
I think the passenger rape records issue was the straw that broke the camel's back and he had to go, but I don't think it needed to be done the way it was. Sure, there's a decent argument that he only has one speed and would be meddling regardless (as he supposedly was while he was supposed to be "on leave"), but doing it the way they did made Travis lashing out once he'd had a bit of time to process it an absolute 100% certainty.
As a last hurrah before getting back to startups I traveled to one big live festival..played terrible in the $10k main event due to poor sleep after travel and got 3-outed just before the money after playing great in a satellite to the $25k. It's one thing to miss the money after playing great for ~5 hours in a $500 tournament from the comfort of your own home...consistently walking away -$15k+ in the hole after expenses for days worth of effort? No thanks.