I'm concerned that names and addresses alone seem to be enough for these guys to do meaningful ID theft with. The phone book is full of names and addresses anyone can get their hands on easily. Even these guys in India - there's whitepages.com. Not sure why they're going to all the trouble of trying to game Amazon's customer support.
On that note, I order alot from Amazon and throw out their boxes in the trash outside all the time. Sometimes I notice that neighbors (presumably) take those boxes for their own use before trash pickup comes along. All of them have my name and mailing address on them...
We suspected this was going on when we looked at the analytics for our ecommerce sites recently and noticed a big shift away from tablets towards mobile (Google breaks them out separately). Large phones would of course fall under the latter category.
Things tend to go faster with cash buyers. In particular, no risk the bank will decline them for a mortgage. I suppose there's less difference if they're preapproved.
Those of us who were investors in bank stocks back in 2008 saw alot of large insider buys, including multi-million ones, from CEOs and top execs looking to reassure investors.
In most cases it simply didn't work. Fundamentals rule sooner or later, not optics. I was in the no-longer extant Wachovia for instance, where the CEO bought around $1m of stock. It was bought out for a song a few months later after it crashed.
One of my favorite texts back in my college days was The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. USA folks may not be familiar with this. It was actually more of a polished transcript of his TV series, which had aired in the UK and some other countries (including Malta, where it was required reading for getting into college in fact). Leo Szilard is a familiar name from that text - he certainly gets plenty of airtime in there.
On that note, Europe has more than one waiting room these days. Malta and parts of Italy seem to be fulfilling a similar role for illegal migrants coming north from Africa, for example.
Again this is not black and white. There are plenty of non-VC funded companies that scaled quickly and had enough of an impact that you could say they "changed the world" to some extent. There are plenty of VC-funded companies that went nowhere and changed nothing except the returns of their VC funds (for the worse).
>>Authorities in Rome now hope to reconstruct the imposing, 17-metre-wide, 15-metre-long marble arch, in a project that would cost at least €1 million (£718,000).
Given the size of this thing, this sounds wildly optimistic.
Actually that is still a pretty good location for steel mills, as well as other industries, like Bitcoin mining farms (perhaps those fall under datacenters...).
Of course terms matter, but the example she gives seems somewhat contrived. Particularly this part:
>> In the deal, Hooli would invest $200 million for equity while in return the two companies would enter into a business development agreement on the side in which Pied Piper guarantees to spend that money in a massive consumer campaign on Hooli’s ad platform. They float the magic “B” valuation. Richard goes to sleep dreaming of rainbows and unicorns.
If you take all that money in with a massive string like that attached (basically no freedom at all to spend it except on one thing), I would think you have only yourself to blame for the result.
>> The VCs have fully grown into their role of king-makers, injecting huge sums of cash to end the game for all competitors almost instantly, create a "natural monopoly",
Yes, capital can certainly be a competitive advantage. Another manifestation of that is economies of scale. Most of the companies on the Fortune 500 have and exploit such economies on a daily basis, and I don't see them apologizing...
>> "Call Tom at Google. He owes me a favor. Let him acqui-hire this stinker at $4M per engineer so I don't have to think about it anymore."
Do you actually have evidence that this kind of thing is going on? Could you post it if so? I'm thinking that Larry Page and plenty of other Google shareholders might be interested...
>> Both companies soon began to struggle under new ownership, burdened by new and huge debt obligations and falling demand during the financial crisis.
The debt obligations are the typical result of private equity intervention. It's basically financial engineering which benefits mostly the private equity people.
For a good read about conglomerates and company architecting, I would suggest Warren Buffet's most recent shareholder letter from a few days ago, especially the part where he discusses the skepticism that should be shown towards bankers and financial people proposing company spinoffs to "unlock value".
title: "The Man Who Knows Whether Any Startup Will Live or Die"
text: ""He admits the models will never be perfect, but thinks that even a model that’s only right about 50 percent of the time could help investors and entrepreneurs..."
Which is not surprising... if the title was really true, this man would likely be richer than Warren Buffett at this point.
On that note, I order alot from Amazon and throw out their boxes in the trash outside all the time. Sometimes I notice that neighbors (presumably) take those boxes for their own use before trash pickup comes along. All of them have my name and mailing address on them...