Or perhaps the cities and state of California killed their whole tax base by restricting their property taxes through Proposition 12 and artificially reduced the supply of housing through regulation and zoning.
Companies like Google have been using tax loopholes every where in the world, but the only cities facing housing crisis tend to be the ones that have reduced their supply of housing through regulation.
Can someone (espescially with a finance mindset) explain the valuations we are seeing?
Slack has 1.5 million users. Assuming average yearly revenue of $100 per user that's $150 million in gross revenue. A 9 billion valuation would mean 60X revenue!
If you compare it to Dropbox, their last valuation was $10 billion and their rev rate is supposed to hit $1 billion this year. So why are Dropbox and Slack valued similarly when Dropbox makes 7x the revenue? I get that growth rate impacts your multiple, but not to this extent.
I actually think Slack is a cool company and can have a sustainable business. However, what I'm missing is that a lot of valley companies have valuations that are completely outside their fundamentals (revenue, growth rate, margins, etc.). In this category of "great companies but overvalued" are Snapchat, Slack, Uber.
I would expect a 10-20x multiple on slack since they are high growth. So a valuation of 1.5 - 3 billion would make sense. What am I missing here?
It's interesting to note that a common refrain you hear is "Bikes are the worst offenders! I see bikes running red lights all the time". If you pair it with this report, you might think your anecdotal experience doesn't jive with this report. As a biker, I would have to agree with the car drivers, a high % of bikers blatantly (and unsafely) break road rules; a much higher percentage than cars. I'd estimate it at 20-30% in SF.
Does this mean the law should be focused on bikers? No, here's why:
1) the laws should be focused on # of bad actors. There are more significantly more drivers than bikers on the road meaning:
2) Even excluding the frequency of each mode of transportation, the risk profile is completely different. A car is a 1 ton fast moving object capable of killing 10s of people (see the London attacks). A bike is much less deadly. The legal constraints should follow the risk profile of the mode of transportation (which is also why truckers have much stricter rules and penalties while driving)
3) If you do a damage assessment (i.e # of biker deaths caused by bad drivers vs vice versa) you will see the numbers are way way higher on the driver side. So from a public policy perspective it makes sense to focus on the drivers.
That being said, I think public policy should have some focus on the bikers. I think humans expect some sense of fairness in their legal systems and when car drivers don't see rules fairly applied, you get road rage directed at pedestrians and bikers. So I'd applaud:
* Stricter enforcement of ticketing on bikers who fail to signal before turns, do not slow at busy intersections, running red lights, unsafely lane splitting , etc. I've seen so many bikers do this and it's so unsafe.
* Education requirements for BOTH drivers and bikers for getting a state id / drivers license
I see that you have changed the tagline to "your social memory" due to feedback from users. However, the language is really unclear and grammatically incorrect - it's a sentence fragment. Some possible solutions:
* Introduce a verb "Build your social memory"
* Introduce Monica "Your social memory, now handled by your digital assistant Monica"
* Some combo of the above "Build your social memory through your digital assistant Monica"
I'd also recommend separate each question on separate line and left align them for readability. I'd iterate on this language as it's the most important content on your page since it's the first thing user's see. You might also want to pull some of the content that is below the fold to this section.
While that may be true, don't you see a marketing problem here? Most people would assume that Gitlab.com is representative of the speed and UX of Gitlab self hosted. It's almost like your demo site to be honest.
Can't you just filter this out with an hour coding challenge?
I don't even know why you are screening these candidates, the profile you are talking about doesn't even hit our hiring team usually or gets binned within 5 minutes.
I really think you have a recruiting process problem.
Again I think you are overgeneralizing since I follow the careers of my class and at least 1/3 of it is doing extremely well in their careers. I think you should be able to program a "paper bag" working at companies like Pivotal Labs, Microsoft, Pinterest, Airbnb, etc. which is where my classmates work at. Maybe I'm not interacting with the right grads though or have a representative sample set, but then again I know you pulled that 90% number out of thin air.
And you know how I know what I don't know? I constantly read, get mentorship from senior engineers at my company, build side projects, etc. The learning process hasn't stopped and it hasn't for many of my colleagues.
I do agree self trained programmers are better, because frankly thats way harder.
I am a bootcamp grad who specialized in undergrad in electrical engineering. I worked for a few years as a research for the one of the top tech universities in the country; I have found that I have a stronger math and physics background than many CS grads. However, many times when doing something I have been stopped by saying "wait aren't you a bootcamp grad? can you even understand this?"
I'm not alone; my bootcamp had plenty of STEM majors. One of colleagues was a biomedical engineer and worked in a research lab and now works in the front end at a top firm in SF. Another was a math major at an Ivy before working full stack. The top guy at my bootcamp went to Berkeley in Biochem and was way way smarter than me.
So stop generalizing. I understand that they are unaccredited institution so you get a wide variance of talent but you can't shit on everyone.
To be honest, your issues probably in how you screen talent. My current company has found success in hiring bootcamp and top schools in the area (Berkeley, Stanford).
Companies like Google have been using tax loopholes every where in the world, but the only cities facing housing crisis tend to be the ones that have reduced their supply of housing through regulation.