GCP was not a strong competitor (in our eyes) when the on-prem decision was being made in the 2011-2013 timeframe, which was also before there was even an Autonomous program. The reason early infra was on-prem largely boiled down to a general distrust for the cloud from the Boss, who in my recollection had had some bad experiences with other portfolio companies suffering major downtime due to AWS outages.

Uber’s relationship with Google was great until that little legal matter. They were huge and very helpful investors in Uber.

Nana's mission is to provide economic opportunities for people in the trades. We operate a managed marketplace in the appliance repair space, paired with a free-of-charge training program that helps to up-skill folks looking for greener pastures - which means we are building technology to help novices perform like experts.

JS/TS shop, in React Native, React and Node/Express. 10 engineers. We raised a $20M Series A last year, are live in cities in the 3 continental US timezones, and are currently facilitating on the order of 150+ jobs per day.

We offer competitive pay, 401k, covered medical, probably a few more things, and we have a lovely office in the Tribune Tower building in beautiful downtown Oakland.

You can reach me directly at bigo [at] nana [dot] io, or submit at https://nanahome.com/careers

that's what happens if you're lucky

I trust my heroes too, but like, that blog post doesn't really...say anything.

Go for it. As a former Yelp engineer, I can assure you that the answer would be negative (no correlation), but I invite you to give it a shot.

To your second question, the answer is "yes". A spam fighter simply cannot publicly release their spam detection algorithm - it would make the system too easy to bypass. SEO black hats have been trying for a decade to get around Google's sorting algorithms, and then they cry foul when Google changes things up. The message from Google all along has been: Stop trying to game our system, and instead focus on creating good websites. Yelp's situation is no different.

Yelp has tens of thousands of paying business customers, and yet with all the sensationalistic media play this type of story somehow continues to generate, no one has ever produced empirical evidence of a single documented case of pay-for-play. I'll also point out that there are at least three former Yelp engineers on this thread - some of whom didn't even like working at the company - who are steadfastly defending Yelp's business practices as legitimate and above-board.

By all means, record it if it happens. But don't hold your breath.