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.

Expect all manner of Hot New Things coming from their PR dept over the next couple quarters.

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.

Yes, I am Mad On The Internet.

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.

Here's the records from Benchmark's Fund 7

Partners put up $80mm of their own cash, in a vehicle named Benchmark Founders' Fund VII, L.P.: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1507661/000150766111...

They then raised $425mm from LPs through a vehicle named Benchmark Capital Partners VII, L.P.: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1507669/000150766911...

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.

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 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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14752832

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14746007

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Great speaker lineup too.

That said, this isn't "just what it is that the FBI is looking to" as this article says. The FBI director originally said they expected to wrap this up by October 2015. If we were talking about a few emails sent over the holidays, this would've been wrapped up a long time ago. In a separate civil suit, the FBI filed a motion to prevent the release of documents, or even the number of documents, for which a FOIA request had been issued. [2] Even the number of documents would tip their hand? The only explanation that really makes sense there is that they're building a RICO case against the Clinton Foundation - and thus a ton more documents than would otherwise be relevant are in play. The fact that they started investigating VA governor McAuliffe's time at the Clinton Foundation shortly after receiving the backups of Clinton's server from their third-party data backup service makes this kind of obvious. Yes, the backups that Clinton's associates attempted to have destroyed even after the State Department asked them to turn over her emails. [3]

[1] http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-email-terrorism-slop...

[2] "disclosure of these records [his immunity agreement] could reasonably be expected to reveal the nature, scope, and focus of the FBI’s activities in the investigation.” http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/new-fbi-filings-reveal-pendi...

[3]Despite Boian’s statement that Platte River set up a 30-day revolving retention policy for Clinton’s emails, Johnson’s letter noted that Platte River employees were directed to reduce the amount of email data being stored with each backup. Late this summer, Johnson wrote, a Platte River employee took note of this change and inquired whether the company could search its archives for an email from Clinton Executive Service Corp. directing such a reduction in October or November 2014 and then again around February, advising Platte River to save only emails sent during the most recent 30 days.

Those reductions would have occurred after the State Department requested that Clinton turn over her emails.

It was here that a Platte River employee voiced suspicions about a cover-up and sought to protect the company. “If we have it in writing that they told us to cut the backups,” the employee wrote, “and that we can go public with our statement saying we have had backups since day one, then we were told to trim to 30 days, it would make us look a WHOLE LOT better,” according to the email cited by Johnson. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/articl...