Really glad to see this happen. I (MIT alum) think this was a legacy of the past that had to change - MIT was just hoarding too many IP addresses. Not blaming MIT - it was a historical artifact, but most other universities had released theirs over the years and MIT hadn't.
Exactly. The article focuses on something marginal (number of large companies starting an 'innovation center' aka a tiny office in Silicon Valley has come down). The title is misleading because it makes you think it's talking about Silicon Valley being left behind in innovation.
What it actually talks about is 'large companies are opening more satellite offices around the world than in Silicon Valley in the last few years'.
The appropriate response to this article is: 'so what? How does that matter?'
If you interpret the title literally, it's probably true. It's not something to worry too much about, however.
Just like the rest of the world starting large universities has rarely had a negative effect on institutions like Oxford, Harvard or MIT, the rest of the world starting innovation center is unlikely to do much negatively to Silicon Valley.
Starting an 'innovation center' and actually creating lots of innovative companies (including some really large ones) are not the same thing at all. In fact, just like IITs are a great feeder into MIT or Stanford, some of the best companies outside Silicon Valley have become a feeder for the SV ecosystem.
I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm just saying quantity is not the same as quality, and quality innovation center is very hard to create without lots of quality people in all parts of the ecosystem.
Silicon Valley has two major things going for it. Talent and money. Asians are intelligent and talented, if they were not they would not be pulling huge work loads in American univerisities. At this point they have lots of capital too as a result of the ascension of the economies in their respective countries. Your comparison of so-called elite universities is a false dichotomy, those work on different rules than technology. Technology does not recognize social status and all that other stuff. Technology belongs to no one and can be acquired by anyone with money and talent.
Chinese have won plenty of Nobel prizes, just not when they were in china.
It just isn't about aptitude, or even capital, but society has to be developed and free enough to let innovation happen. Where all the capital (human and financial) has accumulated (China), this simply isn't the case. We will continue to see young Chinese leaving for the west to realize their full potentials.
So are Europeans and Latinos and Americans and Arabs and Africans and dolphins.
The discussion isn't about race. It's about creating a culture and ecosystem of innovation. Which even other cities in the US have failed to replicate beyond modest successes.
Your latest election is going to make this more possible than anything. Currently many of the most talented foriegn graduates of us universities stay in the us. But with the current xenophobia more will start leaving specially if they see someplace safer to go to.
Either enforce the laws or eliminate them. The media is fully complicit in fueling narratives with respect to immigration by conflating illegal with legal. Contrary to the spin the permanent resident and naturalization figures being double to quadruple the next country (Germany) shows America welcomes immigrants. Which countries make citizenship and owning a business easier than America?
I am not talking about laws but people's behaviour which Trump's rhetoric is allowing. I understand anti immigration sentiment and with the current world economic situation it is being exasperated. But what the government is saying and how it is saying makes a huge difference no matter what they actually do.
US has always been competitive because of its open immigration tightening it is not going to make much difference as other countries have even tougher immigration. Trump and his equating the color of a person skin with being illegal immigrant is going to hurt the US.
This is a great question. And 6 months after the last update is a good time to be asking it.
It's much less efficient for both YC and individuals if every interested individual started emailing and asking for updates. Much better this way - after all that's why broadcast or pub-sub systems exist. HN is kind of a curated broadcast system.
It often happens that people who're working on the project might not find 'right now' to be the ideal time to share updates. This could be either because they're immersed thinking through a particularly challenging aspect of the problem/solution, or they feel a little lost (which is a normal feeling in the middle of ambitious projects). Sharing an update at that point makes you feel vulnerable, but that's exactly what you need to do.
Or it could be that they have a really promising angle and want to see more data before writing something up. The 'more data' approach is usually a mirage (promising approaches start showing potential even at early stages/small scale) and sharing progress helps the project even in that case. (For example, you might learn that a similar approach has been tried before, and here is what someone learnt).
"he received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from its College of Arts and Sciences. Musk moved to California to begin a PhD in applied physics and materials science at Stanford University"
maybe not, but pretty technical.
A better example of a non-tech CEO of a tech company is Jack Ma, who was an English teacher.
I thought it would be fun to do the math on this one. A 12-pack of coca cola cans is $5.00 USD. So 10K would buy 24K cans of coca cola. If that was their yearly soda budget, it would be 66 cans per day. So yeah, obviously an absurd amount for a single person to be consuming.
Small perks like free lunches, gym membership or a massage every month are huge in making employees happy.
We're a seed funded company and provide free lunches to our employees. We also reimburse up to 100$ a month for fitness/gym memberships. Some of my friends working in large organizations don't get these perks, and point out that they're wasteful of a company that is cash flow negative and trying to conserve capital.
What most people with such mindset don't realize is how valuable inspired people can be. For employees to be inspired, they must do work they find meaningful and they must be appreciated and challenged. But they also must realize the company genuinely cares about them. Then they want to give back to the company; they want to exceed expectations because they love how the company cares about them.
Now you need to show care to employees on an everyday basis, but one amazing way to show it is with perks like these. 100$ a month for gym or 200$ a month for lunch per employee is not outrageous if you compare that with how much you pay them every month. It's almost miniscule. Also, in most startups at least, they're getting paid below market rate in exchange for equity etc. Not having to worry about lunch or gym everyday makes a huge difference psychologically.
The one situation where you can justify cutting perks is when the company is going through a genuine crisis, cutting the perk is critical to get through, and you let everyone know this is temporary and it's just something we all must do to get through this crisis. Otherwise, instead of trying to cut soda out, the management needs to focus on growing revenue and profits and ask themselves why they're not succeeding there as much as they'd like to. Hiding behind a soda cut isn't going to fix the issue.
PS: I used to worked at Salesforce where we got several days a year off just to go volunteer time at non-profits. You'd be amazed at how much employees love the company for allowing them to do things non-work related that they're passionate about just a few days a year while getting paid for it. It says that the company has a warm heart. The impact shows up in the company's relentless growth year after year. Same with companies like Costco. Showing care for employees has an outsized impact on the bottomline.
Just a brief +1 to this: I'm a fit guy who's traditionally been a fairly regular blood donor. My newest (and still current) firm has its offices a couple blocks from a permanent blood donation center, and since it's so easy to donate I started to do platelet donations, primarily since the refractory interval is much shorter than other donation types.
However, as some may know, apheresis takes considerably longer than other donation procedures (~ 2h45m), and at the time I had a PHB manager who wouldn't allow me the time to donate as often as I was able (and willing).
This really soured me on his leadership. An attitude such as you cite at Salesforce would have fostered in me a much stronger sense of symbiosis between me and the company.
So instead of "getting more work out" of me (his intent), instead he got an irritated employee who had little to no inclination to go above or beyond the minimum (wrt what he asked or expected, not in general).
I think my experience and attitude is a classic example of strict bean counting and lack of soft skills backfiring on companies (or managers) with similar methods.
I tend to agree with this perspective but I don't think anyone has managed to actually create an experiment to study it. (perhaps if two startups in the same space had diametrically opposed benefits you could use their market share or productivity as a comparison metric).
There is also something tribal/instinctual about sharing food. Buying lunch two or three times a week for the team will bond them better paying them cash. And a well bonded team is a higher performance team. That you can measure with your sprint planning. The downside is that it is disproportionately impactful when you take food away. When Crawford Beverage (HR VP at Sun) discontinued the company beer bash (and it was just popcorn, chips, maybe some vegetables with ranch dressing and beer, not even a lot of food) it permanently scarred morale.
They don't though, in most cases. All that stuff is just window dressing. I haven't thought about it a lot, but genuinely caring might mean not firing someone going through a rough patch, when their productivity is pretty bad.
I'd say that when you've worked at a company > 6 months, you know if your manager cares about you. You know if the management cares about you. Doesn't take much to figure that out.
I think there are 1-1 and public ways of showing care. When an employee has a performance issue and is going through something rough, you have a private conversation, nobody else needs to know (unless they're impacted/frustrated and you let them know some of it to make them cut some slack) and the employee is taken care of.
Perks are a public way of taking a stand and saying I care about people and will provide these perks and won't take them away except in the direst of situations. Providing perks won't make people love you, but it shows you care. They're nice to get and show thoughtfulness. Especially if you're not obnoxious otherwise.
Thinking out loud: maybe "giving without expecting anything in return" ? Perks and compensation are things you mostly expect to get something back from.
Something genuinely nice/caring at the place I work now was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving where they just told everyone to go home after lunch and enjoy the long weekend.
