Plenty of people would give everything to be an early employee at seven-year-old Uber. But Uber employees who’ve been with the ride-share company for at least a few years have discovered a considerable downside to their ride with the transportation juggernaut. They can’t afford to quit. Startup employees have to exercise their options within 90 […]
Uber
It’s Not Just Uber: Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Dean on the School’s Poaching Problem
Andrew Moore was a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University for a dozen years when Google hired him away in 2006 to lead some of its efforts around ad targeting and fraud prevention. CMU lured Moore back in 2014, making him the dean of its computer science school. But he still […]
Sequoia’s Alfred Lin on Why Uber’s Valuation is Twice That of Airbnb
Today, at the Post-Seed conference in San Francisco, Alfred Lin, the former COO and CFO of Zappos and now a Sequoia Capital partner, was asked a variety of on-stage questions about the current market. Among them was whether Lin thinks it’s a good time to start a fund. “Probably not,” he said. “Valuations are high. […]
A Third Worker Classification? Don’t Bet On It
Lately, there’s been a steady drumbeat of accusations that on-demand startups are unfairly wringing profits out of independent contractors. The concern: no one is withholding their taxable wages for them, they aren’t being given health care, and they have almost none of the same protections as full-time employees. In fact, one of the only protections independent […]
Talking 1099 Workers (and More) with Redpoint’s Ryan Sarver
Last week, the California Labor Commission found that a San Francisco-based Uber driver should have been legally classified as an employee, and not a contract worker, by the company. The ruling could be a very big deal for Uber and many other on-demand companies that argue they’re an appealing alternative to people who want to work […]
StrictlyVC: May 18, 2015
Hi, welcome back, everyone! Hope you had a terrific weekend. —– Top News in the A.M. Google will reportedly launch buy buttons on its search-result pages in coming weeks, pitting it more directly against online marketplace rivals, including Amazon and eBay. —– Uber Exec Tom Fallows on the Company’s Culture, and More At a StrictlyVC […]
Uber Exec Tom Fallows on the Company’s Culture, and More
At a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco last week, Tom Fallows, Director of Global Expansion Products at Uber, talked with us about what’s important to Uber right now, why Uber sees the fight for India and China as far from over, and the various ways that Uber and Google differ culturally. (Fallows was hired away […]
Bill Maris Addresses Sensational Headlines at Disrupt
Bill Maris of Google Ventures gave a thoughtful performance yesterday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. Interviewed by the outlet’s co-editor, Alexia Tsotsis, the two covered a range of high-profile stories that have been published in the last year and relate either to Google Ventures’s portfolio companies or to controversial – even seemingly […]
TPG Growth’s Bill McGlashan: We’re No Stranger to Startups
Bill McGlashan would like you to know something. TPG Growth is no newcomer to startups. The 45-person group that McGlashan leads within 22-year-old TPG Capital hasn’t just been writing checks to startups since 1999, but it has incubated a number of companies, too (including, last year, the film studio STX Entertainment). “I think there’s been a […]
VC Patrick Gallagher on Where CrunchFund is Shopping Now
By Semil Shah When college friends Patrick Gallagher and Michael Arrington came together in 2011 to start CrunchFund, Arrington — who’d founded the media property TechCrunch in 2005 — brought contacts, startup smarts, and a talent for drumming up attention to the table. Gallagher brought his own sizable network and institutional investing know-how, having been […]