This trick is used all the time. In my previous SaaS company we used to write case studies to show the impact caused by our product on the business' bottomline. A typical impact used to be like conversion increased from 10% to 12%. However, this impact used to seem very tiny and absolutely not case study worthy.
Hence, we would deliberately calculate impact by taking not the previous sales but the previous conversion rate as the denominator. Thus, would 10 to 12% growth would go like "we increased Y's conversion rate by 20%."
Can't be mathematically disputed and totally clickbaity at the same time.
In that case, it’s not particularly misleading. All else equal, I’d expect an increase of 20% of sales, not an increase of 2%. Sure, a clarifying footnote/endnote would be nice.
Trees and plants are net consumers of CO2 when they grow, but become neutral when they reach maturity, so they are more of a carbon buffer. The buffer can be freed when they burn or rot, both of which happen naturally.
The best way to permanently take away CO2 from the atmosphere is to cut off the trees and somehow store them where the CO2 cannot escape (and to free space for new trees to grow). Some of the carbon from dead plants is stored in the soils, but this takes a lot of time to do.
In the long run biofuels + carbon capture can be carbon negative.
We already have shortage of building-grade wood, because it needs to be grown for 60-90 years, while today's wood is cut at 30. Younger wood is softer, attracts bugs, rots easily.
Wow! so much scientific conversation and not one thought about gazillion of animals who live in those trees. Did you guys know earth was doing pretty fine with just trees and animals before all these tech, or even their talk, appeared in the scene.
> The best way to permanently take away CO2 from the atmosphere is to cut off the trees and somehow store them where the CO2 cannot escape
I really don't understand this logic. The oil industry spends billions every year to extract oil (= fossilized biomass) buried deep underground, because burning biomass gives you cheap energy.
If you cut down and store enough trees to compensate for the current CO2 emissions, you will have access to an immense volume of biomass, much easier to "extract" than oil is.
What do you think is going to happen with this biomass? People are going to burn it to make cheap energy again..
Actually, why would you even go through the trouble of cutting down the trees in the first place? You could just, not extract the oil and end up with the exact same amount of energy you will have at the end of this complex process.
One way to to store that carbon by burning the trees is and storing the CO2 underground - it will be costly to extract and worthless to do so and you will get some energy out of it.
Doesn't burying the trees drastically increase the length of capture? Then it's a matter of cost and resource optimisation. I'd do the job of planting, cutting, trucking, and burying trees with pride.
You joke, but if you have a solid idea of how to permanently¹ sequester carbon from trees in a cheap and scalable fashion, it might be worth submitting that proposal. If nothing else, it can serve as a baseline against which other proposals are judged (as in X tones more cost effective than the "plant some trees" approach).
¹ Some uses for wood, like as fuel, release the carbon back into the atmosphere. Likewise anything where the wood decomposes.
A tree is actually a very poor method of carbon capture. It's not durable and doesn't last ages. It can catch fire. And it takes decades. If you're gonna do organic methods then blue-green algae is way better. But I think the idea here is to come up with a technology that's even better than that.
Great initiative. Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads.
They randomly change distribution models, ignore the bot traffic, and present eye candy line graphs to show "tremendous" impact from ads. And this keeps on running until cash graph goes below the threshold and CEO goes into the "introspection" mode.
One place where I worked spend a lot on ads, but they also hired some marketing people and a leads conversion person who seemed to be able to quantify how much return on investment they were getting from ads.
Thing is, everybody involved has an interest in making the numbers look good. And it's really easy to make them look good even without faking anything. Just omit the fact that you're counting post view leads, stretch the lookback window, etc
I think he did a bit more of an objective job than that. He compared platforms where we were advertising and I remember that Pinterest generally gave a far better return on investment (than Facebook, which was the main platform we used).
> Frankly most organisations continue spending on digital ads despite seeing diminishing returns because they have had hired people, often at the VP level to do just ads. These people obviously have to justify their salary so they forcibly convolute numbers to attribute some revenue to justify what they do- which is running ads.
How the hell do I structure my empire so that it out-lasts my reign as obsessive good emperor? I am the one guy who can finally say, “I’m sorry, you’re a good person and a great VP of marketing, but you’ve done such a great job that you’re now just marketing yourself really and you’re fired.”
I understand that the valuation of a company is also determined by its earning potential but did Boston Dynamics have that so much that it justified this crazy valuation.
From what I know it barely made any revenue while being in business for more than 25 years. It couldn't find a customer to produce any of its hyped robots at scale. It was clearly a loss-magnet entity for Softbank which is in a selling mode in the wake of Uber/Wework disaster.
In any other country valuation like this would have become the subject of enormous assessment because outside the US, $1 bn still means a lot of money. But I think USA is beyond but I really do not understand the system which facilitates such transaction without the corresponding exchange in value. How is the money being made?
As an immigrant engineer I feel this is actually good because it shows that the market in the US is bullish on new technologies. I believe this is what has led to most of the major inventions in the past 100 years to come from the US.
In my home country (India) it’d be impossible for a company to reach such valuations based only on research and prototypes, which in turn leads to low salaries for STEM people, culminating in brain drain.
A ~30 years bet on a company is difficult in any country or any sector for the matter of fact unless it has potential to change the landscape of future wars, thereby providing ROI in the form of strategic superiority or at least that's what U.S. DoD hoped for with Boston Dynamics and it didn't happen.
On the same context,
Imagine if Boston Dynamics was only involved with drones, it would have never changed hands.
And it’s fine. Boston Dynamics paved a way with research and prototypes and some company will come along and commoditize it.
My point was that the economic culture in the US supports and this kind of innovation. No other country - maybe barring China, can do that.
I’m not praising the US as a country either (infact I’m moving to Canada). The US has deep flaws but it’s one redeeming quality is industrial innovation.
>Boston Dynamics paved a way with research and prototypes and some company will come along and commoditize it.
BD had already started selling its robots(Spot, Pick) commercially and had even had projected a plan for profitability[1].
Current sale is not really an indicative of its inability to make money but rather desperate situation of Softbank VF after string of poor bets, this must have been hard as Masayoshi Son is a self-acknowledged robophile.
This immediately follows the Slack acquisition which was sold at at price that is almost 1/10th of Pakistan's GDP. Keep in mind that Pakistan has 220 million people.
One individual company with less than 2k employees is valued 1/10th of what 220 million people collectively produce in a year. How can one explain this asymmetry. No doubt it was the biggest tech acquisition in the history but tech executives in the US bolstered by Fed's dollar printing have been breaking paper records almost every year.
Maybe I do not understand the economics of this well so I would gladly accept any roast of my above observation.
In my noob understanding, Salesforce overpaid on the acquisition for a couple of reasons:
1) They are desperate to continue growing and need acquisitions to do so
2) They believe Slack is their best bet to boost their revenue in the coming years
In saying that, the asymmetry is the markets each of them serve though. Are majority of Pakistani's serving B2B customers with a SaaS? No, and so the profit/revenue generation is different.
I agree Slack is way over valued for something which could be switched without much effort. In fact my anecdotal knowledge from my network suggests that MS Teams is taking over.
However the analogy with Pakistan is incorrect. Pakistan has a lot of people who simply don’t have the skills to be productive. Same with India.
And in South Asia progress and reform doesn’t happen easily.
I think the boom bust cycle is good. It trims the extra fat and runs unsustainable businesses (like Boston Dynamics, Uber, WeWork, etc) and lazy unproductive individuals to the ground.
As a side effect home prices in the US remain relatively stable.
In India it’s impossible for a single income family to own a home and it’s a struggle with dual incomes.
Same with Canada where I’m planning to move (since I don’t have patience to wait 20 years to start my own company)
Don't want to sound harsh and insinuate anything but did Zappos make any profit? I think the merits of 'Holacracy' that Zappos and Hsieh vehemently propagated can only be validated if it made any impact on the bottomline.
The reason I am saying this is because I worked in a startup which tried posturing like Zappos- flat hierarchy, no cabins, boozing, chilling et al, while being run by a cynic CEO. The startup failed badly so this cool culture never got the limelight but my hunch is that if they had raised enough money and survived another 5 years somebody would have included them in their book or dissertation.
Zappos didn’t posture. They really believed in what they were doing was good for the people who worked there. They also had imitators who were sincere. Sorry to hear yours wasn’t. Tony Hsieh was not a cynic.
I don’t know the financials pre-acquisition but I remember reading they had an excellent repeat purchase rate. Just the fact that they made shoe selling work online, in the first place, was also success as those were not considered viable ECommerce products in the first few years of Zappos’ existence.
Truely believe that Tony Hsieh wasn't a cynic or a wannabe. My question was centred around their financials because I still believe that the culture that Zappos famously practiced is impossible to imitate without dangerously compromising the company's productivity. So I want to know did it work for Zappos either? Because I think it didn't but I don't have any data.
Disclaimer- Nothing against Tony Hsieh. I am sure he is a good person as I have rarely heard anything other than nice stuff about him.
While it had good gross sales numbers, Zappos had a cash flow problem prior to the sale to Amazon. Hsieh acknowledged this a few years ago in an article titled "Why I sold Zappos". (Even that may have been an overly positive spin on the situation at the time; I've seen speculation elsewhere that they may have been on the verge of insolvency.)
This is a story of every second household. My wife's nieces are stuck on phone practically 24 hours. The day their internet balance gets exhausted is when they peep out of their phone screen and raise all hue and cry forcing their parents to recharge their phone immediately. Their sleep cycle doesn't exist and if their kid brother even if playfully hides their phone then he risks getting killed by them.
Another toddler in my extended family just had his eyesight treated because of addiction to mobile phone.
There is a reason why tech billionaires are sending their kids to schools devoid of screens. The general horde who are making these billionaires even richer by buying their phones and seeing virtue in being able to afford it should introspect the damage they are doing to their kids.
I just changed my mind about what he did being sleazy. We are subjected to what he did everyday and we won't consider it a problem even if somebody reminds us that it is.
Was a segment user around two years ago. Felt like a software that is made at exactly the moment when it should have, for a really hungry audience. Their success never surprised me. They also had a capable alternative- mParticle. Not sure what are they upto.
Hence, we would deliberately calculate impact by taking not the previous sales but the previous conversion rate as the denominator. Thus, would 10 to 12% growth would go like "we increased Y's conversion rate by 20%."
Can't be mathematically disputed and totally clickbaity at the same time.