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monicadeola · 5 years ago

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In questa newsletter non siamo mai stati fan di Mark Zuckerberg. Non tanto e non solo per l’immensa capacità di condizionare le nostre vite che ha raggiunto il fondatore di Facebook: la lista dei potenti è troppo lunga per averli tutti sullo stomaco. È che Zuck è proprio speciale, non solo perché il suo potere già smisurato non smette di estendersi, ma soprattutto perché di questo geniale ipernarcisista sono ancora impercettibili alcuni elementi essenziali: il quadro di valori, il livello di coscienza, la frequenza degli scrupoli, i confini dell’ego. La fenomenologia di Zuckerberg è un work in progress, se ne dovranno occupare almeno un paio di generazioni di esperti di ogni ramo: massmediologi, sociologi, politologi, psicanalisti, economisti, storici, criminologi. Qui e ora conviene però seguirlo passo passo, perché ogni sua mossa è decisiva. L’ultima è il rifiuto, contrariamente al boss di Twitter Jack Dorsey, di prendere le distanze dalle minacce di Trump ai rivoltosi americani, un rifiuto per nulla compensato dalla personale condanna della violenza presidenziale. Ne è seguita l’insubordinazione dei dipendenti di Facebook. Il tema più evidente, e importante, è la responsabilità dei social network rispetto ai contenuti che pubblicano, e la difficoltà — ma pure la necessità — di trovare un equilibrio tra il tutto di cui rispondiamo noi giornali e il nulla di cui rispondono loro. Ma il tema di fondo è la personalità di Mark, che tutto dirige, tutto inquina, tutto manipola. Fosse eticamente più strutturato, Mark, allora certamente sarebbero da prendere in considerazione i suoi dubbi sulla possibilità che le piattaforme digitali decidano cosa va pubblicato e cosa «censurato»: per esempio il Wall Street Journal lo prende sul serio e gli dà ragione, gli chiede di superare questo «test di credibilità», di resistere al «bullismo» liberal e di registrare le istigazioni presidenziali all’odio senza fare un plissé, così la gente si fa «la sua idea» e decide. Si potrebbe aprire una discussione importante sul pilatismo interessato di Big Tech, ma anche sull’oggettiva difficoltà di controllare tutto. Ma essendo la struttura etica di Zuckerberg labile, sappiamo perfettamente che questo è solo un paravento per continuare a pubblicare tutto ciò che genera attenzione, e dunque profitti. Per questo è importante chiedersi, periodicamente: In cosa crede Mark Zuckerberg? Cosa c’è nella sua testa? Cosa gli sta a cuore? Cosa lo muove e cosa lo può fermare? Uno dei più importanti zuckologi del mondo è Siva Vaidhyanathan, autore di Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. L’amabile chiacchierata con Trump con cui Zuckerberg ha concluso l’ultima querelle lo ha indotto a fare su Wired un nuovo punto sulla questione. E a chiedersi: un uomo che con tre piattaforme globali come Facebook, WhatsApp e Instagram «è in grado di strutturare l’esperienza culturale e intellettuale di miliardi di persone nel mondo», come può finire a tarallucci e vino con Trump nell’ora «in cui gli Stati Uniti affrontano la peggiore minaccia dalla guerra civile»? Come ha potuto un giovane dall’apparente visone cosmopolita, che va alle marce gay e sostiene l’immigrazione, favorire nel 2016 l’elezione di «un razzista che si vantava di abusi sessuali»? E appoggiare di fatto leadership autoritarie come quelle dell’indiano Modi e del filippino Duterte? «Bisogna chiedersi perché», e la risposta non può essere semplicemente «i soldi». Certamente si copre a destra e a manca: lo ha già fatto con i democratici e forse teme che Trump e i repubblicani gli vadano addosso in caso di rielezione. Ma al di là di queste manovre politiche, resta inevasa la risposta chiave: in che cosa crede davvero? All’inizio Vaidhyanathan lo considerava addirittura un idealista. Uno che credeva, genuinamente e ingenuamente, «nella forza della connessione, della comunicazione, della comunità». C’è un concetto chiave, da non dimenticare mai: «Essendo poco istruito e poco esperto, Zuckerberg non era turbato dai fatti, dalla storia o dalla complessità. La connettività bastava e avanzava». Cresciuto in bolle come Harvard, Silicon Valley — e poi Davos —, «pensavo che non avesse contezza della varietà della crudeltà umana. Che da americano maschio bianco ed etero, fosse ignaro dei modi in cui la “comunità” possa opprimere quanto consolare». E che a furia di frequentare miliardari bianchi che lo adulavano, ne fosse rimasto incantato. Poi è arrivato un libro più aggiornato sui misfatti del social network — Facebook: The Inside Story di Steven Levy — che spiega in modo impressionante «l’entusiasmo con cui Facebook ha assecondato la censura dei governi autoritari», e come si è fatto usare per il genocidio dei Rohingya in Birmania, il terrorismo religioso in Sri Lanka o la propaganda negazionista sui vaccini. È forse Zuck un caso di dissonanza cognitiva, di incoerenza inconsapevole tra valori predicati ed effetti provocati? No, è semplicemente che la passione per la «connettività» convive senza problemi con quella per il potere. E un aneddoto del libro di Levy lo spiega bene. Si rifà alle vaghe reminiscenze di Zuck di storia romana. A quanto pare, ama citare il Catone di Carthago delenda est riferendolo a Google. Shakeratelo con la sua nota venerazione per l’imperatore Augusto (è pure il nome di suo figlio) e il gusto del cocktail sarà riassumibile in una sola parola: Dominio. È la parola che grida nelle riunioni, come se stesse giocando a Risiko. Vaidhyanathan: «Tutto per lui è una partita da vincere. Lui deve vincere. Se milioni di persone si rompono le ossa giocando, il suo piano di gioco servirà comunque al bene superiore di un numero superiore di persone». Lo stesso concetto lo ha usato Marc Isaac, super reporter tecnologico del New York Times, quando la sua collega Shira Ovide gli ha chiesto «di cosa ha paura Zuckerberg». Risposta: «Il dominio è fluttuante, soprattutto nel tech. Credo che sia questo a non far dormire Mark. Ha paura che la gente perda interesse in Facebook, che i suoi concorrenti fuori dagli Stati Uniti lo superino. Sono preoccupazioni valide. Ma per la gente è difficile coglierne il senso quando tre miliardi di persone usano una delle app della compagnia, e Facebook continua ad aumentare i guadagni. Ha paura di essere usurpato, anche se non sembra possa succedere presto».

Il problema è che, nella sua ossessione cesaristica — il potere da conquistare e da rafforzare di continuo nel timore di perderlo — Zuckerberg — come si è visto nella gelida testimonianza al Congresso sullo scandalo di Cambridge Analytica — non è nemmeno sfiorato dal dilemma che prima o poi raggiunge tutte le persone che fanno la fatica di pensare, anch’esso riassumibile in una sola parola: Contraddizione. La contraddizione tra intenzioni dichiarate e conseguenze reali, tra enunciazioni ed eventi, tra il bene che certamente Facebook fa a un sacco di gente tenendole compagnia — lo ha confermato la pandemia: quanto è mancato un Facebook a tanti anziani soli e spaventati — e il male che consente di fare a chi lo usa per fini ignobili. Ancora Mark Isaac. Se gli chiedono se «Facebook fa più bene o male», lui risponde: «Ci penso di continuo. Ma c’è un modo per misurarlo, e decidere quale parte ha vinto?». La domanda retorica sembra una risposta evasiva, ma Isaac aggiunge una frase tremenda: «La questione per tanta gente — o almeno è quello che mi chiedo io — è questa: se la natura di un prodotto consente danni seri, compresa la morte, quel prodotto dovrebbe esistere?». Non c’è però la minima possibilità che Zuckerberg sia preso da simili tormenti esistenziali. Ancora Vaidhyanathan: «Crede in sé stesso in modo così totale, ed è così convinto che la sua visione del mondo funzioni completamente, che è immune dalla dissonanza cognitiva. È immune da nuove evidenze o argomenti. I megalomani non soffrono di dissonanza cognitiva». Insomma, questo dominatore è sì un idealista, ma è «idealista riguardo a sé stesso e alla sua visione di come tutti gli altri debbano vivere». Perché «crede che il meglio per Facebook sia il meglio per noi. A lungo termine, il dominio di Facebook lo redimerà rendendo le nostre vite migliori. Dobbiamo solo arrenderci e fare funzionare tutto questo». Tratta Trump e i suoi simili da governatori locali e li asseconda «perché l’imperatore resta lui». Come sempre, gli imperatori possono essere deposti, se solo ci si ribella. «Forse sta cominciando a succedere. Ma forse è troppo tardi».

#Gianluca Mercuri #Corriere della Sera #Mark Zuckenberg #Facebook #dissonanza cognitiva #narcisismo #Steven Levy #Marc Isaac #Siva Vaidhyanathan

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bigyack-com · 5 years ago

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DealBook: Is This the Next Leader of the Fed?

Good morning. Fears about the spread of the coronavirus whacked stock futures this morning — and led to the cancellation of Mobile World Congress. More on that below. (Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

The race to be the next Fed chair is getting interesting

Judy Shelton, who has been nominated to the central bank’s board of governors, is scheduled to testify before the Senate today.She is a contentious choice for the job, Jeanna Smialek of the NYT notes:• Ms. Shelton has questioned whether America needs the Fed at all.• She favors pegging the value of the dollar to something like gold, an idea the U.S. abandoned decades ago.• She’s seen as open to bending her ideological positions to please President Trump, eroding the Fed’s political independence.But she appears to be moving into a prime position to become the next Fed chair if Mr. Trump wins re-election, Ms. Smialek adds. The president has openly derided the current chairman, Jay Powell, and could well pick someone more in tune with him ideologically when Mr. Powell’s term is up in 2022. Washington speculation had focused on a different candidate for Fed chair: Kevin Warsh, who was on the central bank’s board during the financial crisis. Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Warsh before, but some wonder whether a strong performance by Ms. Shelton today would give her the inside track.____________________________Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin in New York and Michael J. de la Merced and Jason Karaian in London.____________________________

Is ‘Beyond Petroleum’ for real this time?

BP announced yesterday that it plans to be carbon-neutral by 2050, an ambitious target for one of the world’s biggest energy companies. What that actually means, however, is up for interpretation.The oil giant’s proposal is its latest climate-minded initiative, with a twist. Not only is the company seeking to reduce its own carbon emissions, it said, but it also wants to offset the emissions from use of the oil and gas that it produces.The proposal is more complicated than it looks. It has to do with the “scope” of emissions targeted by the plan: The bulk of pollution created by BP’s products are generated when customers burn the fuels, which are called Scope 3 emissions. BP’s net-zero pledge covers only its more direct operations, although the company plans to reduce Scope 3 emissions significantly.

U.K. regulators investigate Barclays C.E.O.’s ties to Epstein

Barclays disclosed this morning that British financial regulators have opened an investigation into ties between its chief, Jes Staley, and the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.The context: The two men had known each other since at least 1999, when Mr. Staley led JPMorgan Chase’s private bank, where Mr. Epstein was a client. The financier had helped funnel dozens of wealthy clients to Mr. Staley, and the two men stayed in touch even after Mr. Epstein was accused of sexually abusing scores of women.Mr. Staley has the backing of the Barclays board, for now. The bank said he had been “sufficiently transparent” about the nature of his ties to Mr. Epstein, and the C.E.O. said that he hadn’t had any contact with the disgraced financier since taking up his post in December 2015.

Mobile World Congress was canceled. Does anybody care?

Mobile World Congress, the annual jamboree for the telecom industry in Barcelona, was canceled yesterday over fears about the coronavirus outbreak. It raises an interesting question: Do these kinds of conferences matter?Last year, MWC drew around 110,000 attendees (including 7,900 C.E.O.s) from 200 countries. Cancellation of this month’s edition was inevitable, after major exhibitors like Nokia, Ericsson and Amazon pulled out over the past week or so.This presents a natural experiment in the value of industry events, seen by some as essential for networking and deal making and by others as price-gouging junkets. Thousands of meetings that would’ve taken place at MWC this year now won’t happen, which could have knock-on effects later in the year. (Or not.)The view from a veteran: We spoke with Ben Wood, a telecom analyst at CCS Insight in London who would have made his 23rd consecutive appearance at MWC this year.• For the companies that blow huge portions of their marketing budgets on MWC, “if you find that you can cope without going, and the costs associated with it, you may choose to deploy your resources in different ways,” he told DealBook.• That’s harder for small companies that rely on “serendipitous moments” with big buyers or potential partners wandering the halls of events like MWC, he added.No touching. In the meantime, conference etiquette will change. The organizers of a big tech event in Amsterdam now underway praised attendees for “safe greeting practices such as fist or elbow bumps.” Generally speaking, it must be said, handshakes are incredibly unhygienic.

Credit Suisse’s chief leaves on a defiant, awkward note

Tidjane Thiam delivered his final earnings call as the Swiss bank’s chief this morning, after being pressured to resign amid controversy over a spying scandal.He presented the growth in net income of 69 percent as the result of his changes in the structure and strategy at the company. “We’ve built something of quality, the numbers are coming through,” he said at a press conference.There was a notable moment of reflection on his uneasy tenure at the bank, notes the NYT’s Amie Tsang, who was listening in on the call. “There are differences within Switzerland in how people feel about me,” Mr. Thiam said. “Every second I’ve done the best I could. I am who I am, I cannot change who I am.”

How Marc Benioff sold Trump the trillion-tree idea

President Trump has openly dismissed climate change activists as “prophets of doom.” But Marc Benioff of Salesforce managed to win him over on one particular environmental initiative, Lisa Friedman of the NYT writes.Mr. Benioff pitched Jared Kushner, a top White House adviser and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, about the initiative to plant one trillion trees to help offset carbon emissions. The idea eventually — and unexpectedly — wound its way into Mr. Trump’s speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month.“Trees are the ultimate bipartisan issue,” Mr. Benioff told the NYT. “Everyone is pro-tree.”There are two lessons to draw from this:• Successfully lobbying Mr. Trump is an unconventional process that involves back-channeling with trusted advisers.• The idea of one trillion trees appears to have taken hold with the president because, as Ms. Friedman notes, “it was practically sacrifice-free.”

Jeff Bezos’ latest takeover: David Geffen’s L.A. mansion

The Amazon chief has continued his real estate splurge with two new acquisitions, according to Katy McLaughlin and Katherine Clarke of the WSJ:• David Geffen’s palatial Los Angeles home, which Mr. Bezos bought for $165 million — setting a record for the city in the process.• A plot of undeveloped land in the L.A. area, purchased from the estate of the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.They follow Mr. Bezos’ $80 million purchase of the top four floors of a Manhattan apartment building last year, reportedly with the goal of turning them into a gigantic pied-à-terre.It’s a windfall for Mr. Geffen, who bought the L.A. mansion — the former estate of the movie mogul Jack Warner — for $47.5 million in 1990.

The speed read

Deals• The parent company of T-Mobile reportedly wants to renegotiate the price of its takeover of Sprint. (FT)• The venture capital firm Battery Ventures has raised $2 billion for its two latest funds, which will focus on investments in enterprise software companies. (Bloomberg)• Meet the Korean hedge fund that scored big by backing “Parasite,” the movie that won the Academy Award for best picture. (Bloomberg)Politics and policy• Moderate Democratic leaders are slowly warming up to Mike Bloomberg as Senator Bernie Sanders becomes the front-runner in the party’s presidential race. (NYT)• Larry Ellison of Oracle is doing a rare thing in Silicon Valley: hosting a fund-raiser for President Trump. (Recode)• The Education Department is reportedly investigating Harvard and Yale over their sources of foreign funding. (WSJ)Tech• The Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, has reportedly said in private conversations that he expects a criminal antitrust case in Silicon Valley in the next few months. (Hollywood Reporter)• Read up on Mark Zuckerberg’s approach to crisis management. (Wired)• Britain plans to give its media regulator additional oversight over internet content. (NYT)• Huawei of China is said to be in talks to fund research into 5G wireless technology at the London School of Economics — for £105,000, or $136,000. (FT)Best of the rest• Massachusetts’ attorney general sued Juul yesterday, accusing the vaping company of buying ads on youth-focused websites to target young nonsmokers. (NYT)• The coronavirus outbreak cost Bernard Arnault his title of world’s richest man. (Fortune)• Charlie Munger on the world today: “There’s too much wretched excess.” (CNBC)Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.We’d love your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Read the full article

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onlyfreebooks · 5 years ago

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The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses[Free Download] by Eric Ries(ePUB|Mobi)

Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup has a kind of inexorable logic, and Ries’ recommendations come as a bracing slap in the face to would-be tech moguls: Test your ideas before you bet the bank on them. Don’t listen to what focus groups say; watch what your customers do. Start with a modest offering and build on the aspects of it that prove valuable. Expect to get it wrong, and stay flexible (and solvent) enough to try again and again until you get it right. It’s a message that rings true to grizzled startup vets who got burned in the Great Bubble and to young filmgoers who left The Social Network with visions of young Zuckerberg dancing in their heads. It resonates with Web entrepreneurs blessed with a worldwide reach and open source code. It’s the perfect philosophy for an era of limited resources when the noun optimism is necessarily preceded by the adjective cautious The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late. Now is the time to think Lean. "Eric has created a science where previously there was only art. A must read for every serious entrepreneur—and every manager interested in innovation." —Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Opsware Inc. and Netscape “This book should be mandatory reading for entrepreneurs, and the same goes for managers who want better entrepreneurial instincts. Ries’s book is loaded with fascinating stories—not to mention countless practical principles you’ll dearly wish you’d known five years ago.” —Dan Heath, co-author of Switch and Made to Stick “Ries shows us how to cut through the fog of uncertainty that surrounds startups. His approach is rigorous; his prescriptions are practical and proven in the field. The Lean Startup will change the way we think about entrepreneurship. As startup success rates improve, it could do more to boost global economic growth than any management book written in years.” —Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Harvard Business School Read the full article

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abr · 8 years ago

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“Dovete ragionare più da startupper che da presidi!”. In Italia subito ci sarebbe una manifestazione, un Tar con un’ordinanza, un appello contro la deriva autoritaria su MicroMega. In Silicon Valley, ecco l’appello di un magnate per una buona scuola 2.0. Si chiama Marc Benioff, è il boss di Salesforce, colosso del software, e sta donando 100.000 dollari (cadauno) ai presidi delle scuole sanfranciscane perché cambino il loro modo di gestire l’insegnamento. (...) Con le scuole non si può stare tranquilli un attimo. (...) Peter Thiel, pontiere tra Silicon Valley e Casa Bianca, ha la sua famosa borsa di non-studio, 100 mila dollari ai ragazzini che abbandonano gli studi per fare la loro startup. Il quasi omonimo Xavier Niel offre vitto e alloggio gratis per programmatori talentuosi con la sua filiale californiana della scuola 42. L’italiana Valentina Imbeni, figlia del celebre sindaco di Reggio e Bologna, tra la via Emilia e il West, non trovando scuole adatte per i bebè ha fondato la sua, con approccio Montessori 2.0, bilingue Italia-Usa, va benissimo, c’è andato pure Renzi ad omaggiarla. E ora arriva il ceo di Salesforce che vuole fare la sua buona scuola 2.0, con la trovata dei presidi-manager (tipo in Italia tormentone atavico, però senza imprenditori disposti a regalare il cash). Nel frattempo Mark Zuckerberg non solo si è creato la sua scuoletta a Palo Alto, gestita dalla moglie, ma da un anno sponsorizza con 100 milioni un programma di apprendimento via computer dei ragazzini. Seguiti a ruota da tutti gli altri: Microsoft ha appena lanciato “Skype in the Classroom” per lezioni a distanza, Google ha la sua App per Education per scambiare compiti e pagelle. Tutti vogliono fare esperimenti sulla scuola. Secondo il New York Times, alla fine è arrivata pure Netflix. Il suo ceo Reed Hastings sostiene che “in una società democratica come la nostra, è salutare che ci sia un dibattito sui veri obiettivi della scuola”, lui nel caso specifico ha investito 11 milioni di dollari in Dreambox Learning, un programma che consente ai ragazzini di studiare matematica usando lo stesso algoritmo delle serie tv. Pare che tutto sia iniziato quando al fondatore di Salesforce un preside col cappello in mano ha chiesto soldi per mettere il wi-fi a scuola, e quello si è esaltato, “dovete pensare in grande!”, creando una specie di fondo di investimento dotato di 100 milioni di dollari per le scuole di San Francisco. Come al solito è difficile capire quanto sia sincero mecenatismo e quanto diabolico investimento – il mercato del software scolastico vale 20 miliardi negli Usa – ma molti di loro sono seriamente interessati a “make the difference”, anche perché spesso sono dropout, cioè non laureati per scelta o per caso, orgogliosamente o meno, frequentemente con complessi bestiali. Zuckerberg, il fuoricorso più ricco del mondo, ha preso finalmente la laureaa Harvard, e tutto orgoglioso ha detto “mamma, ce l’ho fatta”, forse a seguito di trilioni donati segretamente all’augusto ateneo.

http://www.ilfoglio.it/tech-and-the-city/2017/06/08/news/la-silicon-valley-vuole-creare-la-buona-scuola-2-0-138641/

non abbiate paura, qui da noi non succede as-so-lu-ta-men-te ni-en-te di tutto questo. Difatti qui la scuola (e i soldi, tanti anche se non sembra) è degli insegnanti sindacalizzati seduti sugli scemipiùscemi, ooops sorry volevo dire degli studenti ma aperta al sociale.

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ageloire · 7 years ago

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Unriddled: Facebook's Redemption, the 'Meaning' of Search Engines, and More Tech News You Need

The summer might be coming to an end, but the Big Tech community is still hot with news around Google's meaning-based algorithm update, social media leaders' upcoming Senate appearance, and more from just this past week.

Oh, and Facebook might be making a real difference against misinformation.

It's our Wednesday tech news roundup, and we're breaking it down.

Unriddled: The Tech News You Need

1. Google Search Adds 'Meaning Variations' to its Ranking Algorithm

Google has been slowly but consistently moving its search engine ranking algorithm to focus more on the intent of a person's search and less on "exact keyword matching," the term it's known by in the SEO industry. Last week, Google gave the search engine its biggest update yet in that interest.

Years ago, Google issued "close variants" to make it easier for the search engine to understand searches if they included plural words and accidental misspellings. The company has now extended these close variants to the meaning of the keyword itself, allowing searchers to find the results they're looking for even if they paraphrase their search or leave certain questions to be implied. Read full story >>

2. Big Tech to Appear Before the Senate

The Facebook user data breach by analytics firm Cambridge Analytica might be several months behind us, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress was just the beginning of the U.S. Government's reaction.

On September 26, leaders from Google, Amazon, Twitter, and Apple are slated to appear at a Senate hearing focused on how each company is approaching the data privacy issues highlighted by Facebook earlier this year. The hearing follows similar appearances by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in front of congressional panels earlier this month.

"Americans are struggling to understand what's being collected and how it's used," Sen. John Thune, a Senator from South Dakota, said in a report by Wall Street Journal. "We're holding this hearing to help inform consumers and to determine where the federal government may need to assert itself." Read full story >>

3. Facebook's Assault on Misinformation Shows Improvement

It's tempting to dismiss a company's response after a crisis as lip service, but the action Facebook has taken to reduce the spread of misinformation since the 2016 U.S. Presidential election is showing some promise.

A recent study by Stanford University has found that content published by a list of 570 "fake news" pages on Facebook has seen a 50% reduction in user engagement since the 2016 election. This includes likes, shares, and comments. As a point of comparison, the study says, engagement with the same type of content on Twitter has largely stayed the same.

This decrease in engagement helps validate the efforts Facebook says it has taken to intercept misleading or propaganda content on its platform -- whether or not it comes from Russia's Internet Research Agency, as it reportedly had leading up to the election two years ago.

Although Facebook's ability to actually curb misinformation was cited as "surprising" by Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow of public policy at Harvard, the company continues to journal its progress toward a better platform for its users. Most recently, Facebook announced it is hiring a Human Rights Policy Director to join the company. Read full story >>

4. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Acquires TIME Magazine

Earlier this week, Salesforce chairman and co-chief executive Marc Benioff and his wife agreed to purchase TIME Magazine for $190 million from Meredith Corp. -- TIME's owner for the last eight months. Benioff cites the magazine's "tremendous impact" and storytelling ability as reasons for his family's acquisition.

Although Benioff is buying TIME as an individual, not on behalf of his business, he joins a generation of technology leaders who've invested heavily in the U.S.'s largest publications. Amazon's Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, and Steve Jobs' wife Laurene Powell Jobs accepted a majority stake in The Atlantic just last year. Read full story >>

5. Twitter to Let Users Opt for Chronological Newsfeeds

There was a time when Twitter's newsfeed displayed tweets from the people you followed in order of when the tweet was posted. (Those were the days … ). Then, in 2016, the company launched a core algorithm update that ranked tweets by the account's perceived importance to you.

Twitter is now reportedly giving users the option to use either system when browsing content on their feeds.

4/ So, we're working on providing you with an easily accessible way to switch between a timeline of Tweets that are most relevant for you and a timeline of the latest Tweets. You'll see us test this in the coming weeks.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 17, 2018

Twitter plans to release this chronological ordering option "in the next few weeks," at which time users can simply uncheck a box in their settings which normally serves to "show the best tweets first." Seeing tweets in reverse chronological order is part of Twitter's shift to giving people more control over what content they see on their timeline. Read full story >>

That's a wrap for today. Until next week, give me a shout on Twitter with your questions and feedback, as well as which events and topics you'd like us to cover moving forward.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/mary-meeker-facebook-misinformation-study-tech-news

#Marketing

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morganbelarus · 7 years ago

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How the Startup Mentality Failed Kids in San Francisco

On the windy afternoon of March 17, 2017, I opened my mailbox and saw a white envelope from the San Francisco Unified School District. The envelope contained a letter assigning my younger daughter to a middle school. This letter was a big deal; San Francisco’s public schools range from excellent to among the worst in the state, and kids are assigned to them through a lottery. The last time we put her name into the lottery, for kindergarten, she was assigned to one of the lowest-performing schools in California. Then we got a break: A private school offered a big discount on tuition. But now our discount was gone, so we entered her in the public-school lottery again.

Ripping open that envelope, I found that she had been assigned to Willie L. Brown Jr. Middle School. I knew who Willie Brown was—Speaker of the California State Assembly for 15 years and two-term mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2004. The school, however, was new to me. So I grabbed a laptop, poked around on Google, and pieced together an astonishing story.

Willie Brown Middle School was the most expensive new public school in San Francisco history. It cost $54 million to build and equip, and opened less than two years earlier. It was located less than a mile from my house, in the city’s Bayview district, where a lot of the city’s public housing sits and 20 percent of residents live below the federal poverty level. This new school was to be focused on science, technology, engineering, and math—STEM, for short. There were laboratories for robotics and digital media, Apple TVs for every classroom, and Google Chromebooks for students. A “cafetorium” offered sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay, flatscreen menu displays, and free breakfast and lunch. An on-campus wellness center was to provide free dentistry, optometry, and medical care to all students. Publicity materials promised that “every student will begin the sixth grade enrolled in a STEM lab that will teach him or her coding, robotics, graphic/website design, and foundations of mechanical engineering.” The district had created a rigorous new curriculum around what it called “design thinking” and a “one-to-one tech model,” with 80-minute class periods that would allow for immersion in complex subjects.

The money for Brown came from a voter-approved bond, as well as local philanthropists. District fund-raising materials proudly announced that, through their foundation, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams and his wife, Sara, had given a total of $400,000 for “STEM-focus” and “health and wellness.” (The foundation says that figure is incorrect.) Salesforce.org, the philanthropic arm of Marc Benioff's company Salesforce, has given nearly $35 million to Bay Area public schools in the past five years alone; each year the organization also gives $100,000 to every middle school principal in San Francisco and Oakland.1 The Summit Public Schools network, an organization that runs charter schools in California and Washington state and has a board of directors filled with current and former tech heavy hitters (including Meg Whitman), made a $500,000 in-kind donation of its personalized learning platform, according to those fund-raising materials.2 That online tool, built to help students learn at their own pace and track their progress, was created in partnership with Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg’s funding organization.

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As the school’s first principal, the district hired a charismatic man named Demetrius Hobson who was educated at Morehouse and Harvard and had been a principal in Chicago’s public schools. Students from four of the Bayview’s elementary schools, where more than 75 percent of kids are socioeconomically disadvantaged, were given preference to enter Willie Brown Middle. To ensure that the place would also be diverse, the district lured families from other parts of town with a “golden ticket” that would make it easier for graduates from Brown to attend their first choice of public high school.

The message worked. Parents from all over the city—as well as parents from the Bayview who would otherwise have sent their kids to school elsewhere—put their kids’ names in for spots at the new school. Shawn Whalen, who was then the chief of staff at San Francisco State University, and Xander Shapiro, the chief marketing officer for a startup, had children in public elementary schools that fed into well-regarded middle schools. But, liking what they heard, both listed Brown as a top choice in the lottery. Kandace Landake—a Bayview resident and Uber driver who wanted her children to have a better education than she’d received, and whose children were in good public schools outside the neighborhood—likewise took a chance on Brown. One third-generation Bayview resident, whom I’ll call Lisa Green, works at a large biotech company and had been sending her daughter to private school. But she too was so enticed that she marked Brown as her first choice in the lottery, and her daughter got in.

On opening day in August of 2015, around two dozen staff members greeted the very first class. That’s when the story took an alarming turn. Newspapers reported chaos on campus. Landake was later quoted in the San Francisco Examiner: “The first day of school there were, like, multiple incidents of physical violence.” After just a month, Principal Hobson quit, and an interim took charge. In mid-October, less than two months into the first school year, a third principal came on board. According to a local newspaper, in these first few months, six other faculty members resigned. (The district disputes this figure.) In a school survey, only 16 percent of the Brown staff described the campus as safe. Parents began to pull their kids out.

By August of 2016, as Brown’s second year started, only 70 students were enrolled for 100 sixth-grade seats; few wanted to send their kids there. The school was in an enrollment death spiral.

It was hard to imagine sending our daughter to a place in such chaos. But I was also unsettled that so many people spent so much money and goodwill to do the right thing for middle schoolers, with such disastrous results. I wanted to know what had happened.

Robotics teacher James Robertson and a student.

Preston Gannaway

Willie L. Brown Jr., the man himself, now occupies a penthouse office with a spectacular view of the west span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, which happens to be named after him. As mayor, he famously gilded San Francisco City Hall’s dome with $400,000 worth of real gold. Brown’s best-known political achievements were in real estate development. He helped spur the rise of live-work lofts during the original dotcom boom and helped to turn San Francisco’s tawdry South of Market neighborhood into a booming tech startup district. After leaving office, Brown became a lobbyist; his clients included some of the biggest developers involved in transforming San Francisco into a corporate tech hub.

Small and compact at age 84, with a genial face, Brown greeted me in his office wearing an elegant purple suit. He explained that Willie L. Brown Jr. Middle School was the second iteration of a school formerly called Willie L. Brown Jr. College Preparatory Academy—“part of a group of schools called the Dream Schools,” he said, “that were going to try to afford equal educational opportunity on almost a boutique, as-needed basis.”

To make sense of this remark, it helps to understand that San Francisco has been trying, and mostly failing, for half a century to give African American and Latino students an education comparable to that provided to white and Asian students in the city. Those efforts started in the 1970s after the success of lawsuits accusing the city of maintaining racially isolated schools in the Bayview. Attempted remedies over the years included busing and racial quotas for school assignment, but both approaches foundered, partly due to opposition from families, often white and Asian, who argued they didn’t want to send their kids across town to school. In 1978, California voters passed the state’s most infamous law: Proposition 13 severely restricted raising property taxes, and required a two-thirds majority to pass many tax measures. This gutted California’s education funding so severely that the state’s public schools, which had been ranked best in the nation in the 1950s, fell to among the worst in a few decades. (They now hover around 35th.) California currently spends less per student on public education than many low-tax states. Belying its progressive image, San Francisco spends roughly half the amount per public school student than New York City, where the cost of living is comparable.

After just a month, the first principal quit and an interim took charge. In mid-October, less than two months into the first school year, a third principal came on board.

By the early 2000s, the district’s next campaign for change was aimed at improving its most underperforming schools, aided in part by a $135,000 pledge from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The district designated some of these new schools as Dream Schools. This plan involved requiring existing teachers to reapply for their jobs, sprucing up their buildings, offering foreign-language and art classes, and requiring kids to wear uniforms. The Dream School that was eventually renamed Willie Brown College Preparatory Academy—Brown 1.0, if you will, in the Bayview—opened in 2004 (the same year Facebook was founded and Google and Salesforce held their IPOs). Six years later, Brown 1.0 had only 160 kids enrolled for 500 slots, and its standardized test scores were among the worst in the state.

“We tried to make it work,” Brown insisted as we sat in his office. “We put kids in uniform, we did everything.” He shook his head as if astonished by the outcome. “I used my connections. I had Spike Lee teach out there! Every friend I had in the celebrity world I took to that godforsaken place for an hour. I shattered my resources in that effort. It was clear it wasn’t going to work.” It was eventually decided, Brown told me, that the school would only succeed if it had a new building.

This, it turns out, was actually kind of easy to obtain. San Francisco has plenty of money for school construction, because asking San Francisco voters for permission to borrow money to build better schools is an easy win: Voters approved four such initiatives from 2003 to 2016, raising a cumulative $2 billion. Money to raise teacher salaries, by contrast, can require lengthy union negotiations and raising taxes. (As I write this, residents are voting on a proposition that would tax property owners to raise teacher pay.) The money for the new Willie Brown Middle School was a mere line item in a 2011 bond issue that raised $531 million.

When those funds came through for Brown 2.0, the school district was facing an existential crisis. Over the previous four decades, enrollment in SF public schools had fallen by nearly 40 percent, from 83,000 to 53,000, even as the city’s population grew by almost 100,000. Part of that loss was due to the skyrocketing cost of local living, which drove middle-class families to the suburbs and left San Francisco with the lowest number of children per capita of any of the nation’s 100 largest cities. As San Francisco’s population became more affluent, parents started to send their kids to private schools in droves. Around 30 percent of the city’s school-age children now attend private school—one of the highest rates in the nation. More shocking, in a city that is 54 percent white, just 13 percent of school-district kids are white. Starting in about 2010 and driven by this new, wealthy tech workforce, the city likewise became a laboratory for tech-driven innovation in private education. Nine new secular private schools, many of them with a science and math focus, opened in San Francisco between 2010 and 2015.

This all made what looked to me like the basic premise of Brown 2.0 eminently sensible: Emulate the new tech-driven private schools, court their funders, and help kids in one of the poorest parts of town. Perhaps the district could even start to reverse a decades-long decline in enrollment.

Willie Brown’s fourth principal, Charleston Brown.

Preston Gannaway

The sheer number of mishaps at Brown, right from the start, defies easy explanation. According to the district, Principal Hobson, who declined to comment for this story, tried to quit as early as June of 2015, two months before the school opened. The superintendent talked him into staying but, a district official told me, his heart seems not to have been in it.

The summer before the kids showed up for class should have been a time when Hobson and the staff trained and planned, and built a functioning community that knew how to care for 11- and 12-year-old kids and all their messy humanity. Instead, according to one former teacher, the primary teacher training was a two-week boot camp offered by Summit Public Schools meant to help teachers with the personalized learning platform. Teachers who attended that boot camp told me that as opening day inched closer, they worried that Hobson had yet to announce even basic policies on tardiness, attendance, and misbehavior. When they asked him how to handle such matters, according to one teacher who preferred not to be identified, “Hobson’s response was always like, ‘Positive, productive, and professional.’ We were like, ‘OK, those are three words. We need procedures.’ ” When families showed up for an orientation on campus, according to the teacher, Hobson structured the event around “far-off stuff like the 3-D printer.” That orientation got cut short when the fire marshal declared Brown unsafe because of active construction.

After the school opened, Lisa Green took time off work to volunteer there. “When I stepped into that door, it was utter chaos,” she told me. According to parents and staff who were there, textbooks were still in boxes, student laptops had not arrived, there was no fabrication equipment in the makerspace or robotics equipment ready to use. According to records provided by the district, parts of the campus were unfinished. Teachers say workers were still jackhammering and pouring hot asphalt as students went from class to class. The kids came from elementary schools where they had only one or two teachers, so Brown’s college-like course schedule, with different classes on different days, turned out to be overwhelming. When Hobson quit, district bureaucrats sent out letters explaining that he had left for personal reasons and was being replaced by an interim principal.

Shawn Whalen, the former San Francisco State chief of staff, says that pretty early on, “kids were throwing things at teachers. Teachers couldn’t leave their rooms and had nobody to call, or if they did nobody was coming. My daughter’s English teacher walked up in front of the students and said ‘I can’t do this’ and quit. There was no consistent instructional activity going on.”

Teachers also became disgusted by the gulf between what was happening on the inside and the pretty picture still being sold to outsiders. “I used to have to watch when the wife of a Twitter exec would come surrounded by a gaggle of district people,” said another former teacher at the school. “We had a lovely building, but it was like someone bought you a Ferrari and you popped the hood and there was no engine.”

Early in the school year, another disaster struck—this time, according to district documents, over Summit’s desire to gather students’ personally identifiable information. The district refused to compel parents to sign waivers giving up privacy rights. Contract negotiations stalled. When the two sides failed to reach a resolution, the district terminated the school’s use of the platform. (Summit says it has since changed this aspect of its model.) This left teachers with 80-minute class periods and without the curriculum tools they were using to teach. “Teachers started walking away from their positions because this is not what they signed up for,” said Bill Kappenhagen, who took over as Brown’s third principal. “It was just a total disaster.”

The adults had failed to lead, and things fell apart. “The children came in and were very excited,” says another former teacher. “They were very positive until they realized the school was a sham. Once they realized that, you could just see the damage it did, and their mind frame shifting, and that’s when the bad behavior started.”

Hoping to establish order, Kappenhagen, a warm and focused man with long experience in public school leadership, simplified the class schedule and made class periods shorter. “I got pushback from parents who truly signed their kid up for the STEM school,” he said. “I told them, ‘We’re going to do middle school well, then the rest will come.’ ”

Xander Shapiro’s son felt so overwhelmed by the chaos that he stopped going to class. “There was an exodus of people who could advocate for themselves,” Shapiro said. “Eventually I realized it was actually hurting my son to be at school, so I pulled him out and said, ‘I’m homeschooling.’ ”

Green made a similar choice after a boy began throwing things at her daughter in English class and she says no one did anything about it. “I don’t think any kid was learning in that school,” she says. “I felt like my daughter lost an entire semester.” Her daughter was back in private school before winter break.

A bust of former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, in the school foyer.

Preston Gannaway

The first year of any school is full of glitches and missteps, but what happened at Willie Brown seemed extreme. To learn more, I submitted a public records request to the district, seeking any and all documentation from the school’s planning phase and its first year. Among other things, I got notes from meetings conducted years earlier, as the district gathered ideas for Brown 2.0. It all sounded terrific: solar panels, sustainable materials, flatscreen televisions in the counseling room, gardens to “support future careers like organic urban farming.” Absent, though, was any effort to overcome some of the primary weaknesses in San Francisco public education: teacher and principal retention issues, and salaries dead last among the state’s 10 largest districts.

Eric Hanushek, a Stanford professor of economics who studies education, points out that among all the countless reforms tried over the years—smaller schools, smaller class sizes, beautiful new buildings—the one that correlates most reliably with good student outcomes is the presence of good teachers and principals who stick around. When Willie Brown opened, some teachers were making around $43,000 a year, which works out to about the same per month as the city’s average rent of about $3,400 for a one-bedroom apartment. After a decade of service, a teacher can now earn about $77,000 a year, and that’s under a union contract. (By comparison, a midcareer teacher who moves 40 miles south, to the Mountain View Los Altos District, can make around $120,000 a year.)

The tech-driven population boom over the past 15 years has meant clogged freeways with such intractable traffic that moving to a more affordable town can burden a teacher with an hours-long commute. According to a 2016 San Francisco Chronicle investigation of 10 California school districts, “San Francisco Unified had the highest resignation rate.” That year, the article found, “368 teachers announced they would leave the district come summertime, the largest sum in more than a decade and nearly double the amount from five years ago.” Heading into the 2016–17 school year, the school district had 664 vacancies.

Proposition 13 takes a measure of blame for low teacher salaries, but San Francisco also allocates a curiously small percentage of its education budget to teacher salaries and other instructional expenses—43 percent, compared with 61 percent statewide, according to the Education Data Partnership. Gentle Blythe, chief communications officer for the SFUSD, points out that San Francisco is both a city and a county, and it is therefore burdened with administrative functions typically performed by county education departments. Blythe also says that well-intentioned reforms such as smaller class sizes and smaller schools spread the budget among more teachers and maintenance workers. It is also true, however, that the district’s central-office salaries are among the state’s highest, as they should be given the cost of living in San Francisco. The superintendent makes $310,000 a year; the chief communications officer, about $154,000, according to the database Transparent California.

District records show that at least 10 full-time staff members of Brown’s original faculty earned less than $55,000 a year. The Transparent California database also shows that Principal Hobson earned $129,000, a $4,000 increase from his Chicago salary. That sounds generous until you consider that Chicago’s median home price is one-fourth that of San Francisco’s.

On Monday, May 15, at the blocklike concrete headquarters of the San Francisco Unified School District near City Hall and the opera house, I took a drab old elevator up to the third floor. Walking down a short hallway, I entered a tidy, small office and shook hands with Blythe and three other administrators: Joya Balk, a director of special projects who supervised planning for Brown; Tony Payne, the interim assistant superintendent for principals, who served as interim principal after Hobson quit; and Enikia Ford Morthel, the assistant superintendent for the Bayview. They all told me that the Brown disaster narrative was unfair and overblown.

Payne dismissed the notion that Brown saw unusual levels of violence. “No kids were seriously hurt,” he said. “So, you know, a kid throwing a pen in a classroom, that’s middle school.” He pointed to the fact that violence in predominantly African American schools is depicted differently than in predominantly white schools. “I saw worse behaviors at Presidio,” he said, referring to a middle school in a more affluent part of town where he was principal for three years. “A fight happens at Presidio, and the narrative is ‘Oh, how do we help that student? What’s going on with that student?’ A fight happens at Willie Brown: ‘Oh, that’s because it’s a terrible school.’ ”

Payne struck a similar note on the teachers leaving Brown. “Looking back,” he said, “you could easily say, you know, of course we’re going to lose teachers the first year. Right? This is hard work.”

In Payne’s view, Brown was a “super-good-faith effort to build a state-of-the-art school that is still ongoing. The startup metaphor is a really good one,” he said, “where you have to iterate. You can’t expect everything to run perfectly on the first day. And I think, you know, that process of storming and norming and developing a community is going to be challenging under the best of circumstances.”

To be sure, Brown was the most ambitious new-school launch ever undertaken by the district, and is still populated by children and teachers who deserve encouragement and every chance to succeed. The allure of the startup metaphor is likewise understandable—except tech startups are launched by entrepreneurs backed by investors who understand the risks they are taking, while Brown was started by government employees with little personal stake in the outcome.

Those government employees, says Hanushek, the Stanford economist, “are not idiots, and they’re not against kids. It’s just that when push comes to shove, the interest of the kids isn’t ahead of the interests of the institutions.”

Some teachers were making around $43,000 a year, about the same per month as the city’s average rent of $3,400 for a one-bedroom apartment.

Hanushek suggests another reason for bureaucrats’ temptation to believe that their innovations will make a difference: Unable to solve deep systemic problems like improving teacher salaries, those tasked with improving specific schools do what they can and hope for the best.

Something similar might be said about the philanthropic efforts of local CEOs. Salesforce’s Benioff recently gave $250,000 to support the June effort to levy a parcel tax to raise teacher salaries. His charities also give an impressive $100,000 each year to every middle school principal in San Francisco—for them to use as they wish—as part of what he calls a Principals Innovation Fund. Partly thanks to Benioff’s fund, all of San Francisco’s middle schoolers now have access to computer science courses.

But a lot of philanthropic efforts have focused on gifts that generate good press while mostly avoiding the diseased elephant lumbering around the room: Critically low school funding combined with the Bay Area’s tech-money boom have made living in San Francisco untenable for teachers.

Even some uses of Benioff’s Innovation Fund can feel less on point in the face of high teacher turnover—like a teachers’ lounge that looks like a cool coffee shop or student work tables that fit together like puzzle pieces to “look like Google and Facebook and Salesforce,” as one school principal told a reporter.

The Sara and Evan Williams Foundation paid design company Ideo and the school district to collaborate on a sweeping redesign of the school lunch experience, including, according to a foundation spokesperson, “a minor investment in technology to support the rollout of vending machines and mobile carts.” The foundation also donated to a district-wide initiative that targeted students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. The spokesperson told me via email that the foundation did consider “all aspects of the public school system, including low teacher salaries. We’ve chosen to focus on the connection between hungry kids and learning because it reaches the most vulnerable students. When addressing a system, there are many points for intervention and no one funder can take on the entire entity.” (She also clarified that the organization’s contribution to Willie Brown was dramatically lower than the district claimed—$48,000, not $400,000.) None of the foundations that donated money to Brown would discuss what went wrong at the school. Neither Salesforce nor the Williams Foundation made anyone available for an interview.

A staffer walks the halls with a student in September.

Preston Gannaway

In the end, we sent our younger daughter back to private school—because Landake and Green told me not to send her to Brown and our efforts to place her in a different public school failed. Our private school discount was gone, and the cost was painful, but I was grateful to have the option. Still, I hated the way it felt. Our older daughter is getting a great education at a public high school, all public schools need community support, and I could not convince myself that I’d made the right decision. It is entirely possible that our daughter could have thrived at Brown.

Last August, as the school year began, I set up another meeting to take a look at the school. I drove there one morning and found the principal—the school’s fourth in two years—greeting kids outside. His name was Charleston Brown, and he seemed terrific. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, a Division 1 football player at Alcorn State in Mississippi, he was charming with a gentle humility. Kids got out of their parents’ cars and shook Brown’s hand as they walked onto campus. He led me on a tour, accompanied by Blythe and Ford Morthel.

“The headache of being a new school, even three years in,” Brown said, “is that you have to build the traditions, build the culture.” He had implemented college T-shirt Thursdays and school T-shirt Fridays. He walked me down hallways newly decorated—by Principal Brown himself—with college pennants. We stopped to observe a sunny science classroom where students sat quietly at desks and paid attention while the teacher handed out a worksheet with the questions “What does it mean to be ‘On task’?” and “Why is it important to be ‘On task’?” Next, Brown took me to see a robotics elective in another sunny room, where a dynamic teacher named James Robertson zigzagged among tables while bright-eyed kids diligently built little machines.

It all felt promising. Test scores from Brown’s second year, the most recent available, did find the student body losing ground: The portion of Brown students testing at or above grade level in English fell about five points, to 21 percent; in math, about three points to near 10 percent. It is too early to expect Brown’s scores to rise, but those numbers doubtless played a role in depressing enrollment—with only 111 kids in the incoming sixth grade, and 382 overall, Brown is currently about half full.

On the upside, the number of families ranking Brown as a first choice has begun to rise, and I’ve heard that many families are encouraged by the nascent community forming there. In fact, Robertson, who has been teaching at the school from the start, told me a hopeful story: “I have kids who stay after school for hours, and I knew parents would have no idea what their kids were doing if they didn’t see it. So we had a robotics night, and they gave presentations, and they programmed in C++ and set up all the sensors. The kids know 12 different mechanical systems of movement. They gave a formal presentation. I just watched parents crying.” He added, “Ultimately, building a beautiful building is great, but community is the heart and reality of a school. And that takes time to build.”

Principal Brown also struck me as a good leader. But I worried. The district’s salary for a principal with his experience starts near $100,000. It looks like the district’s strategy for turning around Brown 2.0 included paying Principal Number Four about $29,000 less per year than Principal Number One.

Brown lives in Fairfield—an hour’s drive to work without traffic. The salaries for principals in that town start around $114,000 a year. If the Fairfield–Suisun Unified School District offered him a job, he could hardly be blamed for taking it.

Daniel Duane is the author of six books; he’s at work on the next, about California.

This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.

1 Updated June 29, 2018, 3:50 pm EDT to clarify the philanthropic contributions of Salesforce.org.

2 Updated June 28, 2018, 5 pm EDT to clarify the source of information regarding Summit.

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ETHICS CASE: Facebook’s “Unfriendly” Privacy Policies (adapted from: Spinello, R. (2017). Cyberethics: Morality and law in cyberspace. Jones & Bartlett Learning) Facebook CEO, Marc Zuckerberg, couldn’t quite believe all the attention he was getting. Facebook was on the verge of its initial public offering (IPO), and it seemed that the media couldn’t get enough of this Cinderella story. Zuckerberg had created a primitive version of the Facebook application in his Harvard dorm room. Thanks to its immediate popularity, he commercialized this product and founded Facebook, a pioneer in social networking. There were 1.4 billion active users on Facebook and the company’s revenue exceeded $12 billion. As Zuckerberg traveled around the country to promote the IPO, the press followed him everywhere. The Facebook IPO took place on May 18, 2012, making many of its brash and talented managers instant millionaires by the end of 2014. Most people at the social network company welcomed the publicity and attention surrounding the IPO. But over the years Facebook has attracted negative publicity and unwelcome attention for its controversial privacy policies. Facebook has had to deal with several embarrassing missteps as it struggles to reconcile user privacy with an open network. The company’s policies have been the object of scrutiny by the FTC, which has investigated a number of privacy-related complaints. In a recent ruling, the FTC “persuaded” both Google and Facebook to consent to a biennial audit of their privacy policies and practices for the next 20 years. What were Facebook’s most contentious privacy policies, and why are key regulators still threatening to block the social media company from carrying out its strategy of boosting advertising revenue by leveraging its user information? The following is a brief historical overview. Facebook first caught the attention of privacy advocates in 2007 when it implemented a technology known as the “News Feed”. This feature was designed to display in real time changes a person makes to her user profile on the home pages of all of her online friends. To the surprise of the company, users balked at this innovation and Facebook had to abandon this default feature. In that same year, Facebook also joined a commercial venture known as the Beacon program so that every member would be notified immediately as soon as one of their friends made an online purchase. Beacon also seemed to clearly violate users’ privacy expectations. As resistance mounted, Facebook abruptly ended the program. In December 2009, Facebook once again shocked many of its users by suddenly changing its privacy settings. A person’s “friends” could no longer be kept concealed from the public or from each other. As a result, information that was once private such as one’s profile picture, name, gender, address, professional networks, and so forth, became publicly available by default. According to Rebecca MacKinnon these changes were motivated by the company’s need to monetize this “free” service, and were consistent with Zuckerberg’s “strong personal conviction that people everywhere should be open about their lives and actions.” Facebook’s decision to make previously confidential information “publicly available” was reversed thanks to public protest, and users now have the capability to control access to most of their personal information. In 2010 the company took public its “instant personalization” scheme, which allows partner websites to access Facebook information as soon as a Facebook user visits the site. This all happens by default before the user gives consent to the sharing of his or her information. In that same year the company introduced social plug-ins, including a social widget known as the “Like” button, that appeared on other websites (like Amazon.com); if a user likes an item she sees, she clicks on this button and the item appears in a list of things she likes in her profile. This plug-in architecture, a further evolution of cookie technology functions as follows. When a user logs into a social networking site like Facebook, the site sends a cookie to the user’s browser, which is disabled only when the user logs out of his her Facebook account. As the user visits various websites, the Like architecture will report back to Facebook whether the user has clicked on the Like button (even if the user doesn’t click on this button, Facebook knows that you’ve been to this site and looked at this item). This social widget provides a history of a user’s web-browsing habits that can be linked to personally identifiable information. The social plug-in architecture has the potential to be an especially powerful mechanism for behavioral advertising, though Facebook claims that (at least for the present) it anonymizes this tracking data after a period of 90 days. Online photos on Facebook pages have also been a bone of contention. When users post a photo on their Facebook page, they can tag it with the names of the individuals in that photo. The can also establish links to the profiles of those individuals, assuming that they too have a Facebook page. Those who come to realize that they have been tagged can server the link to their profile but can’t do anything about the actual photo. It remains to be seen whether Facebook can successfully fend off regulators in Europe and the United States and live up to the expectations of its investors, who expect the company to be able to exploit the commercial value of the information it collects. To this end, Zuckerberg has repeatedly sought to diminish privacy expectations and encourage Facebook users to share their information in the spirit of openness and greater connectivity. Questions What is the problem that is described in the case? What are the known facts (from the case or references provided)? Who are the key people (stakeholders) involved? What is the timeline of events? What are the alternative courses of actions that can be implemented to solve the problem? Which of Facebook’s past or present privacy policies do you find to be the most troubling? Which ones are not a “big deal” in your estimation? Should social media sites like Facebook be subject to more regulations to ensure the preservation of privacy rights? How much do you think companies like Facebook really know about their users? How much of that knowledge can be a potential revenue source? What is the economic value of such user data?

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mastcomm · 5 years ago

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Is This the Next Leader of the Fed?

Good morning. Fears about the spread of the coronavirus whacked stock futures this morning — and led to the cancellation of Mobile World Congress. More on that below. (Want this in your inbox each morning? Sign up here.)

The race to be the next Fed chair is getting interesting

Judy Shelton, who has been nominated to the central bank’s board of governors, is scheduled to testify before the Senate today.

She is a contentious choice for the job, Jeanna Smialek of the NYT notes:

• Ms. Shelton has questioned whether America needs the Fed at all.

• She favors pegging the value of the dollar to something like gold, an idea the U.S. abandoned decades ago.

• She’s seen as open to bending her ideological positions to please President Trump, eroding the Fed’s political independence.

But she appears to be moving into a prime position to become the next Fed chair if Mr. Trump wins re-election, Ms. Smialek adds. The president has openly derided the current chairman, Jay Powell, and could well pick someone more in tune with him ideologically when Mr. Powell’s term is up in 2022.

Washington speculation had focused on a different candidate for Fed chair: Kevin Warsh, who was on the central bank’s board during the financial crisis. Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Warsh before, but some wonder whether a strong performance by Ms. Shelton today would give her the inside track.

Is ‘Beyond Petroleum’ for real this time?

BP announced yesterday that it plans to be carbon-neutral by 2050, an ambitious target for one of the world’s biggest energy companies. What that actually means, however, is up for interpretation.

The oil giant’s proposal is its latest climate-minded initiative, with a twist. Not only is the company seeking to reduce its own carbon emissions, it said, but it also wants to offset the emissions from use of the oil and gas that it produces.

The proposal is more complicated than it looks. It has to do with the “scope” of emissions targeted by the plan: The bulk of pollution created by BP’s products are generated when customers burn the fuels, which are called Scope 3 emissions. BP’s net-zero pledge covers only its more direct operations, although the company plans to reduce Scope 3 emissions significantly.

U.K. regulators investigate Barclays C.E.O.’s ties to Epstein

Barclays disclosed this morning that British financial regulators have opened an investigation into ties between its chief, Jes Staley, and the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The context: The two men had known each other since at least 1999, when Mr. Staley led JPMorgan Chase’s private bank, where Mr. Epstein was a client. The financier had helped funnel dozens of wealthy clients to Mr. Staley, and the two men stayed in touch even after Mr. Epstein was accused of sexually abusing scores of women.

Mr. Staley has the backing of the Barclays board, for now. The bank said he had been “sufficiently transparent” about the nature of his ties to Mr. Epstein, and the C.E.O. said that he hadn’t had any contact with the disgraced financier since taking up his post in December 2015.

Mobile World Congress was canceled. Does anybody care?

Last year, MWC drew around 110,000 attendees (including 7,900 C.E.O.s) from 200 countries. Cancellation of this month’s edition was inevitable, after major exhibitors like Nokia, Ericsson and Amazon pulled out over the past week or so.

This presents a natural experiment in the value of industry events, seen by some as essential for networking and deal making and by others as price-gouging junkets. Thousands of meetings that would’ve taken place at MWC this year now won’t happen, which could have knock-on effects later in the year. (Or not.)

The view from a veteran: We spoke with Ben Wood, a telecom analyst at CCS Insight in London who would have made his 23rd consecutive appearance at MWC this year.

• For the companies that blow huge portions of their marketing budgets on MWC, “if you find that you can cope without going, and the costs associated with it, you may choose to deploy your resources in different ways,” he told DealBook.

• That’s harder for small companies that rely on “serendipitous moments” with big buyers or potential partners wandering the halls of events like MWC, he added.

No touching. In the meantime, conference etiquette will change. The organizers of a big tech event in Amsterdam now underway praised attendees for “safe greeting practices such as fist or elbow bumps.” Generally speaking, it must be said, handshakes are incredibly unhygienic.

Credit Suisse’s chief leaves on a defiant, awkward note

Tidjane Thiam delivered his final earnings call as the Swiss bank’s chief this morning, after being pressured to resign amid controversy over a spying scandal.

He presented the growth in net income of 69 percent as the result of his changes in the structure and strategy at the company. “We’ve built something of quality, the numbers are coming through,” he said at a press conference.

There was a notable moment of reflection on his uneasy tenure at the bank, notes the NYT’s Amie Tsang, who was listening in on the call. “There are differences within Switzerland in how people feel about me,” Mr. Thiam said. “Every second I’ve done the best I could. I am who I am, I cannot change who I am.”

How Marc Benioff sold Trump the trillion-tree idea

Mr. Benioff pitched Jared Kushner, a top White House adviser and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, about the initiative to plant one trillion trees to help offset carbon emissions. The idea eventually — and unexpectedly — wound its way into Mr. Trump’s speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month.

“Trees are the ultimate bipartisan issue,” Mr. Benioff told the NYT. “Everyone is pro-tree.”

There are two lessons to draw from this:

• Successfully lobbying Mr. Trump is an unconventional process that involves back-channeling with trusted advisers.

• The idea of one trillion trees appears to have taken hold with the president because, as Ms. Friedman notes, “it was practically sacrifice-free.”

Jeff Bezos’ latest takeover: David Geffen’s L.A. mansion

The Amazon chief has continued his real estate splurge with two new acquisitions, according to Katy McLaughlin and Katherine Clarke of the WSJ:

• David Geffen’s palatial Los Angeles home, which Mr. Bezos bought for $165 million — setting a record for the city in the process.

• A plot of undeveloped land in the L.A. area, purchased from the estate of the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

They follow Mr. Bezos’ $80 million purchase of the top four floors of a Manhattan apartment building last year, reportedly with the goal of turning them into a gigantic pied-à-terre.

It’s a windfall for Mr. Geffen, who bought the L.A. mansion — the former estate of the movie mogul Jack Warner — for $47.5 million in 1990.

The speed read

Deals

• The parent company of T-Mobile reportedly wants to renegotiate the price of its takeover of Sprint. (FT)

• The venture capital firm Battery Ventures has raised $2 billion for its two latest funds, which will focus on investments in enterprise software companies. (Bloomberg)

• Meet the Korean hedge fund that scored big by backing “Parasite,” the movie that won the Academy Award for best picture. (Bloomberg)

Politics and policy

• Moderate Democratic leaders are slowly warming up to Mike Bloomberg as Senator Bernie Sanders becomes the front-runner in the party’s presidential race. (NYT)

• Larry Ellison of Oracle is doing a rare thing in Silicon Valley: hosting a fund-raiser for President Trump. (Recode)

• The Education Department is reportedly investigating Harvard and Yale over their sources of foreign funding. (WSJ)

Tech

• The Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, has reportedly said in private conversations that he expects a criminal antitrust case in Silicon Valley in the next few months. (Hollywood Reporter)

• Read up on Mark Zuckerberg’s approach to crisis management. (Wired)

• Britain plans to give its media regulator additional oversight over internet content. (NYT)

• Huawei of China is said to be in talks to fund research into 5G wireless technology at the London School of Economics — for £105,000, or $136,000. (FT)

Best of the rest

• Massachusetts’ attorney general sued Juul yesterday, accusing the vaping company of buying ads on youth-focused websites to target young nonsmokers. (NYT)

• The coronavirus outbreak cost Bernard Arnault his title of world’s richest man. (Fortune)

• Charlie Munger on the world today: “There’s too much wretched excess.” (CNBC)

We’d love your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].

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#Business

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years ago

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CIRCUMSTANCES BEING WHAT THEY WERE, COMPANIES WOULD HAVE BEEN: SURE, GIVE 'EM WHATEVER THEY ASK FOR, SO LONG AS YOU'RE A PRODUCT COMPANY THAT'S MERELY BEING EXTRA ATTENTIVE TO A CUSTOMER, THEY'RE VERY GRATEFUL EVEN IF YOU DON'T WANT TO; YOU COULD TELL FROM THE CASE

But apparently hackers are particularly curious, especially about how things work. See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.1 Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School, he said they'd decided to build their software on Windows NT, and had just hired a very experienced NT developer to be their chief technical officer.2 They'd be in a rush to choose your life's work. In a way this is virtuous, because I think startups are a good thing. When you're running a startup you have to be the best you ever get. They wouldn't do it otherwise.

People may still watch things they call TV shows, but they'll watch them mostly on computers. How long will it take them to grasp this?3 He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting Microsoft. Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. But you never had one guy painting over the work of multiple hands, though there may only be one name on the wall next to it in the museum. So a company that can attract great hackers will have a huge advantage. Bill Gates?

Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a replacement for don't give up on your dreams to what someone else can do, but you come from the corporate world and your friends, or even the fact that they have a single format.4 A startup now can be just a pair of 22 year old guys. I was taught, was a kind of mania for object-oriented programming is popular in big companies, because their software is probably going to be a general consensus about which problems are hard to solve, and what constitutes a good solution. For cases like that there's a more drastic solution.5 It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it seems lame to use them. And finally, if a good investor in the startups is that there are two possible explanations: a it is finished, or b you lack imagination. Written language is more complex, which makes it more work to read. If startups are the first to go. It's the same with all of them.6

I'm describing already sounds too good to be true to think you could grow a local silicon valley by giving startups $15-20k each like Y Combinator there, but in software you want to make money that you can't do it by accident. 28%. They may have to use Java and Windows at work, but how to work together.7 Imagine what it would take if one did.8 Some hackers are quite smart, but when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make them unavailable to the people who make the most money: make the best surgeons operate with their left hands, force popular actors to overeat, and so on. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything. He said he didn't think so, because the bugs are random.

They get new technology by buying the startups that can retain control tend to be people I know who favor markets are Marc, Jawed Karim, and Joe Kraus. Few would be willing to claim that it doesn't reduce economic inequality, you decrease the number of people who can be employed in an economy consisting of big, slow-moving companies with a couple thousand people each. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something. It's clear now that even by using the word convergence we were giving TV too much credit.9 There are a lot of what looks like work. Of course not. Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not outright bribery.10 Ironically, part of the training of engineers.11 If he was good, so I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation.

I was a kid I thought they protected inventors from having their ideas stolen by big companies. The difference between the good ones. Seven years later I still hadn't started.12 The good news is that they're cheaper to produce. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are.13 What I'm telling you is that you will yourself misunderstand your work. I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technological progress.

Notes

Robert V.

MITE Corp. They'd be interchangeable if markets stood still. When that happens.

They don't make their money if they don't have to tell them about your conversations with VCs suggest it's roughly correct for startups that are still a few VC firms.

This probably undervalues the company is always 15 weeks behind the rapacious one. So if they don't know of a handful of lame investors first, and in some cases the process dragged on for months. Scheme: define foo n n _ Erann Gat's sad tale about industry best practice at JPL inspired me to address this generally misapplied phrase. VCs recapitalize the company really cared about users they'd just advise them to represent anything.

People were more the aggregate is what you learn in college. To do it mostly on your cap table, and they were already lots of options, because we know exactly what your body is telling you to two more investors. A larger set of plausible sounding startup ideas, because any invention has a similar logic, one of them is that so few founders do it for the next round, though I think the top startup law firms are Wilson Sonsini, Orrick, Fenwick West, Gunderson Dettmer, and one didn't try to avoid using it out of their initial funding runs out. Aristotle's contribution?

Again, hard work is in itself be evidence of a type II startups neither require nor produce startup culture. So instead of being interrupted deters hackers from starting hard projects.

The Sub-Zero 690, one could reasonably be with children, with number replaced by gender. Yahoo was their customer. Quite often at YC. But it was more rebellion which can make offers that super-angels gradually to erode.

What they must do is leave them alone in the few cases where you currently are. That's because the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the first half of it in the middle class values; it has about the Airbnbs during YC.

Just use the phrase frequently, you would never come face to face with the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Edgar v. But it is genuine. This was certainly true in fields that have it as if you'd just thought of them had been able to raise money are saved from hiring too fast because they know you'll have to resort to raising money from the moment the time required to notice when it's aligned with the New Deal but with World War II.

S P 500 CEOs in 2002 was 35,560. That's why startups always pay equity rather than by you based on their utility function for money.

If they want to invest in syndicates. See, we should be asking will you build this? You'll be lucky if fundraising feels pleasant enough to turn into other forms of inequality, and you'll probably have some kind of secret about the origins of the present that most people who did it.

This is why they tend to have lunch at the time it takes a few months later.

That makes some rich people move, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was worth about 30 billion. Investors are one of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits. They found it easier for some reason, rather than geography. He was off by only about 2%.

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marketingadvisorvietnam · 6 years ago

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Người phụ nữ đứng đầu đế chế hỗn loạn YouTube

Marketing Advisor đã viết bài trên http://cuocsongso24h.com/nguoi-phu-nu-dung-dau-de-che-hon-loan-youtube/

Người phụ nữ đứng đầu đế chế hỗn loạn YouTube

Từ đầu năm 2019 đến nay, CEO Susan Wojcicki chưa có ngày nào được bình an. Chỉ trong vòng một tuần của tháng 2, BuzzFeed đưa tin YouTube chạy quảng cáo trên những nội dung chống vác xin, nhiều người bị sốc khi phát hiện ẩn trong một số video trên YouTube Kids là những hướng dẫn cách tự sát.

Tệ không kém là chuyện những kẻ ấu dâm ẩn danh đăng các bình luận tục tĩu dưới các video dành cho trẻ em. Tiếp đó là việc những hình ảnh quan hệ tình dục giữa người và động vật xuất hiện bên cạnh nhiều video cho trẻ em.

Dù vậy, đó không phải là những trải nghiệm tồi tệ nhất mà CEO Susan Wojcicki từng gặp phải ở YouTube. Hồi tháng 4/2018, một người dùng YouTube nổi giận với những thay đổi về chính sách lọc video đã xông vào trụ sở công ty xả súng khiến 3 người bị thương trước khi tự sát. Suốt 40 phút, bà Wojcicki phải lẩn tránh kẻ xả súng.

CEO YouTube Susan Wojcicki. Ảnh: New York Times.

Không ai nghĩ nhiệm kỳ lãnh đạo của bà Wojcicki tại YouTube lại sóng gió đến vậy. Khi nhận việc vào năm 2014, bà được mô tả là người phụ nữ quyền lực nhất trong giới quảng cáo, người đã đem lại nguồn thu khổng lồ cho Google và được kỳ vọng sẽ tiếp tục thành công đó trên cương vị CEO YouTube.

Trong 5 năm đầu tiên, bà Wojcicki đưa ra những mô hình quảng cáo mới, cung cấp nhiều dịch vụ về nhạc và các nội dung khác trên YouTube. Tuy nhiên, giờ đây công việc của CEO YouTube không còn là thúc đẩy sự tăng trưởng, mà là xử lý khủng hoảng, hạn chế thiệt hại.

Phong cách không phù hợp với “sự hỗn loạn” của YouTube

Những tháng qua, hàng loạt chính trị gia và các nhân vật tai to mặt lớn trong giới công nghệ đã lên tiếng chỉ trích YouTube là không nỗ lực hạn chế các nội dung độc hại. Bê bối nối tiếp bê bối. Tháng trước, video xả súng đẫm máu ở New Zealand bị phát tán ồ ạt trên YouTube và các nền tảng khác.

Điều đáng ngạc nhiên là trong cơn bão tố, bà Wojcicki vẫn rất lặng lẽ và né tránh được phần lớn những cú đòn. Năm ngoái, khi lãnh đạo các mạng xã hội phải điều trần trước Quốc hội Mỹ, bà Wojcicki không có mặt.

Trong khi Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg và Jack Dorsey liên tục hứng chịu cơn mưa chỉ trích, bà Wojcicki gần như không bị nhắc đến. Phóng viên Daisuke Wakabayshi của New York Times tò mò muốn tìm hiểu xem bà Wojcicki quản lý YouTube như thế nào và đã phỏng vấn bà 3 lần, nói chuyện với hơn 10 nhân viên YouTube và Google trong vài tháng qua.

Nhà báo Wakabayshi phát hiện ra rằng người đứng đầu nền tảng video lớn nhất và hỗn loạn nhất thế giới trên thực tế là một người vô cùng bình tĩnh. “Nhưng phong cách đó có thể không phù hợp với tốc độ và quy mô của những điều kinh khủng và sự ngu dốt tệ hại đang tung hoành dữ dội trên YouTube”, nhà báo Wakabayshi nhận định.

Hôm 2/4, Bloomberg News đăng bài chỉ trích bà Wojcicki và các lãnh đạo YouTube vì tìm mọi cách để tăng view nên cố tình phớt lờ cảnh báo của nhân viên về hệ thống của công ty. Bà Wojcicki tỏ ra bị động. Trong cuộc trả lời phỏng vấn ngày 7/4, bà tuyên bố YouTube không phớt lờ vấn đề này và cho rằng đó là “một vấn đề lớn và phức tạp”.

Nhà kho căn hộ của bà Wojcicki, nơi 2 người sáng lập của Google khởi nghiệp. Ảnh: Twitter.

Theo nhà báo Wakabayshi, khi đó bà Wojcicki tỏ ra cứng đầu và giận dữ, điều trái ngược với sự thể hiện thường thấy của bà. “Chúng tôi không thể tuyên bố ngay là phải thay đổi mọi thứ và mọi thứ sẽ được giải quyết. Đó không phải là cách vận hành thực tế”, bà Wojcicki thanh minh lúc đó.

Trong một lần có mặt tại trụ sở YouTube ở San Bruno (California), nhà báo Wakabayshi được chứng kiến rõ sự thận trọng của bà Wojcicki. Trong phòng họp, bà ngồi lặng lẽ xem video có tên “Thử thách bao cao su” (Condom Challenge – một người đặt bao cao su đầy nước lên đầu người khác, bao cao su sẽ trùm kín mặt người này).

Video này khi đó đạt 15 triệu view trên YouTube. Bà Wojcicki và các nhân viên cân nhắc xem liệu thử thách này có gây nguy hiểm hay không. Hành vi “nguy hiểm” không dính líu đến trẻ em sẽ được tồn tại trên YouTube, còn hành vi “có nguy cơ gây chết người” sẽ bị gỡ xuống.

Một nhân viên cho rằng Condom Challenge chỉ thuộc loại “nguy hiểm”, nhưng bà Wojcicki không đồng ý. “Chẳng có lý do gì để trùm nylon lên đầu mình như vậy”, bà kết luận. Nhưng video vẫn tồn tại trên YouTube và tiếp tục thu hút hàng triệu lượt view.

'Chị họ đầu tiên trong hoàng tộc Google'

Câu chuyện nguồn gốc của bà Wojcicki không ly kỳ như nhiều CEO tại Thung lũng Silicon. Bà không hề có một ý tưởng độc lạ nào nảy ra khi đang đi học. Bà cũng không bỏ Đại học Harvard để khởi nghiệp, mà đã tốt nghiệp trường đại học này.

Năm 1998, bà cho thuê một phần nhỏ căn hộ đang sống cùng chồng cho 2 sinh viên Stanford mới tốt nghiệp. Hai thanh niên này có tên là Larry Page và Sergey Brin, và họ vừa sáng tạo ra một công cụ tìm kiếm có tên Google.

CEO của YouTube là người thân cận của nhà đồng sáng lập Larry Page. Ảnh: Getty.

Tới một ngày, bà Wojcicki cần tìm một thứ gì đó nhưng không thể tìm được bởi Google lúc đó đang sập. Đó là lúc bà nhận ra mình đã phụ thuộc vào sản phẩm “được 2 anh chàng sống trong gara nhà tôi tạo ra”, như bà kể lại năm 2014.

Năm 1999, bà Wojcicki gia nhập Google, trở thành nhân viên thứ 16 tại công ty và là người quản lý marketing đầu tiên. Bà góp phần giúp Google trở thành một đế chế công nghệ. Năm 2006, bà ráo riết thúc ép Google mua lại YouTube với giá 1,65 tỷ USD. Giá trị của Google hiện nay, theo tính toán của Morgan Stanley, khoảng 160 tỷ USD.

Trong những năm qua, bà Wojcicki đã kiếm được hàng trăm triệu USD và giữ mối quan hệ mật thiết với Larry Page. Một cựu quản lý Google mô tả bà Wojcicki “là người chị họ đầu tiên trong hoàng tộc Google”. Em gái út của bà là Anne, người đồng sáng lập công ty 23andMe và là vợ cũ của Sergey Brin.

Kể từ khi lên nắm quyền ở YouTube, bà Wojcicki luôn tránh né truyền thông, không muốn mình được coi là người nổi tiếng. “Khi đưa ra các quyết định, tôi thường đặt câu hỏi là trong 10 năm nữa, người ta sẽ nghĩ gì. Họ có đánh giá là chúng tôi đã làm đúng không? Tôi có cảm thấy tự hào không? Các con của tôi có nghĩ tôi đã làm đúng không?”, bà Wojcicki cho biết.

'Ước gì hành động sớm hơn'

Nhưng dưới sự lãnh đạo của bà Wojcicki, YouTube đang đối mặt với vô số vấn đề. Năm ngoái, YouTube phải gỡ video “Tide Pod” và “No lackin”. Khủng hoảng nối tiếp khủng hoảng, bà Wojcicki buộc phải đưa ra các quy định hạn chế những video có nội dung xấu. Công việc của bà trở thành “dọn rác”.

Khi trở thành CEO YouTube, bà Wojcicki có nhiệm vụ đảm bảo nền tảng này phải thu hút người dùng xem hơn 1 tỷ giờ video mỗi ngày, tăng gấp 10 lần so với năm 2012. Bà đã làm được điều đó.

Nhưng vào năm 2016, YouTube bắt đầu phải hạn chế dần các gợi ý thu hút người dùng tới những video có nội dung độc hại. Nó giống như là ăn đồ ăn nhanh vậy, nếm thì ngon nhưng cực kỳ có hại cho sức khỏe.

Khủng hoảng bùng lên với cá nhân bà Wojcicki vào mùa xuân 2017. Tháng 3, nhiều công ty lớn tẩy chay dịch vụ của YouTube vì phát hiện hình ảnh của các hãng này bị lồng ghép trong những nội dung xấu.

Tháng 4/2018, một vụ xả súng diễn ra tại trụ sở YouTube. Thủ phạm là 1 YouTuber bất mãn với các chính sách mới. Ảnh: Twitter.

Tháng 6, ba gã đàn ông lái xe đâm vào người đi bộ ở London (Anh). Một trong ba kẻ này từng xem trên YouTube các nội dung cổ vũ Hồi giáo cực ��oan. Phản ứng lại, bà Wojcickitriển khai hàng nghìn nhân viên kiểm tra các video có nội dung gây tranh cãi. Nhân viên YouTube cũng ứng dụng công nghệ AI để dò tìm và phát hiện các nội dung cực đoan.

Đầu năm nay, YouTube tuyên bố đang thay đổi thuật toán để trang web ngừng gợi ý các video kiểu như “thuyết âm mưu”. Tuy nhiên, vẫn chưa có nhiều thay đổi trên YouTube. Và thuật toán của công ty cũng có vấn đề. Hồi đầu tuần, khi vụ cháy Nhà thờ Đức Bà Paris xảy ra, YouTube nhận nhầm đó là vụ tấn công khủng bố 11/9.

Khi được hỏi tại sao YouTube không hành động sớm hơn để ngăn chặn các nội dung độc hại, bà Wojcicki nói ”ước gì đã làm như thế”. “Nếu được trở về quá khứ, tôi chắc chắn sẽ thúc đẩy công việc đó bởi giờ tôi nhận ra nó quan trọng như thế nào”, bà nói.

Bà Wojcicki cho biết xem những video có nội dung độc hại và phản ứng thù hằn của mọi người trên mạng là điều tồi tệ nhất trong công việc của bà, nhưng cũng là một trong những điều quan trọng nhất.

Theo nhà báo Wakabayshi, những chỉ trích dữ dội nhắm vào YouTube thời gian qua đã khiến mối quan hệ của bà Wojcicki với nhiều nhân vật quan trọng trở nên xấu đi. Ông Marc Benioff, chủ tịch Saleforce, từng mô tả mạng xã hội có hại chẳng kém gì thuốc lá và cần bị giám sát.

Bà Wojcicki có chân trong ban giám đốc Saleforce từ năm 2014 và có mối quan hệ khá thân với ông Benioff. Khi nhà báo Wakabayshi hỏi ông Benioff về bà Wojcicki, ông tỏ ra giận dữ và nói không muốn trả lời.

Một tuần sau đó, ông tuyên bố: “Chúng ta đang rơi vào một cuộc khủng hoảng lòng tin, và nếu chúng ta không tự kiểm soát thì chính phủ sẽ làm điều đó. Nhưng tôi cho rằng thực tế không hề tác động gì đến Susan”.

Đánh giá CEO YouTube như thế nào?

Cách dễ nhất để đánh giá năng lực một CEO là nghiên cứu kết quả kinh doanh của công ty. Tuy nhiên, đối với bà Wojcicki và YouTube, đây không phải là điều dễ dàng. YouTube nằm sâu trong Alphabet và kết quả kinh doanh của nó không được công bố.

Các nhà đầu tư không nắm rõ được chi phí và lợi nhuận của YouTube, cũng không xác định được CEO Susan Wojcicki có ảnh hưởng như thế nào tới các con số. Ảnh: Bloomberg.

Các nhà đầu tư không rõ chi phí và lợi nhuận của YouTube, càng không rõ bà Wojcicki có ảnh hưởng như thế nào tới những con số này. Tất nhiên nhiều nhà phân tích đánh giá YouTube vẫn đang ăn nên làm ra với doanh thu năm vào khoảng 15 tỷ USD và đang tăng trưởng khoảng 30-40%/năm.

Ngoài chuyện doanh thu, vị trí của bà Wojcicki được đánh giá là rất vững vàng bất chấp những điều tiếng của YouTube thời gian qua. Trên lý thuyết, bà làm việc dưới quyền CEO Google Sundar Pichai, nhưng thực tế là bà chỉ dưới quyền Larry Page. Bà Wojcicki là một trong những người hiếm hoi của Google có thể gặp Page bất kỳ lúc nào. “Bà ấy sẽ không đi đâu đâu”, một quan chức Google khẳng định.

Sau những khủng hoảng liên tiếp thời gian qua, bà Wojcicki khẳng định những khó khăn sẽ giúp YouTube có sự chuẩn bị tốt hơn để đối phó với các vấn đề mới. Và chắc chắn những vấn đề và khủng hoảng sẽ tiếp tục ập tới, khi nào mà YouTube còn mở cửa cho người dùng thoải mái upload video.

Bà Wojcicki tâm sự bà gia nhập Google vì muốn làm một điều gì đó có ý nghĩa với đời mình. Nhưng giờ đây, bà nhận ra rằng di sản của mình sẽ là liệu YouTube có thể xử lý được các vấn đề của nó hay không. “Chúng tôi cần phải cải thiện, chúng tôi sẽ làm tốt hơn. Chúng tôi sẽ phải xử lý các vấn đề”, bà quả quyết.

Nhưng liệu bà có thể "giải độc" YouTube? Nhận xét về phong cách lãnh đạo của bà Wojcicki, nhà báo Wakabayshi đã thể hiện rõ sự nghi ngờ.

Sẽ ra sao nếu cả thế giới đều mất Internet? Sẽ ra sao nếu bạn thức dậy vào một ngày mà mạng Internet bị sập? Tất nhiên, bạn không thể truy cập được mạng xã hội vào buổi sáng và không có Google Maps để tìm đường.

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linusjf · 6 years ago

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Marc Andreesen: Actually has a shot

“Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.” ~ Marc Andreessen, Co-founder of Netscape, Board Member of Facebook.

View On WordPress

#Marc Andreesen

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lindyhunt · 7 years ago

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Unriddled: Facebook's Redemption, the 'Meaning' of Search Engines, and More Tech News You Need

Oh, and Facebook might be making a real difference against misinformation.

It's our Wednesday tech news roundup, and we're breaking it down.

Unriddled: The Tech News You Need

1. Google Search Adds 'Meaning Variations' to its Ranking Algorithm

2. Big Tech to Appear Before the Senate

3. Facebook's Assault on Misinformation Shows Improvement

4. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Acquires TIME Magazine

5. Twitter to Let Users Opt for Chronological Newsfeeds

Twitter is now reportedly giving users the option to use either system when browsing content on their feeds.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 17, 2018

That's a wrap for today. Until next week, give me a shout on Twitter with your questions and feedback, as well as which events and topics you'd like us to cover moving forward.

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ageloire · 8 years ago

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Blast From the Past: 7 Websites That Were One Thing, But Now They're Another

Once upon a time, back in 2005, there lived on the internet a website called YouTube. It's a name that, today, many people recognize as a video-sharing website -- and much more -- that's owned by Google. But over a decade ago, YouTube wasn't what it is today. In 2005, YouTube was a dating site.

Yes, you read that correctly. YouTube began as a dating site.

It's something that the co-founders have discussed in interviews, but the rest of us rarely do. Since the late 90s, how many websites have transformed into something completely different from what they originally set out to be?

As it turns out, many of our most beloved destination sites -- some of which we frequently write about and are essential to marketers -- were borderline unrecognizable when they first launched. What were they then? And what can marketers stand to learn from it?

Spoiler alert: It's been a long time since people recorded things in stone. It's the internet, and it allows for progressive changes to design, product, and the way they're marketed. But remember -- be strategic. If you're looking to make some big changes, check out our quick guide to branding.

7 Websites That Used to Be Something Completely Different

1) Amazon

Founded: 1994

Original model: "Earth's biggest bookstore."

Before:

Source: Newfangled

Founder Jeff Bezos is said to have chosen books from his list of 20 products he thought would sell online, because they were the lowest-cost and most universally-demanded. And sure, Amazon still sells books -- and a lot more. The amount of growth it has witnessed in the two decades since its incorporation is beyond impressive.

Today:

Current model:

"Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking."

It sells much more than just books -- it's now a full ecommerce operation.

In addition to online shopping, Amazon now produces and offers, among many other things:

The Amazon Echo, a digital personal assistant and smart home device.

The Kindle E-reader.

Original entertainment programing.

Streaming media tools and devices.

Music downloads.

Grocery delivery.

Total assets: $67.7 billion

Employees: 230,800

2) Netflix

Founded: 1997

Original model: "To offer online movie rentals."

Before:

Source: Netflix

When Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph co-founded Netflix, the intention was clear -- they wanted to create an easy way for people to rent and return movies, without having to drive to the now-extinct video store. Now, things look a little different.

Today:

Current model:

"The world’s leading Internet television network."

Offers original and syndicated programming via streaming technology.

Content is personalized, with algorithms designed to make recommendations based on viewing behavior and history.

DVD rentals are still available, but only through DVD.com, owned by Netflix.

Total assets: $11.26 billion

Employees: 3,700

3) Facebook

Founded: 2004 (as Thefacebook)

Original model: "An online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges."

Before:

Source: Wayback Machine

There have been many pop cultural references to Facebook since its 2004 launch. But on the surface, founder Mark Zuckerberg's intentions were fairly clear -- to allow students at Harvard to connect online. Eventually, the network expanded to most U.S. colleges and universities, until it was announced in 2006 that anyone would be able to join.

Today:

Current model:

"To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

Anyone can create a profile, with some parameters for members who are minors.

Is the primary source of news for 44% of the general population.

Averages 1.18 billion daily active users.

Total assets: $49.41 billion

Employees: 12,691

4) YouTube

Founded: 2005

Original model: "The first online community site that allows members to post and share personal videos."

Before:

Source: Wayback Machine

It's true -- as we mentioned earlier, YouTube had very brief beginnings as a dating website. Its founders have spoken to the press about it on more than one occasion. CEO Chad Hurley once told Time that the intention was for YouTube to serve as "a video version of HOTorNOT.com," a site in which users would rate the attractiveness of complete strangers on a scale of one to 10. To the delight of its many current users, that's no longer the case.

Today:

Current model:

"Allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos."

Offers YouTube Red, a paid membership that offers ad-free videos and music.

Acquired by Google in 2006 and has since operated as "a Google company."

5) Inbound.org

Founded: 2012

Original model: "To enable great content from the world of inbound marketing to get noticed."

Before:

Source: Wayback Machine

As the story goes, a pair of friends -- Moz co-founder Rand Fishkind and HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah -- started Inbound.org "for fun," and to provide a platform for the content creators who were following the somewhat-new principles of inbound marketing. There were member-powered discussion boards, Q&As, and job listings. And while the foundation of that community is still, at its core, very much the same, the site provides even more to do and see.

Today:

Current model:

"An online hub where good Marketers come to get better."

Members can do more than ask questions and start conversations -- they can post original content on Inbound.org. That comes with the opportunity for other members to "upvote" it.

Offers discussion boards, original content, and ways for members to earn badges, among other marketing-related resources. As Casey Henry -- who oversees growth for Inbound.org -- says, it's "a community where marketers access, share, and leverage marketing resources all in one place."

Members: 204,929

6) BuzzFeed

Founded: 2006

Original model: "Distinguishes what is actually interesting from what is merely hyped."

Before:

Source: Wayback Machine

It seems like BuzzFeed has really earned a name for itself in the realm of listicles, like "6 Items That Totally Overreact To Being Microwaved," and other light -- but fun -- content, like quizzes to determine how many marriages you'll have, based on your favorite cheese. (Even we can't make this stuff up.) But it wasn't always like that. BuzzFeed was actually founded on the principle to detect only the most important news items that were "on the rise and worth your time."

Today:

Current model:

"The leading independent digital media company delivering news and entertainment to hundreds of millions of people around the world."

Appears to be striving for a balance of listicles, quizzes, and serious news, with top stories ranging from topics like health care, to "43 Thoughts Everyone Has While Shopping At Target."

Offers original, branded content in numerous formats, including video.

Has established a portfolio of owned and affiliated shows, including Tasty, which is best known for abbreviated cooking demonstrations.

Total assets: $55.93 million (according to documents obtained by Gawker in 2015)

Employees: 1,300

7) Airbnb

Founded: 2008

Original model: "An online marketplace for peer-to-peer traveling."

Before:

Source: Wayback Machine

When Airbnb -- first known as AirBed & Breakfast -- started out, the mission was to help people make money. Much of the focus was on homeowners, and the efforts to help them earn supplemental income by renting extra space, empty apartments, and even fold-out couches to kind people. And yes, renters also benefitted by finding affordable places to stay when traveling. But since its inception, Airbnb has gotten a major makeover -- one that's safer, more expensive, and offers more than just lodging.

Today:

Current model:

"A trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world — online."

Has implemented a series of precautions to improve safety for both homeowners and travelers.

Affordability is no longer emphasized to travelers -- listings are available for as much as $4,000 a night.

In addition to lodging, Airbnb now offers curated experiences for travelers who want a trip to center around certain interests, including:

Sports

Nature

Social Impact

Entertainment

Food

Arts

Valuation: $30 billion

Employees: 1,917

What's Your Before-And-After?

Things change. Businesses, brands, entrepreneurs, and websites do, too. Maybe your original idea isn't going in the direction you had hoped. Or maybe, you know you can make it bigger.

These examples show that it's more than acceptable -- and often beneficial -- to ask questions like, "What's next?" or, "What needs to change?" Of course, positive evolution takes time, and these brands had an average period of 12 years between their "Before" and "Today." So be patient, but be creative. With that combination, there's no limit to where your brand and its online presence can go.

What are your favorite before-and-after websites? Let us know in the comments.

from HubSpot Marketing Blog https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/before-and-after-websites

#HubSpot Marketing Blog

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