This post is cross-posted from my joint newsletter with Ranjan Roy, The Margins. Please check it out, and consider subscribing. I talked last week here about the arbitrary, if not blurry, line between the server and the app. Products are products, features are features. It is probably good that you don’t care whether it is the supercomputer in your pocket that enables that Instagram filter, or some server running in a data center in Nebraska. Through […]
This post is cross-posted from my joint newsletter with Ranjan Roy, The Margins. Please check it out, and consider subscribing. People commonly ask me what I did at Uber. I wrote code, is one approximation. In many people’s mind, many “companies” exist as some app on their phones. Most people realize there’s a “backend” or “datacenter” or “servers” somewhere, but the lines are blurry. The most high resolution view of Uber, or any tech company, is […]
This post is cross-posted from my joint newsletter with Ranjan Roy, The Margins. Please check it out, and consider subscribing. Suppose you are joining an early stage startup and you are faced with choosing an offer that is either heavy on the options or cash. Which one do you pick? Do you lean more decisively on the stock side, or prefer cold, hard cash? Obviously, this is not a common occurrence, but it’s not purely stylized. […]
This post is cross-posted from my joint newsletter with Ranjan Roy, The Margins. Please check it out, and consider subscribing. Hi. This is your host Can Duruk speaking. Earlier, this week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on a surprise charm offensive, literally asking to be regulated. He first published an opinion piece on The Post, and now is rubbing elbows in Europe with the Eurocracts. What a turn of events! But maybe it’s not too […]
This post is cross-posted from my joint newsletter with Ranjan Roy, The Margins. Please check it out, and consider subscribing. I love stretching analogies to the point they break. Take the tired cliche that data is the new oil. It makes some sense, considering the biggest data hoarders seem to be doing great, like the oil companies once were and still are. But there are big flaws in the analogy. The point of oil is […]
Spotify complains to EU about the Apple Tax. What is even an Apple Tax?
Zuckerberg wants a more privacy focused Facebook. But does that really change anything?
People make bad predictions all the time. Getting them wrong is not the problem, some are bound to be wrong. A source of bad predictions is often inherent to the enterprise; things are unpredictable. In almost any field, chaos reigns over order. In some sense, our economic system in the Western world, capitalism brought on by free enterprise, is designed to maximize this chaos and to reap its benefits. You might even call this innovation.
Turns out I always had a penchant for run-on sentences. I have counted over 3 of them in a college application essay I wrote in 2004. It is sitting there, on my Dropbox account, where I moved my “important” documents to from an old Yahoo! email. It’s been there, untouched, seemingly for eternity. Barring a catastrophic event, like Dropbox going out of business or me getting hacked, I suspect it’ll be there for at least […]
Yesterday I had a quick interview with BBC Newsnight about the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica debate. In one of my answers, I mentioned that I think what Facebook did was probably legal. The text in the tweet is missing the rest of my answer, but I regardless stand by what I said. As a disclaimer, I am not a lawyer.