Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Good point.

A piece of Cheddar would have been a flat, orange block.

— Melissa Rosenthal (@MelisOnCheddar) April 30, 2019

not just any old logo decision, a STRATEGIC logo decision, checkmate haterz

maybe the holes are mouse nibbles

or perhaps you are rich and at one of those restaurants where a clever chef tries to trick you into thinking you are eating a different type of cheese. maybe they also place the hole filled cheddar cheese onto a bag of air that blows pepper jack smell on your face.

the holes are where the money goes

only if u want a UTI

Fetch me my brown shirt! pic.twitter.com/LjovKlwU0G

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) May 7, 2019

to be fair it would be a brown hoodie

Read this ending and died dead. https://t.co/WjTMbBtRm9 pic.twitter.com/6VoNFjgOY4

— Mark Bergen (@mhbergen) May 15, 2019

holy shit that whole piece

I still don't completely get the entire coworking space model and I'm not sure my confusion is wrong

i think it's like working in a coffeeshop except there's no coffee and there are more successories posters around??

at an absolute base level coworking spaces are decent for people who do remote work in an area away from a company's main office or have their own business and need somewhere to occasionally work around other people, socialize, and use office facilities like a conference room

working in one 100% of the time makes less sense, because traditional offices generally have seating you're meant to be in more hours of the day, and if you're lucky you get more than a couple square feet of space. coworking is like... a long table and a less-ergonomic chair and you sacrifice personal space for notional amenities

I work in an indie coworking place now and I have had a month in a WeWork. For remote people they are good as an idea. The vibe in WeWorks is weird and not pleasant. And in a corporate finance sense WeWork is a real estate Ponzi scheme grift on SoftBank as far as I can tell.

'my superpower is change'

love how the article goes on about all kinds of shit without ever explaining what WeWork actually does. good indicator what they actually do.. is beside the point

i thought that was a deliberate choice since the ceo is such a knob

i have been hunting for like 30 mins to find ilx's original YTMND thread, but maybe we never had one?

anyway, pour one out for an internet thing that was great and is now dead and impossible to imagine seeing its like again.

i did find what i think is its first mention here:

I pointed this out on another thread, but best site ever: www.yourethemannowdog.com< br>
My friend used to have his alert be a clip of Mike Patton asking "Safeway?", which he blurted out randomly in the middle of a Mario Bros. cover.
― Vinnie, Saturday, May 11, 2002 7:00 PM (seventeen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

HOLY SHIT. I've never seen such brilliance. Oh my god, that's almost as good as Peanut Butter Jelly Time.
― Ally, Saturday, May 11, 2002 7:00 PM (seventeen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

guess what's STILL around

http://superbad.com

I still don't completely get the entire coworking space model and I'm not sure my confusion is wrong

― mh, Wednesday, May 15, 2019 8:29 AM (one week ago)

i think it makes the most sense for people who live in areas where the cost of renting private office space would be ridiculously expensive, and their homes aren't really suitable for some of their work: either because of size or sharing with others (including small children). People that pay for co-working space because being around other people typing on laptops and checking their phones is comforting to them or increases their productivity ... I do not understand these people, like this is the opposite of me.

like if I had to do the co-working space thing, I would be spending so much time on ilx and facebook posting about all the awkward, stupid and annoying people in the co-working space rather than doing my own work

I’d bookmark that thread.

xxp no, that is the part that completely makes sense

The entire part where 90% of their marketing is about start-up weirdness and sub-TED talk stuff and whatever the hell the wework guy is on about all the time, that is the nonsense

also why do most of the pictures look like ergonomic nightmares

i think the ergonomic nightmares are definitely related to the sub-TED talk stuff

it's more about the idea of a comfortable chair

maybe they also want to disrupt chairs

xp to goole: in that post, I said I already posted it in another thread! So there must be an earlier mention of YTMND unless I was lying, which is a very real possibility

Also, this may be the first time I was first at anything

so I was working for a blockchain startup until recently. technically I still "work" there - they haven't fired me or laid me off - but they stopped paying me and two other people at the beginning of May. the three of us were the only employees being paid; the senior staff had gone without since mid-January and a host of technical workers (and at least one lawyer!) since a little after that. they raised a fuckton of money about a year and a half ago but blew threw the vast majority in less than a year, largely on trips, big salaries (incl at least one hefty severance package), and stupid marketing stunts. since mid-October (a little after I was brought in full-time; I'd done some work for them as a contractor), we've been hearing that new sources of funding are "just being held up by red tape" etc. the three of us were told that should there end up being any difficulty in making payroll, we'd be told in advance; another lie, and they wound up getting a couple weeks' worth of free labor out of us. we're filing a claim with the ministry of labor to get that covered but idk what sort of timeline we can realistically expect anything to happen in

anyway the really wild part is that a number of coders, graphic designers, marketers, and other skilled workers have been working for free for *months*, and the way they've gotten away with this is:

1. selling employees and contractors on the potential value and utility of the technology and its potential use cases, including "social impact" applications
2. promising said employees etc. that WHEN (not if) funding inevitably comes in, they'll be offered (cash) bonuses and/or (token) equity (they made us an offer to come back to work that included both; we didn't bite as it was strictly conditional based on said ever-elusive funding coming in)
3. once senior/c-level staff had committed to forfeting a salary, they quietly started informing other employees about it, thus normalizing working for free / subconsciously making people feel like assholes if they had the temerity to insist that getting paid on time / getting paid at all was too much to ask. if you've never had the experience of being paid for a job whilst you're surrounded by people who aren't....well, it's weird, and bad, in a lot of ways that are tough to articulate.

would it surprise anyone to learn that the CEO's background is in multi-level marketing?

anyway I don't regret it cause I got in at the right time (I was well-paid) and got out just slightly too late and I met some excellent people. but man if you're ever gonna consider working for a startup, make sure you *really* do your homework.

how many employees were there total, at peak?

tough to measure for a variety of boring reasons but I'd say about 15 employees and a constellation of contractors. at least one of the firms we worked closely with ended up having to lay off a number of staff because we stiffed them.

(15 not including execs)

to make that small anecdote even worse, I only found out about that other company's layoffs in the last week. at the time, we were told that *they* hadn't done their work according to spec and generally made them out to be incompetent no-nothings as opposed to people we completely fucked over

Upper management seems to attract and reward serial liars at a disproportionate rate.

some liars, some hopelessly naive, some just psychotic

speaking of which the chairman (who is significantly younger than me; I'm 32) once posted a viral hoax to our all-company WhatsApp channel about how there was an Assange "dead drop" that was released following his arrest alleging "white genocide: not such a myth after all!"

hmm I'm debating whether that is better or worse than a higher-level exec at my Fortune 500-style company referencing a Thomas Friedman book some years ago

probably worse, but to their credit I think they got rid of that guy anyway

I used to work for Meg Whitman and honestly I have very few complaints about her CEO-wise, especially when compared to these stories

one last story: my former boss at this place was very high up at Le@n !n Canada and was well acquainted with $heryl S@ndberg. unfortunately she was sacked just as the scandal from a few months back was breaking out so I didn't get to inquire about how her good pal was handling all of this. (appropriately enough the sacking took place because she was giving her male bosses a little too much pushback. but as it turns out she got out at an excellent time.)

feel free to keep going! today i heard a couple variations on 'uh-oh tableau to salesforce' from friends around both, and your stories are much more interesting

so I was working for a blockchain startup

can we back up to how this even started, was the alternative mugging grandmas

For real

the silicon valley startup whose business model was to steal bongos from grandmothers and use them to join the fall foundered when mark e. smith died, but not before raising $100 million in venture capital through ycombinator

He's optimized the space with the ingenuity of a startup founder, installing ample shelves and hooks for storage and even some foam acoustic panels to mitigate the noise from below and beyond his window.

daamn these startup founders really are more ingenious than the rest of us

https://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/startup-CEO-lives-works-Zeitgeist-Vivek-Kumar-13969019.php

nice place to live if u spend half the year in pittsburgh

so I was working for a blockchain startup

can we back up to how this even started, was the alternative mugging grandmas

a fair question lol, a few years back I had just gotten my technical writing certificate and I was looking for work in a couple different cities, and I just so happened to get a job working for a *different* blockchain startup, before it was quite the dirty word it is now. the job itself was sort of a nightmare, but it was specifically because of the asshole who ran the place - everyone else was great and the work was sort of interesting, not to mention getting to meet all the industry's weirdos and psychos. then I left to work a steadier corporate job for a couple of years, and one of my former co-workers tapped me for this job, where I'd be working with some of those same people I liked, without (that) asshole boss, and for considerably more money than I was making at the time. so that's how that started.

since I last posted at least one exec has left the company, I'll be surprised if they survive the summer

tbh i don't really understand what "blockchain" even means and i don't give a fuck.

I strongly suspect knowing what it means would never, ever impact your life in any meaningful way

great! *whistles and skips*

(i mean, tbh, i do have some idea, but mostly a vague notion that it's connected to cryptocurrency)

Do you know what a database is? Imagine that but extremely slow and used for fraud.