David Marcus is perhaps the poster child for failing up.
He started a mobile payments company that was acquired by PayPal. The product was later discontinued and generated no value for PayPal.
He ended up as the PayPal CEO. IMHO as a PP employee at the time, he was clearly out of his depth in that job. It was abundantly clear he did not have the toolkit to run a large complex business.
He then left abruptly to join facebook.
At Facebook he started this thing that did nothing but burn money and generate negative headlines.
If there was a metric that was the value created for the companies you work for vs. the money you personally earned I think his would be an outlier.
I believe that people who are willing to put their neck out there as a high profile leader AND are able inspire others to get to work on a bold vision are rare. I believe those are the sought after qualities in a tech leader.
It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working. He will find another job.
Results should be what's assessed. A lot of analysis around ideal leaders focuses on the "inputs" instead of the outputs.
Of course, important to understand and try to correctly attribute what factors led to success or failure.
But if a charismatic, visionary leader chooses to pursue projects that don't have a hope of succeeding, I don't see that as a success.
That being said, don't know much about this guy's background. Maybe everything he's worked on were perfectly great ideas and failures were not due to his direction/leadership.
Anyway, I only comment on this because there's something of a bias to put extroverts/outspoken people into management roles, but I've found introverted people often do just as well. Of course always comes down to the individual.
> I believe that people who are willing to put their neck out there as a high profile leader AND are able inspire others to get to work on a bold vision are rare. I believe those are the sought after qualities in a tech leader.
> It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working.
This reads like a CV for Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani.
> It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them.
Just getting people to work on your projects isn't necessarily that hard as long as you pay them market rates. Or they are young and naive.
If you're looking for evidence of visionary leadership, it kind of matters who, specifically, you're getting to work on your projects (because the folks you want all have their pick of places paying market rates), and it really makes a statement if highly competent folks are being paid below market rates in return for equity.
Other highlights include years of Messenger dallying and feature creep and abandonment causing the app to be rewritten and all work for years lost the moment he moved out of the org and M, the voice assistant that got killed soon as well.
I found the bias of the author to be a bit... stupefying?
> For all the effort from journalists trying to work out the precise 12-dimensional chess Facebook must surely have been playing … maybe Libra was just very stupid. Because it was a blockchain project started by bitcoiners. Maybe it was always just dumb as hell.
The rest if the article is links to buy the author's books, or links to the author's other blog posts. I thought there would be a payoff in the form of a conclusion but calling it "dumb" was all there was. I'll let you guess who submitted it to HN.
It’s telling that every comment from obvious fans of cryptocurrency hasn’t the faintest idea who one of their best-argued, longest-term critics is. Look at all these comments. It’s like employees of Tesla discovering that David Einhorn has an opinion on them for the first time.
Wisdom comes from not only knowing your domain but understanding its critics and their criticism. Ignoring all criticism to the extent that you haven’t a clue who the loudest voices are is closer to zealotry (which is a word already used here in the other direction, strangely).
> I found the bias of the author to be a bit... stupefying?
Agreed.
But when you look at the name of the blog, it ain't exactly a surprise.
Also, he's been at it for quite a while, looks like he's spending inordinate amounts of time "fighting the blockchain".
I'm always puzzled when I see folks like this ... the sheer zealotry is simply amazing, and it always leads me to wonder what can possibly motivate them to be so hell-bent on destroying something that has likely zero impact on their lives.
I get your point, but on the other hand, many seems hell-bent on making things like crypto-currencies a success, but fails to explain the actual value of the idea.
There are certainly problems that crypto-currencies solve, but it's not problems most people have. So when a company wish conjure up billions of dollars in value from thin air, it has all the hallmarks of a scam. While some sit back and chuckles: "Who s dumb enough to fall for that", others feel compelled to warn the world and take down the scammer.
Because it doesn't have zero impact. The amount of money that is scammed out of people and the amount of sheer environmental destruction is sickening and last I checked we all live on the same planet (if you live on the ISS then sorry for making the assumption you were on earth).
And your post history speaks quite loudly on what "bias" looks like to you.
The stablecoin and the core blockchain tech are totally different things. 0L is using the blockchain tech (move language, the Rust BFT implementation, etc), and has no stablecoin -- its currency is like any other decentralized blockchain base currency.
24 is not very good. I just want to point out that a lot of chains that report high tps are cheating in one way or another. I won’t name names but some of the “highest throughput” chains count their node synchronization messages as transactions, not transactions written to the ledger. It’s really disappointing when you understand the games they’re playing.
Real tps has to be tx written to the ledger per second. Anything else is dishonest.
> The US government was just absolutely not going to let Facebook do a private currency, backed by a basket mostly of foreign currencies, at worldwide scale.
How does this affect the rest of Crypto, because I suspect that governments around the world can shutdown Bitcoin and others any time they want. Given that fact, I'm wondering why other crypto currencies are being tolerated.
Bitcoin would be a lot less interesting to its proponents if it were to become illegal to interact with the network and every "legitimate business" suddenly can't operate in the US anymore.
Not to mention that it would be extremely easy for the FBI to just, like, find miners and tell them to shut stuff down (at least US miners). A coordinated worldwide effort and bitcoin dissapears overnight.
Maybe Big Media can't make bittorent and piratebay go away entirely, but they've put one hell of a dent in the whole ecosystem of piracy. Used to be I could use Covenant[2] on Kodi[0] and stream anything for free, in a multitude of languages and formats, with downloadable subs if desired. It was a golden age, and it is gone now.
Similarly, I've watched several retro-game preservation communities[1] I've been a part of disappear mysteriously overnight. Certain sets are still very difficult to find on public trackers and the private ones are difficult to get into.
In other words, they may not be able to eliminate it but they can make it very inconvenient.
[0] Yes, I know this isn't backed by bittorrent.
[1] Backed by bittorrent but having little to do with Hollywood.
[2] Actually I guess Exodus was first. I always forget which one was the fork.
You can’t get rid of Bitcoin, but if you make it illegal for retailers to accept Bitcoin and for currency exchanges like Coinbase to operate its pretty much taken care of.
Governments cannot shutdown Bitcoin as a protocol. They could ban the mining and ownership of it. This doesn't at all stop the protocol from operating, but institutional investors and most retail would abandon it, crashing the prize.
None of this will happen, as governments aren't this united. Even within the US there's crypto-friendly and crypto-hostile states. Right now, Bitcoin is explicitly recognized as an asset/commodity, not as a currency. Property, not a security.
There's definitely regulation pending regarding crypto. In particular, many non-Bitcoin cryptos are likely securities. Stablecoins backings are to be regulated. And there may be mining regulation where it's not outright banned, but (CO2) taxed.
You don't think there's a first amendment argument for mining bitcoin?
Could the government legally restrict me from solving a math problem?
If mitigating the CO2 produced by using some energy isn't priced into that energy, that's the fix. We absolutely need to incorporate externalities into prices.
> There's definitely regulation pending regarding crypto. In particular, many non-Bitcoin cryptos are likely securities. Stablecoins backings are to be regulated. And there may be mining regulation where it's not outright banned, but (CO2) taxed.
They can 'regulate' it by banning Proof-of-Work mining for 'climate change' reasons and then it will be outlawed or heavily taxed, just like in China, Kosovo, Kazakhstan and possibly Russia.
Sure, Bitcoin (and any other cryptocurrencies) can't be totally 'banned', but enough to discourage mining and using PoW cryptocurrencies via legislation or taxes.
The US is super reluctant to shut down anything that looks like a business. It's a capitalist country, they love people going out and making money, especially in finance.
But one thing the US is regulating is money laundering - the US sanctions regime is super-important. So FinCEN in the US and FATF internationally are tightening traceability on the crypto system, wherever it interfaces to actual money. 'Cos they might not be able to stop bitcoin trades, but the interface to actual money is entirely in their purview.
The one thing the US couldn't tolerate about Libra was that Facebook was trying to mess with the money, at systemic scale - and doing so incompetently, which was probably a worse failing.
Regulators and legislators had Libra's number immediately - they knew this species of dumbassery, and they knew that these bitcoin-VC bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.
Then why did the US gov. go after the people from Liberty Reserve?
I understand that the whole concept of committing crime was a bit clearer in LR than it is in Tether, but Tether sounds like what LR would have been, after they learned from their mistakes?
It was too soon and done in a stupid way. They will try again later.
As another example: just because Google Glasses flopped because of privacy issues it doesn't mean that future Apple/... Glasses which will have exactly the same privacy issues will not be a thing.
To be fair, Google Glasses didn't just flop because of privacy issues, they flopped because they didn't work very well at first and Google is constitutionally incapable of following through with products.
Yeah, we still use privacy destroying services everyday and most people believe their smartphone listens to them passively all the time. I think it was just too early in the 2010s, no one would bat an eye to a wearable camera headup display thingy now.
What in-game-currency does Meta use for purchases? My guess is that Meta was partly created to have a virtual world where they could still operate Libra outside of regulation.
Readit News
He ended up as the PayPal CEO. IMHO as a PP employee at the time, he was clearly out of his depth in that job. It was abundantly clear he did not have the toolkit to run a large complex business. He then left abruptly to join facebook.
At Facebook he started this thing that did nothing but burn money and generate negative headlines.
If there was a metric that was the value created for the companies you work for vs. the money you personally earned I think his would be an outlier.
It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working. He will find another job.
Of course, important to understand and try to correctly attribute what factors led to success or failure.
But if a charismatic, visionary leader chooses to pursue projects that don't have a hope of succeeding, I don't see that as a success.
That being said, don't know much about this guy's background. Maybe everything he's worked on were perfectly great ideas and failures were not due to his direction/leadership.
Anyway, I only comment on this because there's something of a bias to put extroverts/outspoken people into management roles, but I've found introverted people often do just as well. Of course always comes down to the individual.
> It doesn’t matter if his last 3 projects failed. They were all ambitious and he got people to work on them. Many businesses run themselves on inertia alone and you just need people to keep working.
This reads like a CV for Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh Balwani.
Personally, I thought he had an air of arrogance that was highly off-putting.
Just getting people to work on your projects isn't necessarily that hard as long as you pay them market rates. Or they are young and naive.
If you're looking for evidence of visionary leadership, it kind of matters who, specifically, you're getting to work on your projects (because the folks you want all have their pick of places paying market rates), and it really makes a statement if highly competent folks are being paid below market rates in return for equity.
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> For all the effort from journalists trying to work out the precise 12-dimensional chess Facebook must surely have been playing … maybe Libra was just very stupid. Because it was a blockchain project started by bitcoiners. Maybe it was always just dumb as hell.
The rest if the article is links to buy the author's books, or links to the author's other blog posts. I thought there would be a payoff in the form of a conclusion but calling it "dumb" was all there was. I'll let you guess who submitted it to HN.
Wisdom comes from not only knowing your domain but understanding its critics and their criticism. Ignoring all criticism to the extent that you haven’t a clue who the loudest voices are is closer to zealotry (which is a word already used here in the other direction, strangely).
Maybe "unbiased" would look more like your crypto-happy post history ?
(Now you added a personal attack about their post history, I don't think that's constructive.)
Agreed.
But when you look at the name of the blog, it ain't exactly a surprise.
Also, he's been at it for quite a while, looks like he's spending inordinate amounts of time "fighting the blockchain".
I'm always puzzled when I see folks like this ... the sheer zealotry is simply amazing, and it always leads me to wonder what can possibly motivate them to be so hell-bent on destroying something that has likely zero impact on their lives.
There are certainly problems that crypto-currencies solve, but it's not problems most people have. So when a company wish conjure up billions of dollars in value from thin air, it has all the hallmarks of a scam. While some sit back and chuckles: "Who s dumb enough to fall for that", others feel compelled to warn the world and take down the scammer.
Because it doesn't have zero impact. The amount of money that is scammed out of people and the amount of sheer environmental destruction is sickening and last I checked we all live on the same planet (if you live on the ISS then sorry for making the assumption you were on earth).
And your post history speaks quite loudly on what "bias" looks like to you.
https://github.com/OLSF/libra
Real tps has to be tx written to the ledger per second. Anything else is dishonest.
How does this affect the rest of Crypto, because I suspect that governments around the world can shutdown Bitcoin and others any time they want. Given that fact, I'm wondering why other crypto currencies are being tolerated.
Not to mention that it would be extremely easy for the FBI to just, like, find miners and tell them to shut stuff down (at least US miners). A coordinated worldwide effort and bitcoin dissapears overnight.
Similarly, I've watched several retro-game preservation communities[1] I've been a part of disappear mysteriously overnight. Certain sets are still very difficult to find on public trackers and the private ones are difficult to get into.
In other words, they may not be able to eliminate it but they can make it very inconvenient.
[0] Yes, I know this isn't backed by bittorrent.
[1] Backed by bittorrent but having little to do with Hollywood.
[2] Actually I guess Exodus was first. I always forget which one was the fork.
None of this will happen, as governments aren't this united. Even within the US there's crypto-friendly and crypto-hostile states. Right now, Bitcoin is explicitly recognized as an asset/commodity, not as a currency. Property, not a security.
There's definitely regulation pending regarding crypto. In particular, many non-Bitcoin cryptos are likely securities. Stablecoins backings are to be regulated. And there may be mining regulation where it's not outright banned, but (CO2) taxed.
Could the government legally restrict me from solving a math problem?
If mitigating the CO2 produced by using some energy isn't priced into that energy, that's the fix. We absolutely need to incorporate externalities into prices.
They can 'regulate' it by banning Proof-of-Work mining for 'climate change' reasons and then it will be outlawed or heavily taxed, just like in China, Kosovo, Kazakhstan and possibly Russia.
Sure, Bitcoin (and any other cryptocurrencies) can't be totally 'banned', but enough to discourage mining and using PoW cryptocurrencies via legislation or taxes.
But one thing the US is regulating is money laundering - the US sanctions regime is super-important. So FinCEN in the US and FATF internationally are tightening traceability on the crypto system, wherever it interfaces to actual money. 'Cos they might not be able to stop bitcoin trades, but the interface to actual money is entirely in their purview.
The one thing the US couldn't tolerate about Libra was that Facebook was trying to mess with the money, at systemic scale - and doing so incompetently, which was probably a worse failing.
Regulators and legislators had Libra's number immediately - they knew this species of dumbassery, and they knew that these bitcoin-VC bros were absolutely stupid and arrogant enough to do another 2008 financial crisis all by themselves.
I understand that the whole concept of committing crime was a bit clearer in LR than it is in Tether, but Tether sounds like what LR would have been, after they learned from their mistakes?
Yes, just as they can shut down movie downloads on BitTorrent.
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As another example: just because Google Glasses flopped because of privacy issues it doesn't mean that future Apple/... Glasses which will have exactly the same privacy issues will not be a thing.
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