Zitat des Tages von Antonio Garcia Martinez:
FBX was my baby that I staked everything on. We shipped it fast, scaled it up, and now the baby talks and can walk to school, but I don't feel I need to babysit it.
In Silicon Valley, where I worked at companies like Facebook and Twitter for the earlier part of this decade, Cuba was generally regarded, when it was regarded at all, as a technological curiosity.
If you're a small startup considering selling your company, there's definitely far worse places to work than Facebook.
Facebook deploys a political advertising sales team, specialized by political party and charged with convincing deep-pocketed politicians that they do have the kind of influence needed to alter the outcome of elections.
Part of any acquisition process is what's loosely called 'due diligence.' Taking both technical and legal forms, it's the snooping around an acquiring company does to make sure it's actually getting what it thinks it is.
Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. Not in the Asperger's, autistic way depicted in the very fictional movie 'The Social' Network, the cognitive genius of exceptional ability. That's a modern definition that reduces the original meaning.
Cubans can be as conversant as any Netflix-and-chill American about popular shows like 'House of Cards' or 'Black Mirror', and they drop allusions to the 'Lannisters' and 'Omar Little' constantly.
In Cuba, where Wi-Fi is both slow and terrible, you will be an emissary from the future, a hint of the degeneracy to come. You're a full-on mainlining internet junkie with the world's uproar piped into your head 24/7, your emotional landscape terraformed and buffeted by whatever some narcissist just posted on Instagram or some windbag on Twitter.
When self-delusion and self-flattery enter the mind-set of a product team and the metrics they judge themselves by, like the first plague rat coming onto a ship, the end is practically preordained.
At the Facebook engineering level are some of the smartest people I've ever worked with.
You can fake a lot in a startup these days, what with Amazon Web Services and all sorts of off-the-shelf back-end components that let any even minimally competent duffer set up a Web app that does something. Intelligent planning for growth is rare among early startups, but it's the name of the game at a large, rapidly scaling tech company.
If you'd come to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging and we were cooking up ever more complicated ways to monetize Facebook data, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin's employ would be buying Facebook ads to subvert American democracy, I'd have asked where your tin-foil hat was.