It depends if you plan on working in big Companies or small to medium size Companies/startups.
Large public Companies (assuming we are talking about a case against a public Company) may be reluctant to have you because HR might freak out. HR is all about damage control and compliance.
But startups to medium sized Companies can be talked into it, and if you work is valued and appreciated, you should be fine. As a founder or executive of several Companies from 1 to 80 people here in California, I would not take this against you.
As a side note, I would also advise you to do some SEO on yourself as was said by porter. It's unfortunate, but worth it.
One of the tenets of competitive advantage is the ability of a business's competitors to enter the market. Running a Bitcoin startups has extremely high fixed costs that cannot be mitigated (contrast with typical startups with mostly variable costs); if VCs aren't giving them funding, as is apparently the case with Buttercoin, then there's no way they can even create a reasonable Bitcoin service, especially one that could compete against Coinbase and its mountain of funding.
It's hard to compete with a similar company if they have a load more money than you. Take Uber. Maybe you build a better taxi app but they have $5bn raised and you don't. Then they can subsidise, run at a loss, spend loads on ads and so on.
Overall - it depends when you get in, and its valuation potential at exit. Companies with 10B-100B+ exits can create hundreds to thousands of millionaires. Companies that exit at 200-500M, much less, obviously!
First of all - nobody has been serious about monetizing messaging yet in the US apart from Tango. Kik, Snapchat and FB Messenger have barely started doing anything.
Second of all, I think that there is some kind of hope from Fred Wilson (who is an investor in Kik) that one of the Asian player buys Kik so that he has a big exit there. I doubt he other thoughts than that: WeChat has spent millions of $ trying to get users in the US without much traction to show for it...
How can a partner know you are not going to compete with him/her? I mean a lot of the recent services you guys launched (Essentials, Alchohol, Flowers) show some kind of vertical integration. What if one of your partner grows like crazy - will you compete with them the way Amazon does with its 3rd party sellers?
Great news otherwise. This will give Uber a run for their money.
What you are talking about is a new phenomenon. Silicon Valley in 2008 was different - rents were lower, and $120K with 2 kids and one income was OK. There has been a dramatic increase in rent/real estate prices in the last 6 years that has completely schewed the system and the culture. Silicon Valley has thrived in years when rents were OK, people were not greedy and yet great Companies were built.
I remember going out of Stanford in 2003 - at the time a job at Oracle for a CS MS grad was awesome - and yet, people went on to create Facebook, LinkedIn, and all these Companies, and rent were OK, salaries were good, and you had this mindset of "I am going to give this a shot" everywhere that is at the heart of Silicon Valley.
Extreme greed as you describe is a new thing. It may have been there in 99-01 but I can tell you none of that was there in 01-04 and it was much less profound in 06-09.
The reality is that all things work in cycles. People who genuinely love tech will stay, others will go back to Wall Street or Consulting.
It isn't a new thing, it was rampant in 1998, some say it was rampant in 1982 as well.
Having lived through the dot com crash of the late 90's I have thought a lot about what went into that event. It is easy to be dismissive and "blame the suits" or the "bankers" but the reality is much more nuanced than that.
I have come to conclude that it depends on what goal is driving the bulk of the community. During a 'non-boom' the driving force is often engineers and designers who are spending all of their capital on solving a problem, or changing the efficiencies of an existing system to favor a different part of the value chain. You get a lot of folks thinking like that and eventually you get a couple of winners. That winning inspires other engineers to either work around similar spaces to see if they can replicate the success. A "wave" is started, whether it is "microprocessors", "the web", or "social media" or any other technology, it generates some success for people who get the value and can plug it into the bigger economy.
As that happens it starts generating economic value which gets translated into cash (the thing everyone thinks they understand).
That cash then attracts a different kind of person. Someone who can use cash to make more cash, they are meta-engineers if you will, playing off the second derivative of innovation, the change in cash flow over time. Their secret sauce is that they perceive the forces that are changing the cash flow and they speak to non-technically inclined folks about tapping that flow to send some cash their way. Imagine everyone in the world had gone wild for buying tulips, these people come in and find the folks who see people getting rich on buying and selling tulips, but don't understand tulips, or the attraction in tulips, and whisper that they know a farm that is growing outstanding tulips and will be harvesting soon.
What this other set of people have done, is to start influencing capital toward the 'new thing' but through their fingers. And they take a cut of course.
The truth is though that there has always been (and perhaps always will be) more capital than Silicon Valley can successfully convert into improvements into systems or new solutions to problems. And so this capital sits on the sideline until the third actor in our play arrives.
That is the person who is going to "get rich" in Silicon Valley. These people spin stories, stories that sound enticing and world changing. Stories about frictionless sharing or paradigm shifting. Stories about turning opportunity into massive shifts of economic power, political power, or both. They spin the story of changing the world, if only there was someone with the courage and the vision to back them in their quest. And at some point, that capital that is sitting on the sidelines "missing" this opportunity, sets aside the common sense its managers had and starts to make some big bets. Because everyone knows you need a lot of money to make a lot of money.
And that is where things have gone off the rails, at least twice before and perhaps now for a third time. Money begins to flow in, it goes to some great people, it sometimes knocks good projects off course, and it goes to some folks who are just good at talking. The the number of 'good' things that are happening with it, goes down quickly. When the diligence drops below the minimum sustainable level, the game board is set for some spectacular failures. And those failures are unavoidable, like a train engineer seeing a car on the tracks half a mile away, knowing it takes over a mile to stop the train, even with all wheels locked.
While I feel like I've analyzed the dot com crash enough to understand the mechanisms in play, I have yet to figure out any scheme or system which could prevent it from happening. That makes me sad.
This is human nature. You have these guys in NYC, in DC, in LA, in Connecticut - everywhere where there is money.
Even among investors at second or third tier firms, you have folks with a lot of money but nothing to show for it.
This is a sad face of capitalism, and something you have to come to terms with. But this is not Silicon Valley - this is a byproduct of Silicon Valley.
TL;DR: Every time there is a wave of genuine innovation, it attracts wannabes. Some of them are not good makers, but they have the skills to attract a lot of capital. Then there is too much money for too little economic activity and too great expectations of growth, and it ends with a crash.
No. I've been in the Valley since the Netscape IPO. It's always been like this since at least the mid 90s.
You don't know because you came out of school at essentially the nadir of the dot-com bust, you only know how things went from shit to great to bubblicious in the last 10 years. Sure, rents have gone insane in the last 2-3 years, but rents have always been high. From 2001 to 2004/5, rents were low, traffic was great, etc, because of the sheer number of jobs lost. Per capita, the number of jobs lost in SV from the bust was worse than Detroit.
But during the dot com bubble, it was definitely like this, and the one thing you also don't realize is that the house prices were not affected by the bust, money moved from the stock market into real estate in the Bay Area. House prices went nuts during this time, until the housing bust and only now have prices surpassed 2007 prices.
But SV has always been about greed and making money.
Quite honestly - do you believe that making more than $50,000 per year for a HS grad is a bad thing?
I am not saying that they should not make more, but for most non college educated individuals - $50,000 is above US average income.
Uber may have shady tactics, and might be deceiving drivers - that's true. But the reality is that the opportunities they are giving drivers are not insignificant.
Unfortunately - these drivers are paying with their wages the price of a market equilibrium that has not been found yet in terms of finding the right pricing model to match supply and demand.
This is the problem that has existed in all major Internet marketplaces where you deal with people's businesses - with eBay, Uber, Amazon, oDesk, etc....
How are drivers making $50,000? According to the article it's more like ~$12 an hour. Working full-time, 40 hours a week, that's only ~25k. 12 * 2048 = $24,576
1/ They mention drivers making $1000/week.
2/ Smarter drivers are driving very gas efficient cars with much lower gas costs
3/ Wages are way better if you drive during peak hours. I did and it is pretty neat how much you can make.
Why are you making assumptions about the education level of Uber drivers? 15% of cab drivers in the US hold a bachelor's degree [1] and I'm sure that number will keep rising.
I've heard complaints about how increased competition with other drivers and slashing fares are causing driver's salary to dramatically decrease lately. I can't comment on the "average" driver salary however, it is a job that comes with some serious caveats, which is the territory of being an independent contractor - so because of that real salary is significantly lower than that of employees making the equivalent.
Besides the number being wrong, it is precarious employment without benefits and therefore not equivalent to a $X/yr "real" job. Moreover I would expect Uber wages to decrease over time (unskilled, easy to acquire work)
I actually disagree. It seems crazy - yes. But, in Europe you have many families that have a maid that does a little bit of everything. These maids are super expensive here - only the top 1% have them. So you have an alfred + the different sub-services, and you are good to go. The sum of all of that is less than a European maid, and you don't have to deal with the details.
It sounds too much, but for a family with two working parents, it is a luxury that I am sure is hard to do without, once you have tried it.
There is a big difference between - delivering food you have in your trunk in under 10 minutes, and what Postmates or Caviar does. It seems UberFresh is closer to a Sprig/Spoonrocket model than a Postmates model.
Large public Companies (assuming we are talking about a case against a public Company) may be reluctant to have you because HR might freak out. HR is all about damage control and compliance. But startups to medium sized Companies can be talked into it, and if you work is valued and appreciated, you should be fine. As a founder or executive of several Companies from 1 to 80 people here in California, I would not take this against you.
As a side note, I would also advise you to do some SEO on yourself as was said by porter. It's unfortunate, but worth it.