Hey, I run the Growth team at Pinterest. I just wanted to comment on the article to be very clear and say we have never scraped Google search results either currently or at any time in the past.
First, if you insist that you have not scraped data then can you offer an alternative explanation for the data being presented here?
Second, it's pretty clear that the majority of at least the tech community hates what you do with the regwall. Do you not know how bad your site's behavior makes GIS for those of us who aren't interested in joining it? Or do you just not care?
I'm guessing that they use one or more third parties that do indeed scrape Google results but provide plausible deniability in the process. And I'd look very closely at the employment histories of principals at those nominal "third" parties. It's not that uncommon in this industry to find companies with exactly one customer, staffed entirely by ex-employees of that one customer.
At the point where you're actively polluting google search results as if you had such a scraping program, is this a meaningful distinction to make for anyone other than Google's TOS compliance team?
Not specific to the article but about the growth team structure at Pinterest.
Is growth an engineering/product led org? Does it have a marketing leader as well?
I've come across a couple instances where growth responsibilities seem not in the land of marketing and I'm curious how those teams are structured and why.
> we have never scraped Google search results either currently or at any time in the past.
Just an observation that this very specific denial without offering anything else makes me think that what they _actually_ do is probably controversial as well.
There's a Chrome extension [1] just to filter out Pinterest results, because Pinterest fills the results with crap. As the head of the team responsible for the need for this extension, are proud of the work you do?
Also biased because they are sampling people who are out and about. People who are out and about likely come into contact with more people than people who are staying at home and rarely going out.
Out, about, and willing to speak to a stranger, which I think is the biggest bias. Pretty much everyone I know goes on the occasional walk, but we all stay the fuck away from other people.
Conclusions: These results show that there is an immediate active behavioral response to infection before the expected onset of symptoms or sickness behavior.
"Up and to the right" is a relatively common business saying to indicate things are going well and that the chart for a metric (ex: revenue, users, etc) is going "up and to the right". The author made a play on this common business phrase by saying IBM's charts are going "down and to the right"
> On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Some employees of Mozilla Foundation tweeted calls for his resignation, with reference to his donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8, which called for the banning of same-sex marriage in California. Eich stood by his decision to fund the campaign, but wrote on his blog that he was sorry for “causing pain” and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla. Some of the activists created an online campaign against Eich, with online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser (although giving them a link to continue with Firefox). Others at the Mozilla Corporation spoke out on their blogs in his favor. Board members wanted him to stay in the company in a different role. On April 3, 2014, Eich resigned as CEO and left Mozilla; in his personal blog, he posted, "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader".
A direct listing is definitely not the most likely option. Only two major tech companies have done direct listings and there are also a lot more reasons you would want to do an IPO instead of a direct listing
1) Neither SPOT or WORK has done great, especially WORK
2) IPO allows you to choose your investors. This gives you the opportunity to choose major institutional investors that are in for the long term which will help reduce stock volatility.
3) Even if you don't need money, raising billions can open up a lot of opportunities for the business and give you a warchest to derisk potential market downturns.
“In a short statement posted on its website on Thursday, Airbnb did not give any details on how it plans to list its shares, although it is widely expected to take a direct-listing route.”
A direct listing is definitely the most likely option which is why they didn’t call it an IPO anywhere. They already have huge numbers of institutional and strategic investors. I’m not sure who you think they are waiting to get investment from. Crunchbase lists 53 investors including YC, Sequoia, Andreesen Horowitz, Greylock, Founder’s Fund, CapitalG, and TCV. They turned down SoftBank funding. Their shares have been owned by mutual funds from Vanguard, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Principal, T. Rowe Price, and Hartford for at least five years. They’ve already raised the warchest that you’re talking about.
Spotify and Slack had fine initial listings, but they are both losing tons of money so the market reacted negatively as their quarterly earnings made this more and more clear. Not a great comparison to a company that has been printing money and hasn’t raised a serious round in years.
> If they do go public for $20B+ they that would be for more than Twitter and Facebook went public for
Lyft is IPOing at a higher valuation than Twitter, but Facebook went public at a valuation of $100B and raised $16B. FB's IPO was 5x bigger than Lyft's.
Stock market manipulation doesn't mean you have to manipulate the entire $20 trillion dollar US stock market, it just means you tried to manipulate the price of a specific stock. Super Micro's stock dropped 40% based on the story. Hypothetically if someone shorted the stock and then pushed to get a story published that they knew had no basis in evidence, they would have profited handsomely and that would have been stock market manipulation.
GDPR could be a factor since it required shutting down accounts of people aged 13-16 that did not have parental consent. Getting parental consent required having parents sign a form and send it in.
That's not true. Consent is only one basis for processing. If they stick to using it for legitimate interest reasons then they don't need consent. Even ads can be a legitimate interest, and probably are in twitter's case, though the user is always allowed to opt out of that. There's also nothing that requires parental consent to involve signing a form.
