Hey. I also hate being in the limelight. But if it's good for business I get over it and have. Just like I get over many things that I need to do in business to make it work. (I have cleaned toilets and done grunt work and still take out the trash. I do things with my wife in personal life that I hate to do in order to have a good relationship as well as I am sure everyone does).
Well perhaps she learned a lesson that if you are going to "lead" with a tasty vignette like that the rest of your message will be lost. So it's a lesson learned, right? Next interview she would perhaps not do the same thing and simply save the story for PG.
For a business purposes, part of the benefit of "that family thing" is that it would tend to make employees less likely to jump ship because of a personal connection and bond.
This is also the reason why in business (the reverse example) it's important (generally and depending on the circumstances) to keep an arms length relationship. If your brother in law is, for example, the contractor doing work and renovating your home, your hands are tied more than if it's someone that you don't have a personal connection to. Weighed against the potential upside of getting a bad job from someone who has no relationship with you at all of course. (Details and the parties involved matter as with anything).
Oh wow I disagree with this totally. One reporter gives a bad slant to a story and that is enough to make you give up on setting up and getting other PR? What am I missing here? Anyone who has ever appeared in a story in the news (I have multiple times) knows they always get things wrong and always angle to story to what they think is something interesting that will allow them to sell advertising. That is the business they are in. With all due respect to Jessica (who I don't know) this sounds to me very thin skinned and not exactly an example of overcoming adversity in the entrepreneurship world. Of course it's her right to not do interviews if she doesn't feel like doing them but the way PG presents the story it's as if this one incident was enough to sour her taste (and there were no other factors at play).
Edit: As would be expected say something (not delicately or gently enough) about anyone closely associated with YC and get downvoted. Maybe that's just because people will pay attention to the comment more and tend to react more emotionally than rationally.
Edit#2: As far as those who say "YC is successful Jessica doesn't need to be in the limelight it's important to realize that people read these essays who are not in that position. Or even close. So perhaps PG could have pointed that out in a more direct way so that those learning from his writings could understand the nuance of the decision.
The issue is not liability. It's whether there is a leg to stand on to get sued for this. In this case there is a leg to stand on to get sued. And in that case it's time and money to defend, assuming insurance does not cover this of course.
"then their professional liability insurance would protect them from the fall-out of sloppy workmanship"
Assumes the homeowner checks that the insurance for the professional is valid at the point the repair is made. Of course nobody does that. (They ask and are told they are insured. Maybe on a large project but on a small repair?)
Along those lines I have a doctor that is practicing in a property that I own (commercial). As part of the lease (as with all tenants that I have) they are required to provide not only proof of insurance but to add my LLC as a named insured to the policy and provide what is known as an ACCORD certficate (as proof). They do have the insurance (I have seen the policy) but even after 2 months I have not been able to get them to get their agent to provide the ACCORD cert. So what am I supposed to do? Tell them to move out? In theory this needed to be provided prior to moving in. But as things like this go of course you give leeway and try not to be a hard ass. I am sure I will get the cert but there is liability for a brief time prior to receiving it. My point is all of this is real life and the difference between what is taught in school (or online) and what actually happens in business. [1]
[1] And another tenant provided the CERT but named me personally instead of the LLC. And I've had cases where my own insurance company mixes up company names (there are several) on the policy and it's a constant battle to get all paperwork actually straight and in order (easy when you own 1 thing, much more difficult to keep track of when you own several or have multiple tenants).
Back in the early to mid 90's the root DNS servers were also left in unlocked rooms of some Universities according to stories that I read around that time.
Also for .info domains when they first came out I happen to be at the headquarters of the registry (Afilias when it was in the US) and they had their servers sitting out in the middle of an office that was quite unprotected like you would any tower computer. The janitor could have taken it off line with a vacuum cleaner. (This was early 2000's iirc.)
"What is the actual risk here, how many people have been bitten by this sort of thing and what was the resulting damage?"
Exactly. And what I essentially typically say is "the scope of the problem has not been defined".
We see this often on news reports on TV as an example. They go off with hyperbole about some issue but fail to address exactly how many people have been effected by it. Simply saying things like "there is a growing concern..." or cherry picking examples.
We see this now with cases of "police brutality" and use of unwarranted force. It's not that it doesn't exist, but that any reports totally ignore how often it actually happens vs. how many times it doesn't happen.
I posted this and wanted to put the word "flawed" before "poll". Mainly because this got front page mention on the WSJ website but if you read how the poll was done it's clearly suspect in it's methodology.
"just the ability needed to put together a shell pipeline to get a job done, or a twenty-line script to automate some tedious task. Imagine how much that would change everyday life."
Well unfortunately like learning a foreign language if you don't constantly use those skills they are near worthless. Especially as you get older. And in one way it's quite a bit different than learning a foreign language. There is a great deal of latitude to make mistakes in, say, Spanish. If you don't have it even slightly correct people can still piece together what you are saying. With programming as everyone knows it's got to be near 100% accurate in syntax or it's not going to run and/or give correct results. I agree that being able to do things in the shell is helpful if you are somewhat regularly doing that type of work. I question how useful it is if someone learns that in high school or college and then needs to apply it to do a task years down the road.
Edit: In other words it's not like learning how to ride a bike or play tennis.
"who believe it is in their best interests to cultivate a populace with unquestioning deference to authority"
The populace doesn't ask questions. They simply parrot what a few outspoken people with a mouthpiece tell them to do or think. Most people are lemmings they don't have your brain (I looked at your resume). Not that every conclusion that you would come to would be correct. But in the everyday world (away from NYC, SV and HN) the mediocrity and low level thinking of everyday people is stunning. A large amount of lawn signs is enough to get you elected to local office.
Free to me doesn't matter. By one definition a vendor is a company that supplies goods. Some definitions go further to say that they "sell" the goods. However there is nothing to indicate in any definition of vendor that money has to change hands. A company could be a vendor for a particular product and give it away for free. Additionally whether an organization is non profit or for profit really doesn't change the situation.