If your goal is to change the companies behavior, then protesting and getting fired and getting a WaPo story is more effective than resigning in protest.
VCs want to be perceived as steely eyed futurists, who are specially gifted at sifting through the mass of ideas bubbling up in tech and picking the winners. But it's actually quite difficult to pick winners, and as more and more investment has flooded into the space even getting a few winners in a batch is more difficult. So what A16z has done is to cash in their reputation as futurists to pump their investments. The article points out that it was their late stage Groupon investment that was the anchor Andreessen's famous "Software Eating The World" op-ed, a late stage investment dumped as soon as the IPO lockout ended. However, one of the consequences of VC being more public and in the press is that now everyone has seen them breathlessly shilling shitcoins during the boom. How long will their reputation last as they are publicly associated with more and more high profile failures?
It's all three, but did want to point out that your claim that
> It's obvious to see how there could be non-Republican-friendly results of faculty being easier to fire for, say, a controversial twitter post.
contains within it the idea that not being fired for a controversial twitter post or even free speech generally are either concepts that help Republicans or concepts that Republicans believe in, neither of which are true. Not for present day Republicans, historical Republicans, idealized conservatives or any shade of right wing thought except for a tiny insignificant rump of libertarians.
I think that as a trend, difficult personalities will have a harder time succeeding in any public role... Business, entertainment, politics, the arts. In the world of Twitter and Instagram, basically any disgruntled employee or collaborator can greatly damage reputations by sharing their experiences. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds, because as humans, I think we are drawn to celebrity, to authorship, to hero worship, to the "great man" theory, but that is obviously somewhat in tension with a world where every employee has the power to launch an effective protest movement from their phone.
I worked at a summer camp in NE Alabama for two summers in high school and college. Weekend trips to Unclaimed Baggage were extremely popular excursion. Definitely worth a stop if you are in the neighborhood.
None of the other conservatives on the court agreed with the decision, so it's reasonable to be surprised. Alito is probably the current judge closest to Scalia and he dissented, so it's reasonable to be surprised. Why would you assume political bias?
The nature of VC being what it is, it's extremely difficult to prove racism at the level of proof that most HN readers seem to need. 99.99% of all startup ideas are bad, 99.99% of all apps are terrible, so how can we know if she was rejected for being black, or for just being another supplicant denied by the VC gods?
The email thing is the strongest evidence she provides, but obviously, a doubting mind can find other reasons that her husbands email would get responses but hers wouldn't.
We do know, however, that African Americans are greatly under represented in tech, in startups and in VC. There are many interlocking reasons for this, and its not unreasonable to expect that racism, whether conscious or unconscious, is one of them. (Why should tech, uniquely in American society, be immune from racism?). Because there are so many interlocking reasons, it's easy for each individual link in the chain of tech to deflect blame to the other links (business can blame the pipeline, colleges can blame the high schools, high schools can blame the financial structures etc etc etc).
So, is it reasonable to expect individual VCs to make a stand against racism instead of doing what comes naturally to them? (trying desperately to make money). Not really!
However, I do think it's reasonable to expect, that VC's who make big pronouncements about what their firm is going to do to combat racism should be expected to follow through with it! And guess what, given all the interlocking problems that prevent black people from founding companies, VC's probably aren't going to be able to follow through on that mission by relying on business as usual of warm intros only, five minute pitch reviews, blow off emails.
Just level with us. We are all adults. Just say, I'm not actually that interested in explicitly helping black founders, I just want to keep trying to make money the way I've been doing it. Conversely, if you do give juicy quotes to the press, then be prepared to walk the walk.
I'm sorry, but this is absolutely not true. You don't do IA or the discussion any favors by being inaccurate.
I live in San Francisco, whose library participates in a digital ebook lending program through Libby. They have a certain number of copies of each ebook available, and allow each copy to be checked out by one person at a time. As a consequence, i've had to wait 7 or 8 weeks for popular books to become available, something which works the same way as physical books at the library. The library buys or is given a copy of a book (whether physical or digital) and then can loan out that copy of the book.
Notably, this is how IA's lending program worked BEFORE the pandemic. They just decided unilaterally to change it to loan out unlimited copies of books. It is this change that the lawsuit is about.
Nothing is stopping the IA from buying books and giving them to people, or paying authors to write books and then giving them to people. What they are suing is to prevent IA from scanning books and giving those copies to an unlimited number of people, which is, no matter what your moral feelings about the matter, quite different!
> Public libraries get licenses from publishers for the e-books they lend, and publishers receive payments, according to the terms that are set. Internet Archive doesn’t get licenses from publishers but instead relies on donated or purchased books or copies it acquires through collaborations with physical libraries. The books are then scanned and made available for one borrower at a time, for 14 days. With that restriction removed, the archive is now operating more or less like a free digital book site.
The IA is good, but the decision they made is very bad and has put their entire operation at risk.
Their leadership clearly both cares about archiving the web and also for advocating an expansionist view of content distribution (that in an emergency, any private organization has the right to distribute whatever content they want however they want to without regard for the right holders of the content?).
That's fine for them to hold both views but both roles are now at risk. It's a very sad and completely avoidable situation and I hope that the IA will course correct and avoid disaster.
I won't criticize anybodies decision to keep shopping at amazon for this reason, it is very difficult to ethically consume in our current environment.
However, for me, I realized that
1) I am fortunate enough that saving fractions of my order will not make a material difference to me (the amazon cancellation page informed me that i had saved 140 dollars in shipping using prime over the last year)
2) In the current environment, supporting local and/or smaller businesses is more important to me than saving a day of shipping time, or 10% off my order
3) Even if your alternative retailer is equally unscrupulous to its warehouse employees, for instance, a shipper that uses UPS, which is unionized labor with benefits, as opposed to amazon's own courier service which is contract labor with no benefits, can be a meaningful difference.
For me, the above 3 made me realize that I could do without amazon prime despite being a prime member for 10 plus years. For household staples, I am a costco member, and I feel much better about costco's relationship with their employees than amazons. For other purchases, it makes sense for me to consider local alternatives. And I can always use amazon if I need to, I'll just pay shipping.
I think this article is interesting, but I think it is mistaken on focusing on the mechanism (stock buybacks) vs the attitude, which is a general focus on value extraction rather than value creation.
I think that in this era of American business, companies are so efficient at extracting value that they've basically forgotten how to innovate. Innovation is delegated to startups, and incumbents focus on financial engineering and extraction. It's foolish to think that one rule change caused this attitude shift and that one rule change will change it back.