Interviewer here. Thanks for the post. It was a lot of fun to ask Marc about his productivity routine, how he spends time, how he makes decision and his "build" essay.
I remember this particular memo very well as I was at Microsoft at the time and it felt so unfair to see the reaction to what you expect any good CEO to do.
I can testify to this. I'm 6'6, turned 30 recently and developed chronic back pain which made walking/standing for over 15-20 minutes painful. I got frustrated and started going to the gym again and doing very basic deadlifts/leg presses/lunges a few times a week. It's been a couple of months and my back is about 70-80% better.
FWIW, I think Nathan will make a fascinating commencement speaker. He gets a lot of flak (rightfully) for Intellectual Ventures but he has a lot of success in multiple unrelated fields (cooking! archaeology! Microsoft).
I was about to come say this. That sentence is provably false - Foursquare took great pains to launch Swarm first and launched the other app months later. They also did extensive communication at each step of the way.
tldr: Uber just can't do the same checks it does in the US in other parts of the world which don't have records. And even though it did actually get the right certificate from the cops in this case, they should have thought of doing more.
That's fair but I was trying to come up with a list that wouldn't require too much tech knowhow. I'd worry much more about deleting all copies from the cloud than someone retrieving data of an old HDD/SSD. Fair point though.
I once got to meet a bunch of M&A/corp dev people from Google/FB and other companies together and asked them "What would you do if you were a founder and wanted to streamline an acquisition?". Across the board, the top response was "Have all your paperwork in order from day 1 - employment agreements, IP assignments, every single thing you can think of"
If I remember ngen is very architecture/platform specific - that is why it has to be done on the target machine. This sounds like it is done ahead of time with support for a variety of architectures.
I suspect a lot of industries build up a corporate mythology around how it is 'special' to motivate intelligent people to get to do their best work for them. I don't see the CIA as very different from every startup entrepreneur with a pitch on how they're changing the world.
On the employee number - if security needs it, they can flip the badge around. I needed it once in six years, when I needed to type it into some internal tool.
On the employee status, that is done with badge color. Blue badges are FTE only.
And
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1481098552658956290?s=21