If the Interior Ministry is upset about disruption of commerce, perhaps they should crack down on the taxi drivers?

Once all the data is in the cloud... the only data breaches will be to the cloud itself. Because it becomes a tasty, tasty target.

I'm also positive that government regulators couldn't possibly find financial irregularities by grabbing you documents from the cloud service provider, since there's no such thing as contradictory laws which make it impossible to not be in violation of one or the other of them...

And they own the current president.

Please mod parent either funny or insightful

Sadly, I am not sure which one is the better option.

[ NO CARRIER ]

A little privation does wonders for a kids tendency to "lose" things...

Just sayin'.

"Sorry, Timmy... we see here that you were eating unhealthy food in 3rd grade which, even if we didn't know it at the time, was later determined to be a primary cause of hepatic liver failure 35 years later; under the provisions of the ACA 17.3, we're sadly going to have to deny you that new liver. If only you'd eaten the lime, instead of the cherry jello..."

Actually, imagine a world where children are effectively indoctrinated from a young age to assume an unreliable and insecure technology is a valid means of personal identification, and therefore fail to question the validity of its pervasive use in later life.

Kinda like bank cards and PIN numbers, or using your credit card at Target, or assuming that chip-and-pin will fix all avenues of fraud and abuse.

So... repair and refuel Hubble?

Or if they can't do that, let SpaceX go up on their own dime and claim salvage?

Or let Google contract a SpaceX flight or two, go up, and claim salvage?

All this means is that someone is willing to series 'B' a company for some absurd amount, which pumps up the TVPI, but since the companies feel no need to exit from their privately held status via IPO or allowing themselves to be acquired, the VCs are unable to cash out.

Typically this is true ... but it's also an excuse the GPs (general partners, the people who control the financial decisions for the VC fund that did the backing) give to the LPs (limited partners, the people who fronted the money into the fund in the first place).

In general, this ignores two things:

(1) Private placement of the equity held by the fund.

Because the VCs are either seed round (typically, VCs are not seed round; they leave seed rounds to angel investors, unless they really believe in the team, have worked for them before, and think they can leverage the product they're working on to -- god, you made me say it! -- build synergy) or series A.

If they are series A, a private placement will net them a large profit. On the other hand, they have preferred shares, and if they can structure an acquisition or IPO exit, they can expect a 5-50X return compared to a private placement of the equity, because they get paid at whatever higher rate that can structure for their stock class.

So VC fund GPs are really reluctant to exit via private placement when they believe they have a huge payday on the horizon.

(2) Private fund equity exchange by one or more LPs.

In general, an LP is permitted to find someone to buy out their equity in the fund. This lets them realize a smaller return earlier, while allowing the GPs to keep the equity in their pocket until an IPO/acquisition exit. I am not aware of a fund LP agreement that doesn't permit this, but practically speaking, I'm sure there's some first time investors who have been snookered into this without having consulted a lawyer or an accountant. In practice, however, the LPs can get out, and realize some of the equity from the so-called "dry bubble gap", as a replacement LP comes in to assume the latency of the GPs waiting around. The catch on this is that most fund LPs are all-or-nothing, meaning you can only exit the fund, you can't exit only the unicorn part of the fund, and the GPs may not like you doing this enough that you are not asked to participated in the next fund.

So practically speaking, there's really no such thing as a "dry bubble gap"; the only reason they exist (and are called "dry") is that the funds are illiquid until such time as the GPs agree to exit, by whatever method. This prevents them from investing in new things, so a unicorn can soak up all of the theoretical equity value (as opposed to the initial fund value), preventing them from releasing DPI, and taking their LPs into the next fund so they can do new investments.

This is not a bubble. It's no fun for the VCs because they can't go out hunting new things to invest in because all of the LP capital they could theoretically spend is tied up ... because of the decision by the VCs (fund GPs).

How about "We'd like to get more customers out of India; we're willing to partner with you to deliver limited Internet service to a lot more people, which you can then use the fact that they now have mobile devices to upsell them on full Internet service, and to upsell them on SMS/MMS services. Alternately, our other option for increasing our customer base is to decrease the cost of WhatsApp in order to attract more customers. This would have the unfortunate side effect of you losing even more SMS/MMS revenue than you've already lost".

So ... "That's not blackmail; that's such a dirty word; that's just smart business! Plus, you know, they have a choice, and we offered to partner with them!".

The fact that it's pretty obvious that they control something that's cost the companies (not Reliance specifically, and not just in India) a collective $9B in revenue last year (in the same way that RIAA/MPAA "lose" money for everyone who fails to buy the new Britney Spears album/watch the latest Pauly Shore movie because they suck) is what gets them in the door to make the partnership offer in the first place, rather than being told "go pound sand".

Before Facebook bought WhatsApp, they would not give Zuckerberg a meeting.

WhatsApp is, of course, destructive of SMS/MMS revenue, given they way they've structured their profit centers around SMS/MMS and not Internet service, so it basically commoditizes their services as very close to "dumb pipes". This is the same thing that anyone who has put a bandwidth cap on someone in the U.S. is familiar with (and which the cap is designed to combat). But the writing is on the wall with things like Google fiber, and the direct satellite Internet projects that several companies are now pursuing: connectivity will be commoditized, and if it has to be over their dead bodies, then it'll be over their dead bodies.

And yeah, I've analyzed some of the other "monster/unicorn valuations", and there is similar reasoning behind their value as acquisitions, as well, or just their value sitting out there with the VCs GPs unwilling to part with their "as yet unrealized dry bubble" profits. You just have to look sideways at these things. :)

Relatively difficult to get a work visa for the UK:

http://www.visabureau.com/uk/i...

You aren't going to get a Tier 1 unless you are an Olympic athlete, Linus Torvalds, or Craig Venter, etc.. Cap is 1,000/year.

You could *possibly* get a Tier 2, if you already had a job offer from a UK company. Cap is 20,700/year.

Intra-company transfers for an existing employer (e.g. IBM), limited to a year if you are making £40,000/year; call it $63,500 at todays exchange rate; this is generally not hard for someone employed by IBM, actually; I have a friend who went to the UK for IBM on one of those, and got her MBA at Oxford (IBM also paid for that, since it was business related).

If you have money (£200,000 for the business, plus your own living expenses), and can start a viable business, a Tier 1 (Entrepreneur) Visa is an option. It has to employ 2 EEA people, or you get kicked out after 2 years.

If you have *lots* of money (£1million), you can get an investment visa; you are not permitted to work any other job, other than managing your investments. I believe this means you can not do international consultancy or remote management of other assets. This is basically similar to the U.S. EB-5 "millionaires visa", by which you are able to (effectively) buy a U.S. green card if you are rich enough, and willing to pump a $750K or $800K house price up to $1M in the outer Sunset in SF (it's basically the reason real estate prices are so high in SF: 5,100 home sales in the Bay area this way each year, 1/3 go to 1,700 EB-5 visa winners, with the remaining 8,300 EB-5's going to other areas of the U.S. and inflating housing prices there, instead. Hint: it's not gentrification that's doing it.

Tier-3 you can't get (program is suspended); it's for things like swinging a hammer and other labor which is considered unskilled.

Tier-4 is a student visa; you aren't allowed to work more than 10 hours a week in most cases, generally granted for only one year, requires 15 hours/week study, you must agree to go home after, as a condition of the visa. This is probably not what you want.

Tier-5 is a temporary work visa with a sponsor; mostly, this is the artist/entertainer visa, but can also be for charity workers and things like Mormon missionaries. If you want one of these, your best bet is to run away and join the circus. :)

So basically: a heck of a lot less opportunity to go to the U.K. from the U.S. than the other way around.

Just because one mom says "on your way" doesn't mean it's actually on the other mom's way. :) And potentially, it could turn a profit; it depends on how many kids she transports, and how many parents give her gas money for the entire journey simultaneously.

Generally, the soccer moms I knew made out enough to buy a bottle of wine.

Silicon Valley is about the only place you can have your startup fail, walk down the street a few blocks, and have a nice safe job to tide you over until you decide you need to do another startup (if you do). In other words, there's a job safety net that is not there elsewhere (the article as much as admits this, for London).

The other issue with any place other than Silicon Valley: Silicon Valley is where most of the VC's are located, and it's where most of the VC's prefer their companies be located, so that they have the option of an acquisition as an exit strategy for the companies they fund. Other locations, not so much.

Jimmy Wales has a pretty safe gig, which allows him to live anywhere he wants, without having to get more funding, and without having to worry about money too much at all, or about having to get another gig. So he can live anywhere he wants to live, and it's kinda OK.

I'm personally OK with London as a very nice place to live, if you've got a steady income, and so on. It's an amazing place. But I think you would have a difficult time getting Series A funding there, compared to a 15 minute drive to Sand Hill Road. To get some sense of the absolute importance of this:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/ar...

Nope. But I don't have to. Just like I don't trust all countries to be rational actors, all it takes is enough of them to stomp on the ones that aren't. And yes, I trust the bulk of them to be rational actors, and that's really all it takes. Even were that not the case, we always have anyone in the SAC-NORAD chain of command down to the Lt. playing cards with the other Lt. in the MCC for the duration of their 24 hour tour.

Call me about their use of metric when they are capable of manufacturing a Boeing 787. Until then, I think I will go with the high technology solution which actually produces working carbon fiber aircraft.