Aaron Sittig: Then pretty much unheralded and not talked about much, Facebook launched in February of 2004.
Dustin Moskovitz (Zuckerberg's original right-hand man): Back then there was a really common problem that now seems trivial. It was basically impossible to think of a person by name and go and look up their picture. All of the dorms at Harvard had individual directories called face books—some were printed, some were online, and most were only available to the students of that particular dorm. So we decided to create a unified version online and we dubbed it “The Facebook” to differentiate it from the individual ones.
There was something a little rough about MySpace.
Mark Zuckerberg: So MySpace had almost a third of their staff monitoring the pictures that got uploaded for pornography. We hardly ever have any pornography uploaded. The reason is that people use their real names on Facebook.
Adam D’Angelo (Zuckerberg's high school hacking buddy): Real names are really important.
Aaron Sittig: We got this clear early on because of something that was established as a community principle at the Well: You own your own words. And we took it farther than the Well. We always had everything be traceable back to a specific real person.
https://www.wired.com/story/sex-beer-and-coding-inside-facebooks-wild-early-days
Ding Yan Zhong — known to industry insiders as “Mr. Ding” — has managed the flow of fireworks for a decade through the two companies he founded, Shanghai Huayang and Firstrans International.
He has broadened his empire by consolidating power in China, expanding his reach into California and becoming the most important player in fireworks logistics on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
Now, Ding’s control of the fireworks delivery chain is nearly complete, according to two dozen shipping and fireworks executives, more than 40,000 fireworks shipping records, numerous court documents and other sources.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/the-largest-supplier-of-american-fireworks-is-from-china/?utm_term=.9e9cf57676b6
The most important component of good management, good leadership, and good stewardship is making sure that you have diversity of mind. When you recruit young people from different universities—and we generally hire around 400 to 450 young people [a year]—they all can’t come from an Ivy League school. You have to start from the foundation that people come from different experiences, and they have different opportunities. If you don’t interview a diverse group of people from different universities, different state schools, and different parts in the world, you are not going to get diversity of mind. If you hire all business majors, all engineers, or all people who have one field of expertise, you’re going to fall down.
There are limits to this archenemy motif. Alibaba and Tencent attack the market differently, in ways that have often allowed them to grow without butting heads. Alibaba’s is largely a strategy of buying controlling stakes in businesses that are a fit with its commerce platform; Tencent takes hundreds of minority stakes in an array of businesses to win over partners and gain access to their technology. What’s more, the competition is hardly a zerosum game, thanks to the rapidly expanding Chinese middle class.
Still, the companies can and do play hardball. In an economy in which e-commerce is dominant in ways unthinkable in the U.S., each company stymies the other’s payment service on their main platforms. And when Tencent and Alibaba sign on investment bankers, they reportedly make it a condition that the bankers work exclusively for them. (Many companies impose such restrictions, but they have greater consequences coming from Tencent and Alibaba given that the two also are major venture capital investors and the prohibitions could impinge on work with the companies in which they invest.) Even if the world is big enough for both of them, Tencent and Alibaba increasingly are in conflict. “Until recently, everyone played in their own sandbox,” says Deborah Weinswig, New York–based CEO of the China-focused retail consultancy Coresight Research. “Now the sand is starting to spill over.”
HAS THE INTERNET failed? Sitting in his office at Christ Church College,
Oxford, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has his
answer ready: “I wouldn’t say the internet has failed with a capital F, but
it has failed to deliver the positive, constructive society many of us had
hoped for.”
Two decades ago he would have scoffed at the idea that the internet
and the web would do anythingbutmake thisplaneta betterplace. In his
autobiography written in the late 1990s, “Weaving the Web”, he concluded: “The experience of seeing the web take off by the grassroots effort of
thousands gives me tremendous hope that…we can collectively make
our world what we want.”
Dustin Moskovitz (Zuckerberg's original right-hand man): Back then there was a really common problem that now seems trivial. It was basically impossible to think of a person by name and go and look up their picture. All of the dorms at Harvard had individual directories called face books—some were printed, some were online, and most were only available to the students of that particular dorm. So we decided to create a unified version online and we dubbed it “The Facebook” to differentiate it from the individual ones.
There was something a little rough about MySpace.
Mark Zuckerberg: So MySpace had almost a third of their staff monitoring the pictures that got uploaded for pornography. We hardly ever have any pornography uploaded. The reason is that people use their real names on Facebook.
Adam D’Angelo (Zuckerberg's high school hacking buddy): Real names are really important.
Aaron Sittig: We got this clear early on because of something that was established as a community principle at the Well: You own your own words. And we took it farther than the Well. We always had everything be traceable back to a specific real person.
https://www.wired.com/story/sex-beer-and-coding-inside-facebooks-wild-early-days
Ding Yan Zhong — known to industry insiders as “Mr. Ding” — has managed the flow of fireworks for a decade through the two companies he founded, Shanghai Huayang and Firstrans International.
He has broadened his empire by consolidating power in China, expanding his reach into California and becoming the most important player in fireworks logistics on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.
Now, Ding’s control of the fireworks delivery chain is nearly complete, according to two dozen shipping and fireworks executives, more than 40,000 fireworks shipping records, numerous court documents and other sources.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/the-largest-supplier-of-american-fireworks-is-from-china/?utm_term=.9e9cf57676b6
The most important component of good management, good leadership, and good stewardship is making sure that you have diversity of mind. When you recruit young people from different universities—and we generally hire around 400 to 450 young people [a year]—they all can’t come from an Ivy League school. You have to start from the foundation that people come from different experiences, and they have different opportunities. If you don’t interview a diverse group of people from different universities, different state schools, and different parts in the world, you are not going to get diversity of mind. If you hire all business majors, all engineers, or all people who have one field of expertise, you’re going to fall down.
Still, the companies can and do play hardball. In an economy in which e-commerce is dominant in ways unthinkable in the U.S., each company stymies the other’s payment service on their main platforms. And when Tencent and Alibaba sign on investment bankers, they reportedly make it a condition that the bankers work exclusively for them. (Many companies impose such restrictions, but they have greater consequences coming from Tencent and Alibaba given that the two also are major venture capital investors and the prohibitions could impinge on work with the companies in which they invest.) Even if the world is big enough for both of them, Tencent and Alibaba increasingly are in conflict. “Until recently, everyone played in their own sandbox,” says Deborah Weinswig, New York–based CEO of the China-focused retail consultancy Coresight Research. “Now the sand is starting to spill over.”
Oxford, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has his
answer ready: “I wouldn’t say the internet has failed with a capital F, but
it has failed to deliver the positive, constructive society many of us had
hoped for.”
Two decades ago he would have scoffed at the idea that the internet
and the web would do anythingbutmake thisplaneta betterplace. In his
autobiography written in the late 1990s, “Weaving the Web”, he concluded: “The experience of seeing the web take off by the grassroots effort of
thousands gives me tremendous hope that…we can collectively make
our world what we want.”
At the heart of their disenchantment, this special report will argue,
is that the internet has become much more “centralised” (in the tech
crowd’sterminology) than itwaseven ten yearsago. Both in the Westand
in China, the activities this global network of networks makes possible
are dominated by a few giants, from Facebook to Tencent. In his latest
book, “The Square and the Tower”, Niall Ferguson, a historian, explains
that this pattern—a disruptive new networkbeing infiltrated by a new hierarchy—has many historical precedents. Examples range from the invention ofthe printing press to the Industrial Revolution.
Source: Economist June 2018
