Mark Pincus Blog

fortune covers craigslist - communism beating capitalism!

my friend adam lashinsky at fortune has another insightful piece, this time on craig and craigslist. he's gleaned a few great new facts like that they should do $20m in revs this year on $5m in expenses, and really captures the gastalt of craig. thankfully, he cuts the story of craig to a paragraph but we'll all have to get used to its retelling as he gets increased business press.

also, interestingly, adam gets the founder of stubhub to estimate what craig could be making if he chose to really monetize his traffic - $500 million! of course, if he went for the gold, his users might head for the door.

one does get the feeling reading adam's story that craig is this pillsbury doughboy giant from ghost busters knocking over buildings (newspaper chains) without even seeing them.

adam talks about the potential of googlebase to attack craig's base. i dont buy it. i think that classifieds are about quality leads fast and not the most leads, and that craig's loose sense of community will trump google's lack of community or humanity. also, he talks about keeping up with technology and new features. helloo!! i tried that one. craig wins because he doesnt change it, so changing faster isnt going to help.

Redemption showing sunday night in sf - pls help fight to save tookie williams from an unjust execution

there is a screening of redemption, an awesome movie on Sunday. More importantly it is part of an effort to stop the execution of tookie williams, a man nominated for the nobel peace prize, who has spent the past 25 years writing children's books aimed at deturring urban youth from entering gangs.

I know we all lead busy lives and get asked to lend our support to too many efforts. But this one is different.

1. we are all safer with tookie around. He has turned 100's of kids away from gangs.

2. we cannot afford to be the community that executed tookie. This happens in texas, not sf.

3. tookie has lead an amazing life and his redemption story is inspiring.

4. this is an amazing movie. Jamie fox's best performace ever.

5. this is the fight we are all supposed to fight. If we don’t stand up for tookie, we have already lost the war.

Here are the details...

*** PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY ***

Danny Glover invites you to a screening of "Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story"

Where: Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th Street in San Francisco (next to the 16th Street and Mission BART Station)

When: December 04, 2005 at 5pm

Why: Help STOP THE December 13th EXECUTION of Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Stan Tookie Williams

Danny Glover, Barbara Becnel, Boots Riley, and Kevin Epps will host a short program before the movie to explain the status of Stan's case and let people know how to get involved in the movement to stop the execution. With only a few weeks left before the execution date, your help is urgently needed. Please join us in the fight to save Stan's life.

This event is a fund-raiser for the San Francisco Save Tookie Committee. Tickets are $5 for students/youth/seniors and $10 for the general public. Inmate art, donated by Alan Laird of Expressions Art Gallery, will also be available for purchase to raise funds for the campaign to save Stan.

Co-sponsors and endorsers welcome; donations appreciated. Please contact Danielle at Danielle@vanguardsf.org or 415-581-2512 for more information about endorsing or co-sponsoring the event.

Tickets available at

www.victoriatheatre.org

or at the door.

Stan Williams co-founded the L.A. Crips in 1971. In 1981, he was convicted of murder by a jury from which all Blacks had been removed.

Standing before a racist system, without adequate funds or competent counsel, he had no real chance of demonstrating his innocence during his trial.

While in prison, Stan began writing books de-glamorizing gangs and prison life for children and young adults. Because of this work, he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times.

For more info go to

www.savetookie.org

Another congressman caught cheating us - when do we call this conspiracy?

Rep cunningham (R. CA) quits house after pleading guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion in accepting $2.4M for steering pentagon work to defense contractor MZM.

And what happens to everyone else involved from the pentagon and MZM?

How many cases of govt corruption do we have to face before admitting that its the system and not a few bad apples?

And if 414 public companies 'restated' earnings last year, can we call that a corrupt financial system? Ahold also announced its pating back shareholders over $1 billion for its fraud. That's just one. There are shareholders at another 413 companies that are still waiting for theirs.

Shouldn't there be some test applied, beyond which its called a corrupt system?

Can't we assume that for every one congressman or company caught there are another 10 getting away with it? Or do we believe our justice system is that swift we just catch, try and convict em all?

And why am I a 'liberal' for demanding reform? If a conservative is someone fighting to maintain our current system, then you guys better do some repositioning fast before you go down with the ship!

And where is bush and cheney on all this? If they're not guilty or protecting friends, one might expect to hear a strong repudiation of people like representative cunningham who btw now faces 10 well deserved yrs behind bars.

But we can't really blame cunningham or his friends in the white house. They're just mice in the maze following cheese. Its our fault for allowing a system so fraught with potential for interest peddling to persist.

let's admit one thing, the entire basis of our lobbying system IS influence selling. I'm sure someone can make a case for the good but there's no way it outweighs the daily corruption.

What would happen if we outlawed lobbyists?
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Google-Mart - more comparisons

robert cringley has a great post on how google will take over the whole internet in a similar fashion to walmart. interesting how these two companies are increasingly both topics and being compared.

Sam Walton Taught Google More About How to Dominate the Internet Than Microsoft Ever Did

Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are only so many fiber networks and they'll be BUYING service from those outfits -- many of which are in or near bankruptcy. Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart's. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.

Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.

Game over.

Some facts on Walmart

a republican friend who reads my blog told me the other night he thought i was a 'liberal'. now i dont have any problem with this label, accept it probably doesnt apply. i'm a g-d damned independent. as i've said, neither party represents many of my views or interests.

when i asked him how he could be supportive of a government that fosters evil corporations like Walmart he took a offense. he actually tried defending them but we both realized we lacked any good facts to back up our opinions. when i told him the limited facts i did know, he said he doubted they were true but admitted that if there were, maybe my views had some merit.

i'll add to this that over thanksgiving i got into the same debate with my sister who is an ethics prof. of course, being my sister, she argued vehemently against me until we realized that we agreed on our basic principles - that a corporation should only be held to two standards. those are the law and the market. i believe Walmart is failing at on the legal front and that the market will soon catch up. the stock is probably a good short in the near future. under so much scrutiny the company will have to end its highly profitable practices of driving down labor costs and avoiding medical costs.

anyway, here are some facts i gathered from the site of the Walmart movie. now before you yell at me about presenting 'one sided' facts (??), i will provide a link here and you will be able to see the complete sources behind all of these which are incredibly well documented.

walmart and welfare...

ALABAMA: 3,864 Children of WAL-MART Employees are Enrolled in Medicaid

ARIZONA: 2,700 WAL-MART Workers on Medicaid

ARKANSAS: 3971 WAL-MART Workers on Public Assistance

FLORIDA: 12,300 WAL-MART Workers and their Dependents on Medicaid

GEORGIA: 10,261 Children of WAL-MART Employees are Enrolled in PeachCare for Kids

TENNESSEE: 9,617 WAL-MART Workers on TennCare

walmart and unions...

$7,000 ANTI-UNION CAMERA PACKAGE per store
$30,000 UNDERCOVER SPY VAN per store
$100,000 24 hour ANTI-UNION HOTLINE
$7,000,000 Rapid response team with CORPORATE JET

$50 MILLION to settle an off-the-clock class action suit in Colorado

In Texas it is estimated that Walmart cheated workers out of up to $150 million in unpaid wages

• "In a recently certified class-action suit in Texas on behalf of more than 200,000 current and former Wal-Mart workers, statisticians estimate that the company underpaid its Texas workers by $150 million over four years by not paying them for the many times they worked during their daily 15-minute breaks. That $150 million estimate does not include other types of unpaid work. The statisticians, who analyzed time records from 12 Wal-Mart stores, found that the Texas employees averaged at least one hour of unpaid work each week from working through breaks."
• Source: Steven Greenhouse, "Suits Say Wal-Mart Workers Forced To Toil Off The Clock," New York Times, June 25, 2002 [reprinted via Common Dreams]

Wal-Mart Managers delete time from workers' timecards

• In Massachusetts, "a Middlesex court judge has put his imprimatur on a suit alleging the retail giant failed to pay employees for time worked and neglected to give them meal and rest breaks, the Herald has learned. The eight-page ruling by Superior Court Judge Ernest B. Murphy cites an affidavit by a computer expert hired by the plaintiffs. The expert allegedly found 7,000 instances during a one-year period when Wal-Mart managers deleted large blocks of time from their employee payroll records."
• Source: John Strahinich, "Judge OKs Employee Lawsuit Against Wal-Mart," Boston Herald, January 7, 2005.

Wal-Mart currently faces lawsuits in thirty-one different States for wage and hour abuses potentially involving hundreds of thousand workers.

Federal Poverty Level Family of Four - $17,650

 

Average Wal-Mart Hourly Sales Employee Wages - $13,861

Wal-Mart is paying eleven million dollars to settle Federal allegations it used illegal immigrants to clean its stores.

WAL-MART SUBSIDY NATIONWIDE: $1.008 BILLION  (from cities)

Currently in the U.S. there are 26,699,678 SQUARE FEET of empty WAL-MARTS

2001: EPA orders WAL-MART to pay $1.0 MILLION fine for Clean Water Violations in: TEXAS, OKLAHOMA AND MASSACHUSETTS

2004: WAL-MART fined $3.1 MILLION by EPA, the largest ever for a retailer, for Clean Water Act violations in TEXAS, COLORADO, CALIFORNIA, DELAWARE, MICHIGAN, SOUTH DAKOTA, NEW JERSEY, TENNESSEE and UTAH

WAL-MART Imported $18 BILLION from CHINA in 2004

The WALTON FAMILY Has Given LESS THAN 1% of Their Wealth to Charity
Bill Gates has given 58%

In 2004, WAL-MART Employees gave OVER $5 MILLION to help fellow workers

The Walton Family gave $6,000

The WALTON FAMILY received a federal tax cut of: $91,500.00 per HOUR in the 2004 tax year

69 incidents of robbery, rape and murder in Walmart parking lots in first 7 months of 2005

131 communities have voted Walmarts out

yahoo buys google ads?

has anyone noticed that yahoo is advertising on google adsense? has this always happened and i'm just noticing or new phenomena? just saw an an ad for yahoo myweb on silicon beat in the adsense box.

is smaller safer? new startup realities?

john battelle, fred wilson and silicon beat all talk about the current reality for startups (at least in the new media space) which is that smaller is safer. what they mean is that without a clear path for high dollar exits (called IPO market), a significant number of startups are selling to big players and many more hope to. however, this can only happen if they keep their valuations low.

what's always been interesting is to realize that for a founder, the actual payout may be the same or more at much lower prices if they never raise big rounds of vc. this also implies that either they can create the same intended value without the big capital or that they do such a bad job deploying it that they dont achieve the intended results in revenue and cashflow.

to some degree this is simply enabling a beautiful mechanism for risk free, distributed r&d for google and yahoo. they dont have to bet on the next flickr. they can just wait and see who gets there, especially when these companies (like flickr) never achieve significant revenue, even when they get big audiences.

i think this may cause more seasoned entrepreneurs to raise outside capital in smaller chunks, selling less of their companies. they can play the option. low valuations enable this.

Someone defines torture for us...

While I don't support personal attacks on anyone, aaron has some good points in adding a few facts to the debate...

“Peter sounds like another arrogant VC who thinks he is smart because people want his firm's money. Give me a break.

Peter, wake up! People kiss your ass because your firm has money they want...not because they like you, or because your jokes are funny, or because you have 'value add'. Got it?

I refer you to the Geneva Convention for the legal definition of torture. See below (i have edited because it is kind og heavy - for the full version go to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention):

The treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) in an international armed conflict is covered by GCIII. In particular article 17 states that "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.".

Pretty clear isn't it?

As for non combatants:

Under GCIV most enemy civilians in an international armed conflict will be "Protected Persons" under the meaning of GCIV, (see exemptions section immediately after this for those who are not). Under article 32, protected persons have the right to protection from "murder, torture, corporal punishments, mutilation and medical or scientific experiments...but also to any other measures of brutality whether applied by non-combatant or military agents."

Self righteous attitudes from people like Peter and his Republican cohorts are what got this country into the trouble that it is in today. Torture is just another symptom country dominated by a group of leaders and voters that are completely uneducated, short-sighted and greedy. “

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More debate on torture

At the risk of 'torturing' some readers the debate goes on...

This just in from peter, the vc who still defends torture. Now he says it all just depends on how we're defining it as some doesn't bother him.

Peter, that's the point. You don't mind barking dogs (though you'll have to tell us how that will spur someone to tell all) but you do mind the degradation (and murder) at abu grav. If you tell the state limited torture is ok, some idiot will exercise their own jusdgement.

I'm not going to define which torture is ok but I don't agree with the practice. Interrogation has gone on according to geneva convention for a long time.

Peter's comments...

“When I'm saying "give us context" on torture, I'm asking to get specific.

What is considered torture? My 6 yr old considers withholding ice cream to be torture. I consider listening to some type of music to be torture.

I also consider electrocution to be torture. But I don't consider sleep deprivation, barking dogs, or verbal harassment to be torture.

From what limited coverage I've seen, Gitmo doesn't torture either. I do agree that the stupid things going on at AbuG were illegal and those that broke the law are being convicted/punished.

So, Mark, perhaps you can give us some definitions of torture and then I can agree or dis-agree with you.”

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Last post on torture

(From a blog reader...)

Here is an excerpt from the washington post about the lack of effectiveness of torture:

it is easy to find experienced U.S. officers who argue precisely the opposite. Meet, for example, retired Air Force Col. John Rothrock, who, as a young captain, headed a combat interrogation team in Vietnam. More than once he was faced with a ticking time-bomb scenario: a captured Vietcong guerrilla who knew of plans to kill Americans. What was done in such cases was "not nice," he says. "But we did not physically abuse them." Rothrock used psychology, the shock of capture and of the unexpected. Once, he let a prisoner see a wounded comrade die. Yet -- as he remembers saying to the "desperate and honorable officers" who wanted him to move faster -- "if I take a Bunsen burner to the guy's genitals, he's going to tell you just about anything," which would be pointless. Rothrock, who is no squishy liberal, says that he doesn't know "any professional intelligence officers of my generation who would think this is a good idea."

Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."

it doesnt work it's immoral and it tarnishes our image worldwide and...worst of all...when the US does it, it says to the rest of the world that they can torture, too.

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