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Saved by @Alex1Powell

~8yrs ago (Dec’12) I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇

 By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.
We were 1st to “containers” (lxc) & container management (Borg) - since '03/04. But Docker took LXC, added cluster management, & launched 1st. Mesosphere launched DCOS. A lot of chairs were thrown around re: google losing this early battle, though K8 won the war, eventually 👏
We were 1st to “serverless” (AppEngine). GAE was our beachhead -- it was the biggest revenue source early on but the world wasn’t ready for serverless primitives. We also didn’t build auxiliary products fast enough. Clients that outgrew GAE wanted “building block” IaaS offerings.
1st to hadoop (map-reduce ‘04) but our hosted Hadoop launched in ‘15. AWS EMR was ~200M ARR by then. 1st to cloud storage (GFS ’03), but didn’t offer a filestore till ‘18! Customers were asking for it since 2014. Didn’t launch archival storage or direct interconnect till v. late.
Common thread: engineering hubris. We had the best tech, but had poor documentation + no "solutions” mindset. A CxO at a large telco once told me “you folks just throw code over the fence”. Cloud was seen as the commercial arm of the most powerful team @ Google: TI (tech infra).
TI “built” stuff == good; Cloud “sold” stuff == bad. This unspoken hierarchy led to GTM decisions that cemented our #3 position in a market where we had far superior tech. Another reminder that BETTER TECH RARELY WINS AGAINST BETTER GTM: https://t.co/jpVV5CWl44
As a result of this engg::product::sales tussle, we 2nd guessed if we were (1) platform or product (2) for developers or enterprises, serving (3) new age cloud-native cos or everyone. Steve Yegge has a legendary rant on #1: https://t.co/hf3rtIJgUb. KNOW WHO YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE!
A lot of early mistakes were made w/ #2-3: AWS was going to the customers and rolling cloud-compatible on-prem versions and direct interconnects to their DCs. We wanted more clients like Snapchat: cloud native. World had lots of goldman sachs: hybrid. GO WHERE THE CUSTOMERS ARE.
Sales teams without quotas (🤯); chaotic branding (GCP? Google Cloud? Google for Enterprise?); title inflation - everyone was “head of X” “lead of Y”; ill-conceived vertical solutions; weak partnership programs, etc. All this took years of fixing.
When TK joined from ORCL many old-timers left GCP to other parts of Google, but he was 100% the right person for the job: aggressive, customer-obsessed, sales oriented. My friends who stayed back speak of a very different org.
GCP is likely at $8-10B ARR now and still growing >50% y/y. This is remarkable, but MSFT came from behind and is now neck-to-neck w/ AWS. I am hardly shocked - for MSFT, an Azure contract was probably 1 extra pricing sheet under a pre-existing MSDN MSA. Zero legal friction.
My google exp reinforced a few learnings for me: (1) consumers buy products; enterprises buy platforms. (2) distribution advantages overtake product / tech advantages and (3) companies that reach PMF & then under-invest in S&M risk staying niche players or worse: get taken down.
As always, this is one person’s narrative so unlikely to be fully accurate. GCP is a much, much stronger platform and team today. Goes without saying, my heart will always root for Google Cloud. We are still scratching the surface of this beast and it is still day one. /end

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Jake Brukhman
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@jbrukh
1/The next major problem set in #DeFi is #NFTLiquidity.

It has become very clear that, like fungibles, nonfungibles are their own financial asset class.

One path to see this is to envision the future of NFTs as “liquid

2/Some say that NFTs “shouldn’t be” liquid, yet the innovation process continues.

Just like photography has become much easier to create in the last 100 years, liquid NFTs will surely bring down price points of tokenized digital content but will also open expansive new markets.

3/The key observation is this: #NFTLiquidity is merely a technical problem for #DeFi, and the entire set of economic mechanisms is its solution space.

👉🏻 In particular, because of tokenization, *the NFT liquidity problem reduces to the NFT price discovery problem.*

4/In other words, if we could reliably price a set of NFTs, we could issue a token backed by their reliably priced future resale value.

This is a core mechanism that today is underutilized in the market, and one that — we will soon see — applies to all illiquid assets.

5/Today, NFT price discovery proceeds via three main mechanisms: sales, auctions, and ERC20 fractionalization.

And the fundamental problem with each of these mechanisms is capital efficiency: in each mechanism, participants need to spend *at least* $N to value something at $N.
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Jake Williams
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Twas the night before Christmas and all over the ‘net,
Not a creature was stirring except a few cyber threats
The firewalls were configured at the egress with care,
But that wouldn’t stop us from being hit by ransomware. 1/

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While attackers hit the web server and established a beachhead
Mama with her EDR and I with my IDS
Were ready to tackle this hot infosec mess. /2

Down in the SOC there arose such a clatter,
I logged into my dashboard to see what was the matter.
This thing had better work, it cost so much cash.
How in 2020 can this thing STILL require Flash?! 3/

The alerts lit up the dashboard, it produced such a glow
But it’s because the threshold for alerting was configured so low.
When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But 300 false positive alarms. I thought “I’ll be here all year.” 4/

Then a little old DLL, signed by SolarWinds,
Was really the Russians, masters of supply chain break-ins.
We need some new vendors said the CISO, and the salespeople came. 5/
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foone
foone
@Foone
time to get back to "repairing" old computers


The funny thing about making the 8-bit-guy into a meme about "repairing" computers with powertools is that the obvious heightening joke would, like, the "8 rounds guy", who fixes computers with firearms

but that would also be him, given that he's also a big gun enthusiast.

so it's inherently hard to satirize the repairing-computers-with-dremels guy, since they're also the guns-guy.

you'd have to go up to like a mythbusters level of overkill.

"this hard drive from 1986 won't spin up. We tried freezing it, tapping it with a rubber hammer, and opening the case to lower the friction... there's only one option left: GET OUT THE C4 EXPLOSIVES!"
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Madhu Menon
Madhu Menon
@madmanweb
The Internet and mobile phones have taken over our lives. But it comes with increasing security concerns. Website data breaches, phishing attacks, and other online scams are commonplace. Here's a thread for regular people on how to increase your security online.
#StaySafeOnline

#1
Go to your Google account settings. Revoke permissions from all the apps you don't use: https://t.co/cMGgSgtRTI

Also check if any app has access to your contacts or - gasp! - your entire email. Strongly reconsider both, especially access to your email.

Giving access to your contacts lets companies spam those people.

Giving access to your email - email organising apps, for instance - renders your online security meaningless. Password resets are often done with email, and if an external entity can access that, game over!

#2
Go to your Twitter account settings and revoke permissions from all the apps you don't use or trust:
https://t.co/lXxCgdnaXH

Online quizzes and such sites often ask for permission to post tweets for you, read your tweets, and even your DMs!.

People click "OK" without reading the fine print.

But imagine the security and privacy risk with having some unknown entity be able to post tweets and read your private DMs just to post the results of what Game of Thrones character you are.
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Donald Bullers
Donald Bullers
@DonaldBullers
The Internet is at a tipping point, here’s what you’ve probably never heard coming next.

Time for a thread 👇👇👇

1) Let’s start with the users…

Today over 50% of the world is on social media AND on average we each have 70-80 usernames and passwords.

Each of these accounts are owned and controlled by the platforms.

Recipe for disaster.


2) In 2021 American adults spend over 4 hours a day online - that is half a work day.

Time is our most valuable asset, did you realize you are giving this away for free?


3) The applications we use today are built on the foundation of ‘Free + Ads’.

You get free access.

They get YOUR account, YOUR data, YOUR screen time, YOUR community.

And the worst part? This can all be taken away at any moment.


4) So where do we go from here?

It starts with self-sovereign digital identities.

ONLY the user owns their identity data online without intervention from outside parties.

Available now at sites like:
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The RV and the Redemption Funds.

ALL Exchanged Currencies as well as all Zim Redemption funds will be placed in the accounts they set up in the Quantum Financial System./1

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Which bank can compete with the QFS when the QFS is free, secure, private, and stable? One of the major problems in the transition will be the use of Debit Cards for merchant purchases. Will VISA or Mastercard be available?/5
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One of the most successful stock trader with special focus on cash stocks and who has a very creative mind to look out for opportunities in dark times

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30-40% move in just 5-6 days is one example of extended move

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Wracając do sedna dzisiejszego zamieszania z artykułem autosportu / motorsportu. Kubica mówi w nim, że podejmie swoją decyzję w ciągu kilku dni. Rozważa opcję z Williamsem lub posadę kierowcy symulatora w Ferrari. Więc za kilka dni dowiemy się co go czeka za rok. #F1PL

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Trudno powiedzieć czy autor się pośpieszył i wyciągnął inne wnioski niż powinien, a może wie coś więcej, ale nie mógł tego otwarcie napisać. Słowa Kubicy brzmią jednak jednoznacznie: decyzję podejmie w ciągu kilku dni.
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👇Thread.

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