Dalton Caldwell

I have heard this sentiment echoed by others - several industry insiders included - before.

If this is indeed true that the sales and marketing honchos are exclusively running large tracts of key operations, aren't the resulting missteps going to be deleterious to Mark's record as the chief?

This sentiment was echoed by Dalton Caldwell about Facebook's "M&A" team, last year:

I am not sure if this bubbled up to you, Mark, but after this all happened I
directly communicated my feedback regarding just how unhappy I was with this
situation to one of your executives. The executive apologized and said he would
take my feedback under consideration.

Mark, I know for a fact that my experience was not an isolated incident. Several
other startup founders & Facebook employees have told me that what I experienced
was part of a systematic M&A “formula”. Your team doesn’t seem to understand
that being “good negotiators” vs implying that you will destroy someone’s
business built on your “open platform” are not the same thing. I know all
about intimidation-based negotiation tactics: I experienced them for years
while dealing with the music industry. Bad-faith negotiations are inexcusable,
and I didn’t want to believe your company would stoop this low. My mistake.

Does Mark maintain control of all of the operations or has he got petty feudal lords running various units and operations?

Source:

http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg

Edit: Cleanup

>imho everything worth doing looks stupid and insignificant at first: http://daltoncaldwell.com/the-makings-of-history-are-banal

Those aren't particularly good choices...because I doubt those announcements were considered banal by the authors or by their intended audience. Particularly the announcement of the Web, which you quote in part as: "However, it could start a revolution in information access"

A better example would be the origins of something like Facebook, which sounds like it was geared towards scoping out the attractiveness of Harvard classmates and has grown into something far more ubiquitous and all-encompassing.

In comparison, the Web hasn't really outpaced its initial predicted scope -- a "revolution in information access" -- but of course, its makers dreamed big.

> you haven't seen it, you were not interested in looking and I doubt that any "evangelist" is going to change your mind

This is disingenuous. (Also, ENS appears to be functionally similar to App.net [1]. I'm open to being challenged on this.)

One thing pervasively lacking from Web3 is compelling fiction. Not "this and that trustlessly," but a functional narrative of someone doing something useful or compelling they presently can't. VR has that. Crypto, not so much.

Instead we have pitches of doing the same things one can currently do, but decentralised. (Again, see App.net.) That will be appealing for a certain political niche. But Truth Social for libertarians, while definitely worth something, isn't the narrative web3 wants.

[1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it

I remember reading this or something alarmingly similar (that too was about Oh, The Places You’ll Go!) a while back on HN... But this one was published today! What the hell is going on? Is it deja vu or it's just a happy coincidence?!!

Edit: Good... "Oh, The Places You'll Go! site:news.ycombinator.com" Google search helped me assure myself I'm not crazy. This is the other article: http://daltoncaldwell.com/oh-the-places-youll-go and HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4061059

Funny thing is that both are using Svbtle, which helped further confuse me.

I won't remove this comment (which is definitely off-topic and non-constructive) because I think others might experience the same shock as mine and it would save them a bit of Googling...

One day startups will learn to stop building on negative/zero/low revenue social networks. After hearing about Zynga getting diversified almost out of existence on Facebook, Dalton Caldwell being served with a "Join us or else"[1] from Facebook, and the Twitter 3rd party castration[2]; it amazes Me that people are still trying to build services on top of social platforms. These platforms are generating very little revenue relative to their valuations. If you have this amazing service that starts making money or getting notoriety, it's in the social networks best interest to stop your business and build the feature themselves.

[1] - http://daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg

[2] - https://blog.twitter.com/2012/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

It's rather unclear what Dalton means here. The interpretation that seems likeliest to me is that Dalton can easily provide independent evidence to a professional auditor (i.e., someone who can be given trusted access to sensitive data, and someone who isn't easily induced to lie on a client's behalf) that the tally is correct.

Unless it becomes routine to actually employ these auditors, that doesn't really answer jtokoph's worry.

Postscript - Indeed, that's what he meant: on http://daltoncaldwell.com/we-did-it he says "In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner."