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It’s a mistake, then, to think of Uber’s carcinized business strategy as driven by its scandal-prone leader, Travis Kalanick, and his bad personality. When author Brad Stone asked Kalanick why the company raised over $10 billion in the previous two years alone, the billionaire’s answer comes off as…

In East Palo Alto, as in the rest of the world, capital called forth the labor it needed at a price it was willing to pay. There’s no reason we need to pretend that authorities at any level wanted everyone in LouAnne Johnson’s bused EPA class to succeed, for none of them to be left behind. Capitali…

When one of the Sac Street dealers told the Mercury News that he was just another businessman in the Bay Area, his specific references might have been lost on the average reader. “You expect me to work at McDonald’s or Home Depot?” he asked reporter Sean Webby a couple of years after the shopping c…

In the following years, before the Facebook IPO, Milner vehicles DST and Mail.ru increased their positions in Facebook, pleasing their investment partners by offering to take their shares off their hands if they lost their nerve, and pleasing Facebook by financing an 8–10 percent stake in the compa…

As Google grew, it combined the monopolistic business strategy of Microsoft with the disrupting scraper speed of Napster. It’s a potent combination, and it left Google strong enough to defend its book scanning from the Authors Guild all the way to the top courts. Not even Bill Gates himself could h…