Birthday Joke: Have all of your friends change their Facebook profile and timeline picture to the same exact picture of the birthday person.
Visa and the banks it partnered with together had tens of thousands of people working to beat fraud. PayPal had two thousand, including some fifty of their best PhD engineers, trying to stay ahead of the crooks. And this kid was talking about “good guys and bad guys,” as if he were the first to discover the problem.
“Sounds good,” Thompson said, not without restraint. “How do you do that?”
“Good people leave traces of themselves on the Internet—digital footprints—because they have nothing to hide,” Shvat continued in his accented English. “Bad people don’t, because they try to hide themselves. All we do is look for footprints. If you can find them, you can minimize risk to an acceptable level and underwrite it. It really is that simple.”
Thompson was beginning to think that this guy with the strange name had flown in not from a different country but rather a different planet. Didn’t he know that fighting fraud is a painstaking process of checking backgrounds, wading through credit histories, building sophisticated algorithms to determine trustworthiness? You wouldn’t walk into NASA and say, “Why build all those fancy spaceships when all you need is a slingshot?”
Still, out of respect for Benchmark, Thompson thought he’d indulge Shaked for a few more minutes. “So where did you learn how to do this?” he asked. “Hunting down terrorists,” Shaked said matter-of-factly. His unit in the army had been tasked with helping to catch terrorists by tracking their online activities. Terrorists move money through the Web with fictitious identities. Shvat’s job was to find them online.
Senor, Dan; Singer, Saul (2011-09-07). Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (p. 25). Hachette Book Group. Kindle Edition.
Space Shuttle over NYC
Funny, sad, and true.
(Source: jenbee)
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“There is something like $1 trillion in student debt. A cynical view is that that represents $1 trillion worth of lies told about the value of higher education.” - Peter Thiel” — A Conversation with Peter Thiel
Interesting contrast in POVs from $YHOO lawsuit against$FB. @mcuban vs @avc (danr.me/ymDyJZ vs. danr.me/z4XgtT)
— Dan Reich (@DanReich) March 14, 2012
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Nat Turner: Quick thoughts on picking entrepreneurs vs. ideas -
All too often (and I find myself doing this too), due to the plethora of startups being created people tend to quickly dismiss many of them solely based on the current idea without even paying consideration to the entrepreneur or where it could go. The conversation often goes like this, with the…
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