Definitely. Not to mention that their major investor, Sequoia, has been war profiteering and Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire has been publicly islamophobic and a huge supporter of the genocide and occupation in Palestine.
Well done, Drew!! And congrats on building an amazing company. Hope you'll get some rest before embarking in whatever is next.
Coincidentially, I know the new CEO, Ashraf Alkarmi; we met at AWS when he was launching Appstream, I believe back in 2013 if I'm not mistaken. It's funny to recognize a name. I am hopeful that he will do well as a CEO.
> but he correctly realized that it would ultimately be the most profitable to him if he could build legions of cars and had a large customer base that could afford them
I think that this is a common misconception. I can't find the reference, but I remember reading that this might have been a "marketing" or PR spin, rather than reality - which was, simply, that he needed to pay well to keep talented workers or take them from other industries.
Also the "five dollar day" was kind of a marketing gimmick too. Your daily pay was still $2.50, but if you stayed two years, went to church on Sundays, tithed, didn't go to bars, didn't go to union meetings, kept your house clean, and didn't send remittances overseas (and he had people checking on all of these things), you got the rest as a bonus in the form of savings bonds.
You just listed some of the reasons why I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy. I have a young kid and I hope he'll enjoy the village-like, car-free environment here.
Isn't Venice as problematic/artificial as suburbia in its own way? If you're saying car-free then I assume you mean the centre, where the real population is tiny (compared to San Francisco at <50k), aging, declining amd dwarfed by tourists. My understanding is that it's increasingly meeting needs of tens of millions of ultra short term visitors rather than real communities. It feels like there must be a wide range of happy medium places in between.
Fun fact: The original company was founded in 1930 in Turin as "Società anonima Carrozzeria Pinin Farina". "Pinin" means the youngest son of the family, and Farina is the family name.
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