Tech Brew Ride Home - Thur. 10/25 - The Andy Rubin Scandal

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

How Google paid Andy Rubin on his way out the door despite allegations of sexual misconduct, Uber Eats and the rise of virtual restaurants, Kickstarter sunsets its Drip service but plans a nice replacement, and older people are worse than younger people at telling fact from opinion. Links: How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’ (New York Times) Uber’s Secret Restaurant Empire (Bloomberg) A New Approach to Our Work on Drip (Kickstarter Blog) Kickstarter to End Drip, Fund New Platform with XOXO Festival Creators (The Verge) The Team Behind XOXO is Taking Over Kickstarter’s Drip Crowdfunding Community (TechCrunch) Older People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact from Opinion (The Atlantic) Younger Americans Are Better than Older Americans at Telling Factual News Statements from Opinions (Pew Research Center) VIDEO: Joseph Saelee vs. Jonas Neubeauer in CTWC 2018 Finals (Twitter) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme Ride Home for Thursday, October 25th, 2018. I'm Chris Higgins, in for Brian McCullough, who is currently on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange promoting his book, How the Internet Happened, which you have definitely already purchased, right? All right.

Today, how Google paid Andy Rubin on his way out the door despite allegations of sexual misconduct. Uber Eats and the rise of virtual restaurants. Kickstarter sunsets its drip service but plans a nice replacement. And older people are worse than younger people at telling fact from opinion. Let's go. Today, the New York Times released a bombshell report that Google paid Andy Rubin $90 million when he left the company. They kept quiet about a credible claim of sexual misconduct, and they invested in his next company, and he's not the only one.

According to the report, Rubin was accused of coercing a Google employee into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013. Google investigated that claim and found it credible. The company told Rubin what it had found, and Larry Page asked for Rubin's resignation. And he got it. And then Page turned around and publicly patted Rubin on the back, saying at the time, quote, I want to wish Andy all the best with what's next. With Android, he created something truly remarkable, with a billion-plus happy users, end quote.

In addition to the happy words, Google provided Rubin an exit package worth $90 million paid out in installments every month for four years. The last payment comes next month. Now, this wasn't in Rubin's contract. This is just something Google decided to do for him. Google also invested millions in Rubin's VC firm, Playground Global, started six months after he left Google. According to the Times report, Rubin is actually one of three executives at Google, who have been protected by the company over the past decade after allegations of sexual misconduct. Quoting the Times, in two instances, it ousted senior executives, but softened the blow by paying the millions of dollars as they departed, even though it had no legal

obligation to do so. In a third, the executive remained in a highly compensated post at the company. Each time, Google stayed silent about the accusations against the men, end quote. Rubin denies the story. Again, quoting the Times, Sam Singer, a spokesman for Mr. Rubin, disputed that the technologist had been told of any misconduct at Google and said he left the company of his own accord. Mr. Singer said that Mr. Rubin did not engage in misconduct, and that quote, any relationship that Mr. Rubin had while at Google was consensual and did not involve any person who reported directly to him, end quote. The Times goes on to detail a laundry list of sexual misbehavior among the highest ranks

at Google and Alphabet, including the time that then Google's CEO Eric Schmidt hired his mistress as a consultant, and the time Google co-founder Sergei Bryn had a consensual extramarital affair with an employee in 2014. And then there's David Drummond, who in 2002 was Google's general counsel. That year, he began an extramarital affair with Jennifer Blakely, who also worked at Google as a senior contract manager in the legal department. And she reported to one of Drummond's deputies. They eventually had a child together in 2007, and only then, five years after the relationship began, did Drummond disclose the relationship to the company? Blakely was transferred to another department and left the company soon after.

But Drummond is now Alphabet's chief legal officer, plus he's chairman of capital G, Google's VC fund. This is a big report. here's one more segment I have to quote, which gets to the core of Ruben's behavior. Uh, buckle up. Quote, Mr. Rubin, 55, who met his wife at Google, also dated other women at the company while married, said four people who worked with him. In 2011, he had a consensual relationship with a woman on the Android team who did not report to him, they said.

They said Google's human resources department was not informed, despite rules requiring disclosure when managers date someone who directly or indirectly reports to them. In a civil suit filed this month by Mr. Rubin's, ex-wife, Re Re Re Rubin, she claims he had multiple, quote, ownership relationships, unquote, with other women during their marriage, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to them. The couple were divorced in August. The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. Quote, you will be happy being taken care of, he wrote.

Being owned is kind of like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people. End quote. I leave you now with two tweets. First, Connor Doherty. quote, a remarkable and screenplay-worthy story about the lengths Google has gone to to silent sexual harassment victims and pay tens of millions of dollars to the perpetrators, then having its well-oiled PR machine craft advanced narratives to cover it all up, end quote. And lastly, Dieter Bone, quote, this is monstrous. The actions of these men and Google's cover up both, end quote. Now, switching gears entirely, Bloomberg reports on a trend in the food world, virtual restaurants. The story opens with the founding of Brooklyn Burger Factory in August, a gourmet burger place that,

quote in Bloomberg, exists only in the Uber Eats delivery app. Brooklyn Burger Factory is located in the kitchen of Garrism Cafe and Ice Cream, a small establishment on Ralph Avenue. There used to be only a couple of unspectacular burgers on the menu at Garrism Cafe, and only about one a day sold, according to co-owner Joel Farmer, end quote. Brooklyn Burger Factory is now selling up to 75 burgers a day, delivery only, and brings in revenue 28 times what its host cafe does. And it started because the data team at Uber Eats approached the owner and told him there was demand for gourmet burgers in the area.

Now, this isn't the only case of a virtual restaurant taking over its host business. MIA Wings in Miami Beach is basically the same story. It's a chicken wing delivery restaurant based inside Venetia Pizza and Lounge. Since launching, Venetia has seen an 80% increase in overall revenue. There's a similar story in Montreal. I could go on, but you get the point. This phenomenon is part of what's driving growth in the online food delivery business. It's currently growing at a 20% year-over-year rate,

and is forecast to bring in just shy of $76 billion in gross volume by 2022. Now, Grubhub leaves the category with 52% market share, and it has been profitable since 2011. Uber Eats is a much smaller player, but its focus on creating and promoting virtual restaurants may help it catch up. Quoting Bloomberg, The virtual restaurant program began quietly in early 2016, and by March, it had spread to 10 cities. Today, the company works with 1,600 virtual restaurants around the world in the 300 or so cities in which Uber Eats operates.

Almost 1,000 of them are in the U.S., end quote. The other part of this story is how Uber Eats is a driver for overall Uber business growth. Quoting Bloomberg again, Liz Meyerdirk, the global head of business development at Uber Eats, estimates the department is growing as fast as UberX did in its first three years. Over the last year, 40% of new Uber Eats users are new to Uber, driving platform growth, she says. Late yesterday, news broke that Kickstarter would discontinue its DRIP platform, which launched in November 2017. DRIP was positioned as a competitor to Patreon, an ongoing source of financial support for people who make stuff on the internet, as opposed to the one-off funding model of regular Kickstarter projects.

Drip differentiated itself from Patreon and other subscription platforms, and its approach to data management. Drip lets creators retain control of their fans' data, like their mailing lists and stuff, and take that data with them if they ever left the platform. Now, that's handy given that the platform is closing up shop in about a year. Well, so the news is partly that Drip is sunsetting, but far more interesting,

Kickstarter has partnered with Andy Beow and Andy McMillan, the founders of the XOXO Festival based in Portland, Oregon, to make a replacement service. In case you're not familiar, XOXO is a festival for people who make stuff on the internet, and full disclosure, I've gone to it every year. As part of this deal, the Andes will get seed funding from Kickstarter to help develop a replacement for DRIP. Kickstarter describes the replacement like so.

The project, which will build on the work of the drip team, will help independent artists and creators get discovered, find a community to support their work, and build a long-term, sustainable career, end quote. Now, a little historical review. Andy Beah was the original CTO of Kickstarter, and McMillan is a longtime user, having launched his design journal, the manual, on the platform. And, in fact, the two of them launched the XOXO Festival itself in 2012 using Kickstarter. That was how you got a ticket to the festival in its first year. You backed their project.

And here, I have some firsthand perspective on why this story matters. I have a personal connection with this story because I worked in the XOXO Outpost with the Andes for a year. The Outpost was a shared workspace in Portland that grew out of the XOXO Festival, and it was briefly the center of Portland's creative universe. Some of yesterday's media coverage of this story actually came from former Outpost members because that was a room filled with working writers like me, along with filmmakers and game designers and VR coders, comics artists, musicians, podcasters, escape room designers, you name it.

My point here is the Andes definitely know how to build and maintain communities of working artists both through their festival and through the Outpost, so this is a project to watch. Laura Hudson, a former outpost member, wrote for The Verge, quote, There is no specific launch date for the as-yet unnamed platform, but Kickstarter will continue to run drip for the next year until existing drip creators can be migrated there or to another service of their choosing. Bayo and McMillan have incorporated as a public benefit corporation, PBC,

for the project, much like Kickstarter, which reincorporated in 2015 as a PBC. The new platform they want to build is, quote, much more community-driven, much more social, says Bayo. The thing we keep coming back to is building something that works for every project, regardless of whether or not they're currently seeking funding." And finally, Taylor Hatmaker, another outpost alum, covered the story for TechCrunch. She quotes Andy Bayo again, who says, I think we're all used to seeing at this point how the platforms that we use have failed.

The challenges that independent artists face are so profound already. To then have the tools and platforms that you're using work against you has been a painful thing. quote, and also shots fired, Andy. And finally, today, a report from the Atlantic about a recent Pew Research Study on American's ability to tell fact from opinion. The headline of the story gives us most of what we need to know. Older people are worse than young people at telling fact from opinion. Okay, so let's get into the numbers and the study here.

The Pew Research Center surveyed Americans and divided them into four brackets by age. The first bracket was ages 18 through 29, then 30 through 49, then 50, 50 through 64, then 65 and older. Pew presented a series of 10 statements to each person and asked them to identify whether each statement was a fact or an opinion. Across basically every axis, the outcome is super clear. There is a strong correlation between being younger and being able to correctly identify a statement as being either fact or opinion.

For instance, within the age 18 through 29 bracket, 44% of those surveyed correctly identified all five opinion statements as opinion. Now, compare that with just 26% of the people aged 50 and older. 44% to 26%. That's a massive gap. And what accounts for that? Well, here's a long quote from the Atlantic summarizing what Pew thinks is behind this. Quote, the research tax against the idea that younger people who are extremely online or digital savvy in Pew's terms

might be more exposed and or more susceptible to misinformation. But the real correlation with poor performance is exposure to television news, which has fallen off among young people but remains very high among older people. This shouldn't be surprising if we consider the evolution of American media over the past 60 years. Someone born in 1958, now 60 years old, witnessed two revolutions in media before the internet, talk radio and 24-hour cable news. Both blended facts and opinions in new and unprecedented ways, and they matured with the cohort of Americans who are now over the age of 50, end quote.

It's also interesting to look at which specific facts and opinions were presented by Pew to the research subjects. They're listed in the Pew Study, linked in the show notes. I just want to highlight one so you can kind of test yourself. Here's the statement, quote, democracy is the greatest form of government, end quote. So think on that. Democracy is the greatest form of government. Is that a statement of opinion or a statement of fact? Well, it's an opinion, though it's probably one that many respondents agree with. In any case, 76% of people aged 18 to 49, correctly identified it as an opinion, compared with only 61% of people aged 50 and older. That's actually the biggest gap for any question on the opinion side.

Check out the Pew Study for a list of those statements and prepare to be shocked at what some people think is a fact, or maybe more significantly, what facts many people simply don't believe. Thanks again to Brian for letting me sit in today. He'll be back tomorrow. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm at Chris Higgins. Now, I want to highlight a fun internet thing for you in case you haven't seen it yet. This past weekend was the classic Tetris World Championship.

Now, this is an event where players compete on the original Nintendo version of Tetris from 1989, played on original NES consoles with vintage CRT TVs. This year's champion is 16-year-old Joseph Saly, and the last link in the show notes takes you to a two-minute clip showing his victory against seven-time world champ Jonas Newbauer. Prepare to be shocked at how stressful and visceral competitive Tetris can be. And bonus points, you can see the back of my head near the end of the clip because I was running the camera on Joseph during the match. If you want more videos like that, this tournament

has been running for years, and every year's finals are dramatic. Check out the YouTube and Twitch channels called Classic Tetris, and with that, Brian will talk to you tomorrow.