Hired.com Looks To Destroy Recruiting Invoices With New Subscription-Like Billing

Hired.com, which runs weekly auctions of developers for hire, is looking to challenge the way that traditional recruiting agencies charge their startup clients.

Technical recruiting in the Valley is often done by boutique agencies or headhunters with long rolodexes, histories and networks among local developers. Often, if they’re successful in getting a candidate, they’ll hand over a lump sum bill worth about 20 percent of a hire’s first-year salary.

But Hired.com, which started out as Developer Auction, is looking to change that. They’re introducing a payments model that resembles more of a subscription.

Instead of charging for new hires up-front, they’ll be charging 1 percent of a developer’s salary for the first 24 months of their employment. If the hire stops working for the startup, Hired.com will stop charging. If they stay longer than two years at their new employer, Hired.com will also stop charging after the 24th month.

It looks like a way for Hired.com to lock in their clientele over the long-run. Clients that are already paying Hired.com one or two thousand dollars a month might be more inclined to keep using the service if don’t get sticker shock.

“A company that’s adding 10 employees could be facing several hundred thousand dollars in recruiting fees,” said Matt Mickiewicz, who founded the company after starting crowd-sourced graphic design community 99Designs.

It will also help them expand their market reach out to companies that haven’t historically relied on recruiting agencies.

Hired runs weekly auctions with 50 to 60 developers each that are hand-selected by an in-house team for their technical skills and work histories. They started out last year to become a “transparent marketplace for recruitment,” where engineers could attract offers of interest from multiple startups instead of having to seek out each one by one.

With the imbalance of supply and demand for good engineers in markets like San Francisco and New York, the auctions took off. The company is profitable and now has 25 of its own employees, up more than threefold from six months ago. They place “dozens” of candidates every quarter and in one day, they even placed five hires. They recently raised $2.7 million from NEA, Sierra Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Google Ventures, Sherpa Ventures, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and John Suliman’s Step Partners in March.

They’ve signed up hundreds of clients including Airbnb, Twitter and OpenTable and recently launched in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle.

They’ve also worked on the sticky issue of preventing current employers from knowing that their engineers are on the hunt for new work. They’ve filtered out current employers from seeing their own people on the site. Candidates are also on the site for only one week at a time, reducing the risk they’ll be seen by their current employer.

Dropbox Snatches Up Sold, The Service That Simplifies Selling Online, To Help It Build A New Mystery Commerce Product

Sold launched early this year with a plan to help remove some of the frustration from selling online.Debuting on the iPhone before moving to Android in September, Sold aimed to help busy people avoid the hassle of eBay and Craigslist and simplify e-commerce by taking the whole process out of their hands.

Today, just seven months removed from launch, the Sold team announced via its website that it has been acquired by Dropbox and will be closing its service as a result. Backed by $1.2 million from investors like Google Ventures, Greylock Partners, Matrix Partners and the team at Boston Seed, it’s a somewhat abrupt exit for a startup that appeared to be on the way up. In September, the team told TechCrunch that it had listed more than 2,000 unique products in its marketplace and was seeing 50 percent growth, month-over-month.

In turn, beyond the fact that Sold sought to add value by reducing the work inherent to selling online by pricing items, finding a buyer and arranging packaging, shipping and transactions for you, the startup also created pricing technology to help you get more for your items. Thanks to its algorithms that crawl top e-commerce marketplaces to build more accurate pricing rates and to allow customers to compare “going rates,” Sold said at the time that its prices were (on average) 43 percent higher, on average, than that of Gazelle.

As a result, after just four months, the startup was projecting $1 million in annual revenue and claimed to be growing fast. Nonetheless, the opportunity to join Dropbox ultimately proved to have more appeal for the founders than what they thought could be accomplished as an independent company. The deal, which Sold co-founder Tony DeVincenzi says came together in under four weeks, will see the startup’s nine full-time employees join Dropbox to form a new team within the company that will lead the design and development of “a new Dropbox product.”

Although the co-founders declined to elaborate on the plans for the new product, they did say via a post on their site that Dropbox’s “roadmap includes exciting new experiences which align perfectly with our ethos of creating products that positively affect people.” While that doesn’t say much, it is clear that the opportunity to reach Dropbox’s user base of 200 million played a hand in determining the outcome. That opportunity, they said, “was too good to pass up.”

Sold will be officially shutting down its product beginning today, and as of now, is no longer accepting new items. DeVincenzi says that the team is putting together a plan to help users finalize transactions and those who currently have items in the system have been contacted and will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Considering that the launch of its Android app in September had allowed Sold to significantly speed up its streamlined e-commerce process — allowing users to move from first post to payment in four days — the abrupt end to its service will no doubt have some of its newest customers up in arms. But, depending on what the Sold team helps Dropbox produce in the coming months, maybe they won’t be without a mobile commerce platform for long.

Stay tuned for more.

Full announcement copied below:

Hi, friends! We’re very excited to announce that Sold has joined Dropbox! As of today, our service will no longer be accepting new items.

We’d like to sincerely thank all of our loyal friends and customers who have helped us, supported us, and spread the love for us through this amazing endeavor. We started Sold to provide people with a service that took the burden of selling off their shoulders – by doing all the dirty work for them.

But even beyond that, we wanted to create something that affected people in a positive way. Something they had an emotional connection with. Something they trusted. After spending time with Drew and Arash, we decided that the move to Dropbox couldn’t be better – their roadmap includes exciting new experiences which align perfectly with our ethos of creating products that positively affect people. Going forward, the Sold team will continue working together to build these experiences, shaping the future of Dropbox for their 200M strong user base. It’s an opportunity too good to pass up.

We’re really excited for the new set of challenges ahead, and are absolutely dedicated to continuing to create great experiences.

If you’re a current user with items in the system, expect to hear from us with instructions on how to proceed and finish your transaction.

Thank you, thank you, thank you,

-The Team at Sold

Lady Gaga Splits From Manager And Rising Tech Investor Troy Carter

Troy Carter has been making a name for himself in tech thanks to investments in Uber, Spotify, and Dropbox, but his biggest tie to the music industry has just been severed. Lady Gaga has split from Carter, who has managed her since 2007, according to multiple sources of The Hollywood Reporter Showbiz411. The separation could shake his status as he raises a new $75 million investment fund.

Carter is credited with masterminding some of Gaga’s success, including her massive social media audience. She has 60 million Facebook fans and is amongst the top figures on Twitter with 40 million followers. The gig gave Carter the clout and earnings to get into tech investing, and get invited tospeak on stage with me at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. In this sense, no longer managing the artist is a serious hit to his profile.

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Lady Gaga Splits From Manager And Rising Tech Investor Troy Carter

On the other hand, splitting from Gaga could also free up more of Carter’s time to add value to his portfolio companies. The Hollywood Reporter says the split was chalked up to “creative differences”. A representative of Carter didn’t respond to requests for comment. However, one source close to the two music moguls tells me Carter may have become too busy for Lady Gaga in recent years.

On top of angel investing and funding startups through his venture capital fund AF Square, Carter runs the Atom Factorytalent management agency that represents John Legend, rapper K’Naan, and violinist Lindsey Sterling who won a YouTube Music Award last night. That’s a lot on one plate.

Regarding the split, The Hollywood Reporter…reports that “while sad, [Carter] feels ‘liberated’ to be relieved from duty.” With Lady Gaga’s new album ARTPOP coming out this month and her propensity for high-production tours, Carter’s duty would have been heavy this year.

Though Carter played coy when I pressed him about being a celebrity investor when we spoke at Disrupt New York, his footprint in tech has grown significantly in the last few years.

Between his reputation as a marketing virtuoso and his extensive rolodex, he’s become quite a prolific VC. Most recently, Carter set out to raise $75 million to $100 million for a new AF Square fund with a focus on brilliant founders.

Some of Carter’s latest investments include music playlist app Songza, celebrity fundraising platform Prizeo, and viral marketing serviceVirool. Now he may be able to better concentrate on providing his startups with product vision, business mentorship, and industry connections.

Google Launches Helpouts, Paid Video Chats With Experts To Address Whatever Is Bothering You Right Now

Helpouts, Google’s fusion of Google+ Hangouts, Google Wallet, and its identity tools is now live. A ‘Helpout’ is a Hangout-like video chat, but instead of speaking with a friend, you are connected to a purported expert in whatever it is that you need help with. The tagline that Google has come up with for Helpouts is “real help from real people in real time.”

Imagine a video chat session that you are paying for, that lasts for as little as a minute or two. You have an issue, say, what is this lump on my hand, or, how do I pull off a particular makeup trick, and have a quick chat with a person who can see what your problem is. And think broadly,

That’s the edge that Google thinks Helpouts has over every other content variety and service that helps you solve the situation you find yourself in. Today at its San Francisco offices, Google gave the media a look at the product, and proffered some hands-on time with its interface. The assembled tech press watched someone attempt to correct a drywall hole, apply lipstick in a particular way, and zest a lemon.

If you need a deep dive into the mechanics of Helpouts, TechCrunch helped break the story that Helpouts existed earlier this year. In this post, I want to dig into the economics of the offering, and its potential to succeed as a product.

Platform

Google is fond of calling Helpouts a platform and telling you that its team is separate from the Hangouts group. So, while the services share the core video experience, they should be thought of as distinct.

Helpouts uses your Google+ identity, Wallets payment features, and Hangout’s video technology to service its marketplace of providers. To seed Helpouts, Google has assembled a collection of just a little more than a thousand brands, Sephora for instance, and individuals so that people can dig in from day one.

Helpouts will need far more providers — diversity of offering here is key, naturally. Google has to demonstrate that its offering is better than what currently exists and that it is worth paying for. It must expand its database of on-demand information providers so that it can take nearly any request – if Helpouts doesn’t manage that, it will be niche, and therefore far too hit-and-miss to be compelling.

Google is working on an API for Helpouts, though it remains unclear to what end, and how developers will be able to better integrate the service into the lives of providers.

Everyone Else

If you are a regular Twitter user, you have probably by now become accustomed to asking your followers questions. It’s a fast, easy way to generate feedback about anything that you can think of. However, your followers are only so deep – unless you are a celebrity, of course – and you can’t pay them for help, so the relationship is quite different.

Would you pay $2 per minute to quickly speak with a cooking guru about your under-construction dinner? You can run Helpouts from your phone, of course, or regular computer. So, you would have a device in your kitchen that you could use. If the answer to that is no, Helpouts isn’t likely something that you’ll find too attractive.

On its face, having a cadre of brilliant people on demand about anything is attractive. It’s getting there that is hard.

YouTube how-tos. Yahoo Answers. Facebook friends. Real friend over the phone and text. These are free, and constitute Helpout’s competition. Google understands the power of free, and pointed out today that some Helpouts will be provided at no cost.

That is, if a specific provider decides as much. Why might you Helpout for free? Perhaps you want to help someone learn Spanish. Or the brand you work for wants a larger digital presence. There are a few options that are simple to imagine.

However, the theoretical magic of Helpouts involves money. That’s because the really good people – the best chefs, or what have you – don’t like working for free. So, you’ll get what you pay for

Who gets to charge for their advice? A fine question.

The Face In The Screen

Google approves every provider. Naturally, that won’t scale. The company either isn’t sure of what it will do next to handle quality of the providers that propagate Helpouts, or it didn’t want to tell the media. It isn’t clear.

Google has two needs that are in direct tension: Lots of providers and very good providers. There is always less supply of a superior good, period. Helpouts need a quickly expanding provider base – therapists! bankers! computer help! gardeners! – while keeping its quality up, which won’t be easy.

Will these people sit around, waiting for someone to book their time or ask for help in real-time? No. The company instead envisions that people who can Helpout will leave it on in the background of their computer, and have it alert them when they are needed. Providers can also receive SMS messages and the like when they are away from their desks. If you don’t hear back as a user in under five minutes, the session is free.

Will It Work?

Helpouts is not a small undertaking. Google wants you to be able to Google far outside of the search box. Helpouts as a service is a tacit admission by the company that its prized search algorithms can’t replace humans seeingyour problems. The information is different. And you can’t feed the real world completely into a search engine. Or not yet, at least.

Video chatting remains a buggy experience. Google Hangouts and Skype are both less-than-excellent solutions. This becomes even harder when on the go, without Wi-Fi, which represents I think a large chunk of the provider and user side of Helpouts. Your car doesn’t break down in your living room, so when you need someone to talk you through your tire repair in the rain, your video bitrate won’t be too impressive.

I’m skeptical of Helpouts because it has so many moving parts, between moving people, looking for quick interactions. I don’t want you to tell me in five minutes if I burned the sauce. If I need a real-time answer, it has to work every time or I won’t come back.

Google has to find endless brilliant people to be providers, and keep their link strong enough to the service to be constantly available. You can book sessions, of course, at a price discount, but that’s different. A real Helpout is now, instantly, and based on video communication. You are never going to stand on a ladder and wait for someone to take their time to pop onto your phone to explain to you why you can’t roof worth a damn.

The Helpouts experiment is something of a question. Has Google perfected the experience to the point in which people will start paying for micro-video sessions? My gut says no.

The other side of that is simply that if Helpouts does work, it will be an incredible asset to life. And Google as a company is known for its brilliance, and not ignorance. But even the smartest companies can’t make everything work.

Finally, by allowing consumers to purchase less expert time at a time, say just 4 minutes as opposed to an hour-long session, Google could be limiting provider revenue by selling a more efficient system. That’s great for consumers, but could irk providers, if they see their ability to overcharge for a service that they could in the past shrink.

Tomorrow

Even if Helpouts doesn’t catch on, it is enjoyable to see Google assemble a new product out of its extant service line up. And, as we said, Google is not making small moves. But whatever happens in the end, we can still Google things. And so far that’s worked out pretty well.

IBM Claims Twitter Infringes On At Least 3 Of Its Patents, According To Twitter’s Latest S-1 Update

As Twitter embarks on its initial public offering roadshow, the company has issued another update to its S-1today with a curveball. IBM has recently issued a letter to Twitter alleging that it infringes on “at least three U.S. patents” held by IBM, “inviting us to negotiate a business resolution of the allegations.” The disclosure comes at the same time that Twitter has also raised its IPO estimate to $23-25 per share, up from the previous $17-20 — a sign of Twitter’s confidence that despite details like the IBM note, it’s expecting a strong turnout when it lists.

The S-1 filing appears to indicate that although IBM is seeking a settlement over the alleged infringement, it looks like Twitter is ready to defend itself. “We believe we have meritorious defenses to IBM’s allegations, although there can be no assurance that we will be successful in defending against these allegations or reaching a business resolution that is satisfactory to us,” the company writes.

The specific patents in question are U.S. Patent No. 6,957,224: Efficient retrieval of uniform resource locators; U.S. Patent No. 7,072,849: Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service; and U.S. Patent No. 7,099,862: Programmatic discovery of common contacts.

The note appears in an update to the S-1 that offers extended caveats on how patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets are frequently the subject of litigation. Twitter admits that it’s not a strong player in this area.

“Many companies in these industries, including many of our competitors, have substantially larger patent and intellectual property portfolios than we do, which could make us a target for litigation as we may not be able to assert counterclaims against parties that sue us for patent, or other intellectual property infringement,” it writes, with a special flag for trolls: “In addition, various ‘non-practicing entities’ that own patents and other intellectual property rights often attempt to aggressively assert claims in order to extract value from technology companies.”

Although Twitter has shown itself up to now to be a very developer-friendly player in the patent space, it is salvos like IBM’s that may prove to test that resolve, especially as Twitter continues to evolve its service and move into new areas — a point it also makes, adding that right now it’s also potentially liable for claims against its partners and customers, too.

“From time to time we may introduce new products and services, including in areas where we currently do not have an offering, which could increase our exposure to patent and other intellectual property claims from competitors and non-practicing entities,” it writes. “In addition, although our standard terms and conditions for our Promoted Products and public APIs do not provide advertisers and platform partners with indemnification for intellectual property claims against them, some of our agreements with advertisers, platform partners and data partners require us to indemnify them for certain intellectual property claims against them, which could require us to incur considerable costs in defending such claims, and may require us to pay significant damages in the event of an adverse ruling.”

Twitter’s patent disclosures in the S-1 come at a time when the company is rolling out new services around its platform — many of which are effectivelydata-driven live tests to see what gets people to engage more on the site. The company is also reportedly looking at how it might do more with core products like direct messaging. Given that a large part of its business and audience is already on mobile, this, too, could take the company further into new product areas.

It’s unclear whether IBM would ever take this kind of allegation all the way to filing a suit, or whether it is putting it out there right now in hopes of a sweetheart deal that involves shares in Twitter. IBM is one of the world’s biggest tech patent owners (although recently slipping to No. 2 in mobile after Samsung), and has in the past sold troves of patents to the likes of Facebook, a sign of how social media companies are not immune to the patent race that has largely been the terrain of the mobile industry in recent times.

The Three Reasons Twitter Didn’t Sell To Facebook

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg tried to acquire Twitter not once but twice, through official channels and via co-founder Jack Dorsey. The details of the efforts are revealed in Nick Bilton’s new book Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal.

I’ll have a full review of the book soon, but I found one passage in particular worth noting. It was late October of 2008, shortly after Dorsey had been ousted as CEO and consigned to a silent role as Chairman, with no voting stock or operational control. Fellow Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone had been invited to visit Facebook for a sit-down with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The purpose? An acquisition of Twitter.

Zuckerberg, Bilton explains, had been working Dorsey for months to try to arrange a buyout. But his plans were thrown into disarray when Dorsey was yanked from the CEO slot. An email at one point to Jack had given a point-by-point reasoning on why Facebook+Twitter made sense. Among those reasons was the customary threat that Facebook could choose to ‘build products that moved further in [Twitter's] direction’, a tactic that we’ve personally heard many accounts of Zuckerberg employing. The implicit threat: sell to us or we’ll clone your product.

During the meeting, Williams and Stone threw out a valuation: $500 million. Zuckerberg was not shocked, as Dorsey had already informed him that this was the range that would be sought.

But the sale didn’t happen, and the reasoning behind the rejection was outlined in an email by Williams to the board, which is partially quoted in Bilton’s book.

It seems to me, there are three reasons to sell a company, Ev wrote in an e-mail to the board outlining why they should decline Facebook’s offer. 1. The price is good enough of or a value that the company will be in the future. (“We’ve often said that Twitter is a billion dollar company. I think it’s many, many times that,” Ev wrote.) 2. There’s an imminent and very real threat from a competitor. (Nothing is going to “pose a credible threat of taking Twitter to zero.” 3. You have a choice to go and work for someone great. (“I don’t use [Facebook]. And I havemany concerns about their people and how they do business.”)

There are a few interesting points in this passage, which we’ve emphasized. First among those is that the board saw Twitter as a billion-dollar company in 2008, and Williams saw it as many times that. In 2008, Twitter had fewer than 11 million users, and had yet to see the exponential gains that would come in early 2009 as a result of publicity like Ashton Kutcher’s public race against CNN to be the first million-follower account. Twitter’s current IPO filing places a roughly $11.9 billion value on the company. Even with a crappy infrastructure still wobbling under the weight of the users it did have, Twitter’s leadership had faith.

That faith extended to the fact that there was no competitor, including Facebook, who could pose a ‘credible threat of taking Twitter to zero’. The concept of Twitter, and its execution, was so unique that even a company with Facebook’s resources was ill-equipped to mimic its behavior and success. This is reinforced by another anecdote in the book about a possible $12 million Yahoo acquisition, which was politely declined very early on in Twitter’s life. The number, even with only 250k active users of what was still an Odeo side project, seemed so low to Biz, Williams and Dorsey that it became a running joke.

And lastly, Williams was also uncomfortable about a culture mis-match. The book as a whole drills down deeply into some very flawed, very human characters. But a strain that runs throughout is that the core creators of Twitter were all looking for ways to democratize human connections. That started with Odeo and continued through to the Twitter experiment. Williams felt that Twitter could be negatively impacted by intermingling with Facebook’s company culture, and was willing to bet hundreds of millions of dollars that it would be better without that influence.

We seem to talk more and more about the mercenary nature of Silicon Valley — and the popularity of ‘acquisition as business plan’ — daily. But, it turns out, there are still people making decisions based on something other than the seven deadly sins.

And one can’t discount the impact that lightly veiled threats have on negotiations. They can often lead to a sour taste, and we’ve heard about more than one negotiation with Facebook that has been spoiled by this kind of hint-dropping. Facebook took roughly three years to clone Twitter’s core ‘follow’ feature, launching Subscribe in 2011. It was later re-named ‘Follow’.

Dorsey, for his part, was ambivalent about a Facebook acquisition, saying that “If the numbers are right, there’s a success story in either path.” At the time, he was fresh off of his removal as CEO, with little hope of getting any real power in the company back. That turned out to be wrong, thanks to friendly investor Peter Fenton, but it’s not too surprising that he saw the money as a fair trade.

But the board agreed with Williams’ reasoning and declined the offer. Zuckerberg would then go on to court Dorsey heavily, but refuse to give him a head of product position. Dorsey never went to Facebook, and when Twitter IPOs, he’ll get his voting shares back.

An interesting note: Williams actually blogged about the offer, and the three reasons, earlier this year but never disclosed that it was Facebook. An interesting quote from the piece:

At the time, the offer we had on the table for Twitter—though a heck of a lot of money and a huge win for investors and anyone else involved—didn’t seem like it captured the upside. Even though we weren’t huge, and there were still a lot of doubters, I believed our potential was unbounded.

…

In the Twitter case, we had no desire to sell. I had actually just become CEO and was raring to go—as was the team. Additionally, the company we were having the discussion with didn’t seem like one in which we’d fit particularly well or the team would be stoked about.

The passage presents us with an intriguing alternate reality where Facebook acquired Twitter, establishing an essential monopoly on the world’s largest and most recognizable social networks. And an example of how it’s still possible to mesh the concepts of business acumen and moral code.

Jeff Bezos’ Wife And Co-Workers Call Out Brad Stone’s Amazon Book As Inaccurate…On Amazon

Amazon was one of the first retail websites to allow negative reviews of the products that they sold to appear right in the listing. This revolutionary practice which has been mimicked earth-wide at this point was one item focused on in Brad Stone’s recent book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

Updated below with personal statement from Craig Berman, VP Global Communications at Amazon.

The book, which I found very interesting and a great read overall, was released last month and is available on Amazon’s site for purchase. In what can only be seen as a moment of delicious cyclical irony, a new fairly negative review of the book has been posted by none other than Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos’ wife, MacKenzie Bezos. We’ve confirmed the identity of the reviewer, the only peson to leave a one-star reaction so far.

MacKenzie’s review is an intriguing read, and features the incredible qualifying disclosure “Jeff and I have been married for 20 years.”

In her review, she calls out what she feels are ‘numerous factual inaccuracies’ in the book, including one right off the bat:

In the first chapter, the book sets the stage for Bezos’s decision to leave his job and build an Internet bookstore. “At the time Bezos was thinking about what to do next, he had recently finished the novel Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, about a butler who wistfully recalls his personal and professional choices during a career in service in wartime Great Britain. So looking back on life’s important junctures was on Bezos’s mind when he came up with what he calls ‘the regret-minimization framework’ to decide the next step to take at this juncture in his career.” It’s a good beginning, and it weaves in nicely with what’s to come. But it’s not true. Jeff didn’t read Remains of the Day until a year after he started Amazon.

MacKenzie also takes an exception with the fact that the book, in its effort to delve into the motivations of Bezos, strays from fact and into the realm of ‘characterization’ too often:

“Bezos felt…” “Bezos believed….” “Bezos wanted….” “Bezos fixated…” “Bezos worried….” “Bezos was frustrated…” “Bezos was consumed…” “In the circuitry of Bezos’s brain, something flipped…” When reading phrases like these, which are used in the book routinely, readers should remember that Jeff was never interviewed for this book, and should also take note of how seldom these guesses about his feelings and motives are marked with a footnote indicating there is any other source to substantiate them.

Notably, Stone’s book starts off with an account of a meeting with Bezos at the beginning of the project. Stone went to him to get Bezos’ blessing to approach friends and family and other acquaintances for interviews. This theoretically improved Stone’s chances of getting those people to talk without fear of Bezos’ displeasure. When MacKenzie notes that her husband ‘was not interviewed’, this may indicate that followup questions about those collected accounts were either not asked or not answered by Bezos.

The tension between laying out a business narrative and a ‘ripping yarn’ is also addressed by MacKenzie’s review. I found myself thinking about this several times while reading, though without the advantage of her first-hand knowledge of events. It was also at the forefront of my mind when readingNYT reporter Nick Bilton’s book ‘Hatching Twitter’, as it too delved into the minds and motivations of its subjects to create an emotional portrait of some situations:

But when an author plans to market a book as non-fiction, he is obliged to find a suspenseful story arc that doesn’t rely on mischaracterizing or avoiding important parts of the truth. I am grateful this is the era of the Internet, when characters in non-fiction can step out of books, as Jonathan Leblang and Rick Dalzell have done, and speak for themselves. Ideally, authors are careful to ensure people know whether what they are reading is history or an entertaining fictionalization. Hollywood often uses a more honest label: “a story based on true events.” If authors won’t admit they’ve crossed this important line, their characters can do it for them.

The two other reviews that she references are those of Jonathan Leblang, a current Director of Kindle at Amazon’s Lab126 facility and Rick Dalzell, a former SVP at Amazon. Leblang’s review takes some exception to Stones’ revelations about Bezos’ biological father (from whom he has been estranged for years). Dalzell’s focuses on the inaccuracies as well, including a passage about Bezos’ laugh which has been bandied about quite a bit:

While I found it rather interesting, lots of stories are missing or just inaccurate. Brad painted a one-dimensional picture of Jeff as a ruthless capitalist. He completely missed his warmth, his humor, and his empathy — all qualities abundantly present in the man.

One of my favorite things about Jeff is his laugh. But Brad’s quote from me implies exactly the opposite: “You can’t misunderstand it,” says Rick Dalzell, Amazon’s former chief information officer, who says Bezos often wields his laugh when others fail to meet his lofty standards. “It’s disarming and punishing. He’s punishing you.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. In actuality, Jeff’s laugh is spontaneous, sincere, warm and endearing. It diffuses stressful situations. Clearly, Brad misunderstood me.

Obviously, without first-hand knowledge of the events I can’t speak to the 100% accuracy of the text, but I can say that the book is probably worth reading, despite the notes on accuracy. Leblang, for one, also says the book is worth reading, in spite of that.

The response by MacKenzie Bezos is a valuable resource for those who have or plan to read the book, helping to offer some perspective from the other side of the coin. I found it interesting that one of Bezos’ first questions to Stone as noted in the book is how he plans to handle the ‘narrative fallacy’.

“The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories.”

Taleb’s solution in the book is to side-step the desire to tell stories or rely on memory, instead being as precise and clinical as possible — relying on data to support the narrative. Obviously, MacKenzie Bezos believes that Stone’s book didn’t do quite enough of that, and has taken to one of Amazon’s first nods to data over narrative — the customer review — to voice her displeasure.

We’ve reached out to Stone for any comment on the reviews.

Update: Craig Berman, Amazon VP of Global Communications, reached out to us with an additional note on Stone’s research for the book:

Over the course of the author’s reporting, Amazon facilitated meetings for him with more than half a dozen senior Amazon executives, during which he had every opportunity to inquire about or fact-check claims made by former employees. He chose not to. I met in person with him on at least three occasions and exchanged dozens of emails where he only checked a few specific quotes. He had every opportunity to thoroughly fact check and bring a more balanced viewpoint to his narrative, but he was very secretive about the book and simply chose not to.

YouTube Music Awards Were Chaos You’ll Never See On TV

Can YouTube create live content that inspires watercooler zeitgeist moments like television? Google’s giving it a shot with the YouTube Music Awards, a celebration of do-it-yourself Internet culture livestreaming on YouTube right now. It’s chaotic, innovative, offensive, silly, and downright weird. But one thing’s for sure. You won’t see this on TV.

Creative director Spike Jonze’s goal with the the YouTube Music Awards was to create “live music videos” on stage with artists like The Arcade Fire and Lady Gaga. You can read the New York Times’ piece on the lead up to the YouTube Music Awards for more context on the production and its intention.

Judging by the concurrent viewer number shown on the livestream (hovering around 175,000 with a peak at 220,000 during Lady Gaga’s performance) the show isn’t a runaway hit. But we’ll have to wait and see whether people take advantage of the option to watch the show on YouTube later.

We’ll have more analysis after the event ends but for now, here’s our live blog:

5:45 EST - Rather than awkward red carpet footage, viewers showing up early are being greeted with behind-the-scenes interviews and clips of how the New York City production came together.

6:00 – With little fanfare, hosts Jason Schwartzman (actor from Rushmore) and Reggie Watts (improv musician and comedian) have kicked off the first YouTube Music Awards. The microphones are bit quiet signaling this won’t be the highest production value affair.

6:03 –  For the first live music video, actress Greta Gerwig is dancing out her breakout woes to a new tune from Arcade Fire. The traditionally very serious band doesn’t quite mesh with the funny faces and spaz-out dance moves Gerwig is tossing around.

6:05 – The hosts are already fumbling over themselves trying to keep the chaotic program on the rails. They introduce a sprawling medley of YouTube hits sung by tribute musicians and viral video stars like Walk Off The Earth (a whole band who plays covers by simultaneously playing a single guitar) and Tay Zonday of “Chocolate Rain” fame. It’s ridiculous and campy, but the middle-school dance squad doing “What Does The Fox Say” was cute.

6:15 – The first YouTube Music Award for YouTube Breakthrough goes to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis for their “Thrift Shop” video. Macklemore tells the crowd they shot the video for just $5,000 with a bunch of their friends, highlighting the democratizing nature of YouTube. And in the first moment proving this is not television, after thanking his family and fiance, Macklemore thanks “the guy who used to sell me shrooms.”

6:25 – Lady Gaga draws the biggest audience of the night with a stripped down performance of her new song “Dope”, taking advantage of the lack of censors to sing “I know I fucked up again because I lost my only friend.” Instead of her typical sensational costumes, she’s keeping it real in a flannel button up and baseball cap. With tears seeming to build behind her eyes, Gaga provides the most compelling moment of the evening when she cries out “I need you more than dope!”

6:30 – In one of many strange gimmicks, Schwartzman and Watts have to dig the name of the winner of the “Response Of The Year” award out of a set of birthday cakes. It goes to pop violinist Lindsey Stirling & Pentatonix for their cover of Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive”. Sterling says “I owe everything about my success to YouTube. YouTube let me be true to my passion…true to myself.”

6:35 – Tyler The Creator of Odd Future (not A$AP Rocky as we originally wrote) and Earl Sweatshirt shoot a live music video by rapping from inside a rowdy moshpit.

6:40 – The most artistically successful part of the evening saw Lindsey Sterling flying on wires through a lightning-struck city scape. Her music gives the impression of hurdling through space and Jonze captured it vividly.

6:45 - The discombobulating nature of the event is starting to make it feel grating. When Taylor Swift song “I Knew You Were Trouble” wins the YouTube Phenomenon award for inspiring the most fan videos, Arcade Fire lead singer Win Butler comes out and “steals” the microphone, mimicking Kanye West’s famous interruption of a Taylor Swift award speech year ago. Butler announces that obviously “Harlem Shake” should have won. It all feels a bit canned.

6:50 – Korean girl group Girls’ Generation wins Video Of The Year. Their “I Got A Boy” video seems pretty boring and has had little domestic notoriety despite racking up 70 million+ views. It seems like an obvious nod to YouTube’s international audience.

7:00 – MIA performs “Come Walk With Me” in psychedelic LED tunnel. Difficulty capturing the lights on camera detracted from what was probably quite dazzling in person.

7:10 – Eminem inexplicably wins “Artist Of The Year” despite his new album not being released until later this week. He beat out musicians who were actually huge this year like Justin Bieber and PSY, whose “Gangnam Style” now has 1.8 billion views.

7:15 – Well isn’t that convenient. Eminem is the closing performance for the show…except he’s nowhere to be found. YouTube quickly pipes in a jagged set of “highlight” clips from the show, followed by Reggie Watts freestyling to kill time. When Eminem appears five minutes later, his performance of “Rap God” is a middling attempt at higher brow art shot in black and white in a blank soundstage.

7:25 – That’s all folks. Schwartzman and Watts seem to have completely run out of things to say as they close the show, with Watts thanking his home state of Montana. The last meaningful thing uttered before the stream cuts off was Spike Jonze saying thanking YouTube “for letting us make this mess.” Accurate.

So Did It Work?

The YouTube Music Awards was fun to watch. The entertainment oscillated between coming from appreciation for great musicians, being impressed by the artistic vision of the whole production, and cringe-worthy scenes when everything seemed ready fall apart. It was anything but boring, which is a huge improvement on the multi-hour Grammys. And it didn’t run gags into the ground like the MTV Video Music Awards.

What was noticeably absent was the practically infinite money of Google. Keeping with the homemade style of much of its content, the hosted interludes between segments were rough around the edges. Cursing, drug references, and the breakneck pace kept it feeling young and fresh.

Still, the YouTube Music Awards could have been much better. The Eminem show lacked inspiration, and though Tyler The Creator’s performance captured the aggression of his music, it looked like a crappy concert video you’d shoot yourself. Unrehearsed chit-chat and mediocre cinematography made it less than spellbinding.

Crystallizing the chaos, at one pointa stagehand (seen below in the middle back) had to come out on stage and tell Schwartzman and Watts they only had 20 more seconds of dead air to fill because Eminem was finally ready to go on.

Some in the YouTube creator community blasted the show for focusing on major label musicians rather than the stars who made their names on YouTube itself. Sterling did win an award and perform, and Destorm, another YouTube celeb also took home a play button statue, but it was the radio stars who got the top slots.

The biggest problem may be that the show lacked a “must-see/must-tweet” moment. There was no Britney Spears-Madonna kiss, Kanye West controversy, or jaw-dropping dance number. YouTube could have done more to engineer something blogworthy.

If you wanted an off-the-cuff, lo-fi awards show, YouTube delivered. It was fun, full of surprises and ambition. If you wanted something to rival television glitz like the MTV Video Music Awards or Grammys, you’re gonna have to give YouTube some time to get its act together.

But if YouTube can do this well already, the TV networks have something toworry about. Google doesn’t demand perfection, it demands progress,  and the YouTube Music Awards made television look dated.