These Are The People Behind Million-Dollar Sales Of Companies That Sell On Amazon

Reuters/Neil Hall

Amazon is no longer a website you use to get rid of a few old college textbooks. Many of the mom-and-pop businesses that rely on the retailing behemoth as their main virtual storefront have grown so large that a market has emerged of brokers who buy and sell such companies.

“Almost everything in e-commerce has an Amazon component, if it’s not totally Amazon,” Mark Daoust, CEO of Quiet Light Brokerage, which first started brokering online business deals in 2007, told BuzzFeed News. “That is a change from two years ago. Now it’s a rule of thumb: e-commerce businesses have an Amazon store or are completely built on Amazon.”

The rise of business brokers who are completely tied to Amazon speaks to the market heft of the e-commerce giant, which is now one of the top five companies by market capitalization — worth around $460 billion. Its revenues have grown by 122% over the last five years, reaching roughly $136 billion in 2017.

Today, 51% of Amazon sales are through third-party sellers — that is, companies that aren't owned by Amazon.

And as Amazon has aggressively expanded its third-party marketplace — where it invites outsiders to do business on its website — so have grown the dollar signs that come from buying and selling those outsiders' businesses. The most valuable businesses that sell their wares on Amazon are anywhere between three and five years old, have established brands on the marketplace, manufacture their own exclusive products, and fulfill shipping and returns through Amazon, according to brokers in the business.

One such middleman, Empire Flippers, told BuzzFeed News it brokered 58 deals last quarter, including the sale of an athletics company in February that went for $1.7 million. Empire said its revenues reached $6.6 million in the second quarter this year.

A large part of this growth comes from a surge in established businesses that fulfill shipping and returns through Amazon. Businesses that participate in the company's Fulfillment by Amazon program (also known as FBA) have a better chance at being the seller in the “add to cart” button, which means more sales. The program grew by 70% in 2016. with more than 2 billion units shipped through the program, Amazon reported in January.

“We are getting a lot more Amazon FBA, because a lot of people who started these businesses are bearing enough fruits to sell,” Greg Elfrink, content manager for Empire Flippers, told BuzzFeed News.

But “Amazon FBA businesses are still relatively new, so the market is still gaining faith in them as an investment or business acquisition target,” he said.

AP/Ross Franklin

Elfrink said that in January, Amazon's FBA businesses sold for an average of 20 times their net monthly profit. Since then, they've seen about a 15% rise in their value on average, selling at 23 times their net monthly profit.

Ace Chapman, who bought his first e-commerce business in 1999, told BuzzFeed News that he and several business partners went in on the $1.7 million athletics company deal because it had strong profit margins and sales traffic from both Amazon and its own website. He declined to name the company.

Customer feedback and reviews were also crucial in evaluating whether or not to buy the business because shoppers can easily buy from a competitor with just one click.

“We want something that has four stars and above, on average,” said Chapman, who has made a cottage industry of giving advice about buying and selling small businesses. “You're dealing with a really competitive space. Everyone is going to look at the ratings and decide if they want to buy the product or not.”

youtube.com

One wrinkle is Amazon's vague approach to sales of the businesses that sell on its site. Transferring Amazon seller accounts is prohibited, according to the company's website, which explains, “If the ownership of a business changes for any reason, the new owner should establish a new seller account.”

But as Amazon fulfillment becomes a more integral part of retail companies, it is more common that business owners notify the company about new ownership after a deal goes through. “Amazon will review legitimate transfer requests, such as the sale of a legitimate business, on a case-by-case basis,” the company told BuzzFeed News.

And the brokers themselves have words of caution. Daoust, of Quiet Light Brokerage, warned of a “gold rush” atmosphere surrounding the buying and selling of small businesses on Amazon, and added that the market's reliance on Amazon can leave businesses vulnerable to the whims of the company and its policies.

“There is a lot of money to be made, but I think people should be cautious to some extent,” he said. “Amazon can change the rules, and when they do, you have no idea how that’s going to affect your business. Like any gold rush, feel free to go for it, but understand the nature of the gold rush — eventually the gold dries up.”

Brokers told BuzzFeed News that people come to them with businesses to sell for a number of reasons. Some people have been running their Amazon shops as a husband-wife team and are looking to offload the work it takes to keep the business running. Some owners sell in order to diversify their income streams, and others may have a life change — a new baby, an upcoming retirement — that prompts them to want to cash out.

When working with potential sellers, brokers will evaluate the business — its sales figures, ranking, products, customer feedback — and determine whether or not it can be sold. Some brokers will send out a notice about the business to buyers they work with regularly who then start to make offers.

Similar to real estate brokers, brokers who buy and sell companies that do business on Amazon collect a number of offers and present them to the owner to review. Buyers usually have an opportunity to ask sellers hard questions about, say, sales dips or low rankings during a certain time of the year.

Brokers told BuzzFeed News they earn anywhere between 8% and 15% of the transaction price. Some brokerages, like Empire Flippers, charge sellers a 5% refundable deposit and take a flat $10,000 on the sale of a larger business.

Most brokers only work with sellers who have built legitimate businesses on Amazon, a process that can take years. Because of the personal and complex nature of these deals, brokers step in to make sure that whoever ends up buying the business will take proper care of it.

“It’s not like selling a house, where you don't really care who you sell it to,” Thomas Smale, the founder of FE International, which brokers deals anywhere between $20,000 and $2 million, told BuzzFeed News. “Most people who sell a business want to make sure they’re selling to someone who isn’t going to run it into the ground.”

Nutrifect via Amazon.com / Via amazon.com

Ken Courtright, an e-commerce entrepreneur, recently bought two nutritional supplement brands — Nutrifect and Naturelle — through FE International. Courtright told BuzzFeed News that he looks for several factors in a potential Amazon acquisition: stable monthly revenues, evergreen products, and minimal competition. Another requirement is that it's fulfilled by Amazon.

“I would not buy any type of business where another seller had inventory out of a home or garage,” he said. “If you buy a business FBA, it’s a great safety net and security platform. You can fact-check everything about that product. There is nothing the seller can hide or manipulate or fake.”

Flippa.com / Via flippa.com

Not all companies that buy and sell these businesses operate as brokers. Some websites like Flippa.com work like eBay, with the marketplace determining the ultimate price of the Amazon storefront, Sid Galada, Flippa's head of growth and product marketing, told BuzzFeed News.

“Generally speaking, our big vision statement is to have every business up for sale to be facilitated through Flippa,” Galada said.

The marketplace sees between 100 to 150 business sales a day, he said. Flippa then takes 8% to 15% of each sale, which can range from $20 to $2 million, he said.

For instance, a spot check of Flippa on Tuesday found that it was taking bids for the domain name ToniaGara.com, an Ontario Canada-based travel website which began bidding at $400,000, and a site called CarInsight.com, a UAE-based company that provides information to new car buyers and had a starting bid price of $3 million.

One Flippa buyer is Dana Rakvica, who paid $20,000 in May for an Amazon FBA business called Opus Health and Beauty, which sells five types of health supplements. The company did $240,000 in sales in 2016, he said, but is now on track to do $700,00 in sales this year after he used marketing techniques to get the storefront back on the first page of search results.

“What’s nice about it is it’s set up for you,” Rakvica said. “I have other businesses, and I’m fairly busy. I wanted something I could set up and just grow. It had revenue history, so there was proof it could be done. It just needed some attention and TLC.”

While businesses that sell on Amazon may be low maintenance for entrepreneurs like Rakvica, who has sold about 100 apps on Flippa and bought 20 to 30 websites, they aren't without risk.

“You have to play by the rules, and the rules change,” he said. “Frankly, in any business, even brick-and-mortar businesses, you have to pivot when the market changes. When the rules change, you need to pivot and change.”

Quelle: <a href="These Are The People Behind Million-Dollar Sales Of Companies That Sell On Amazon“>BuzzFeed

Facebook Just Shared The First Data About How Effective Its Fake News Label Is

Facebook

A news story that's been labeled false by Facebook's third-party fact-checking partners sees its future impressions on the platform drop by 80%, according to new data contained in an email sent by a Facebook executive and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The message also said it typically takes “over three days” for the label to be applied to a false story, and that Facebook wants to work with its partners to speed the process.

The data about the effectiveness of Facebook's fact-checking partnership initiative was contained in a brief email sent today by Jason White, Facebook's manager of news partnerships, to the company's fact-checking partners.

“We have been closely analyzing data over several weeks and have learned that once we receive a false rating from one of our fact checking partners, we are able to reduce future impressions on Facebook by 80 percent,” White wrote.

A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the system begins to “demote” a story in the News Feed after a single fact-checker finds it to be false. The label is then applied to a link once at least two checkers rate it false.

The statistic about the reduced spread of fact-checked stories (which was not accompanied by additional information about how that figure was arrived upon) is the first time Facebook has shared internal data about its checking program. White's email emphasized that the company wants to work with its partners “to surface these hoaxes sooner” due to the lag time between a hoax being published and the label being applied.

“It commonly takes over 3 days, and we know most of the impressions typically happen in that initial time period,” White wrote. “We also need to surface more of them, as we know we miss many.”

Facebook has been working with external fact-checkers like PolitiFact and Snopes since December in an effort to reduce the spread of false stories on its platform. The checkers are given access to a special tool where they can view stories being shared on Facebook that are flagged as potentially worthy of a fact check. If two or more checkers deem a link to be false, Facebook ads a label to inform users that it has been flagged by fact-checkers.

From the moment of its launch, the efficacy of the disputed label has been questioned. In May, The Guardian reported that some publishers of false stories saw shares of their content increase after the disputed label was applied. Last month, Politico cited data from Yale researchers that found the label “has only a small impact on whether readers perceive their headlines as true.”

White's email is the first time the company has provided its own data to back up public statements from executives that the fact checks and labels do help stop a story from being seen on the platform. It also gives the fact-checking partners the first tangible sense of the impact of their work.

Facebook has also long emphasized that data gathered from fact checks help inform decisions made by News Feed algorithms in terms of what content to surface for users, and that this ultimately has more effect than the public-facing label. But the checkers have been asking for data from Facebook since the early days of the program.

@Mantzarlis / Via Twitter: @Mantzarlis

White's email also included a caution that the push to increase the speed and volume of fact checks should not come at the expense of free speech. This likely refers to Facebook's guidance to fact-checking partners to only focus on stories that are 100% false, and avoid any with shades of grey.

“Increasing our speed and efficacy is important, but it’s equally important we do this the right way, and don’t restrict legitimate speech,” he said. “It’s a difficult tension, but we are confident we can improve our efforts.

Read the full email:

We'd like to provide an initial update on the progress we’re seeing in our shared efforts to reduce false news on Facebook. Thanks to your hard work and partnership, we have learned how to reduce distribution of news hoaxes.

We have been closely analyzing data over several weeks and have learned that once we receive a false rating from one of our fact checking partners, we are able to reduce future impressions on Facebook by 80 percent. While we are encouraged by the efficacy we’re seeing, we believe there is much more work to do. As a first priority, we are working to surface these hoaxes sooner. It commonly takes over 3 days, and we know most of the impressions typically happen in that initial time period. We also need to surface more of them, as we know we miss many.

Increasing our speed and efficacy is important, but it’s equally important we do this the right way, and don’t restrict legitimate speech. It’s a difficult tension, but we are confident we can improve our efforts.

Please know your partnership is valuable to us. We know we must also take additional steps to meet this challenge and are continuing to pursue a multi-pronged approach to stop the spread of false news on Facebook.

We plan to provide you additional updates about our efforts going forward, and appreciate all the work you continue to do.

Quelle: <a href="Facebook Just Shared The First Data About How Effective Its Fake News Label Is“>BuzzFeed

Ev Williams Wants To Save Media — Again. But Some Writers And Publishers Are Skeptical.

Medium CEO Ev Williams

Obvious Ventures

Ev Williams changes his mind. A lot.

Most recently, the CEO of the online publishing platform Medium switched the company to a $5 monthly subscription for premium writing, scrapping its previous strategy of sharing ad revenue with small publishers. Now, anyone who publishes on Medium — not just well-known writers and publishers — will be able to put their content behind a paywall and get paid based on engagement. It’s an ambitious scheme, one in which a writer can potentially earn payment proportional to her impact on an audience, while avoiding the web’s traditional reliance on advertisers.

But this is far from the first big change — or, to use the term of art, “pivot” — for Medium, which has tried and discarded at least five business models in as many years. Interviews with 17 sources close to Medium paint a picture of a company that has plenty of buzz but no stable strategy, and that has cycled through and in some cases alienated the writers, editors, and publishing executives it purports to put first.

“Ev Williams is trying to brute force his way through the problem of publishing and monetization.”

Medium’s biggest challenge, according to many of these sources: its capricious founder and CEO. Today’s Medium is the product of five years’ worth of zigzagging decisions that Williams has made as its leader — which makes its path forward unclear.

“I don’t even have to make an argument against it,” said one ex-employee, bluntly, of the most recent change. “I just have to wait six months.”

Medium disputed this characterization. “Medium has spent the year building a model that helps writers and publishers get compensation for their meaningful work,” a company spokesperson wrote to BuzzFeed News in an email. “That strategy has been consistent since the start of the year — and, really, is an extension of Ev’s first post on Medium five years ago.”

For many tech startups, continued refinement of a business model is all part of the process. But writers and publishers who've dealt with Medium and its unpredictable strategic shifts say they've begun to realize that Bay Area techno-utopian startup culture may be an inherent mismatch with the business of publishing — or, at the very least, that Medium’s culture is.

“Ev Williams is trying to brute force his way through the problem of publishing and monetization,” said Choire Sicha, cofounder of The Awl network, which migrated a handful of its sites onto Medium during its publisher partner phase in late 2015 and early 2016. “In doing so, he has upended people’s lives — he has upended good publications.”

“I understand the desire to be agile and to pivot, and to try new things when things aren’t working,” Sicha continued. “But it’s destructive — you can’t try people and things on, then discard them. It’s not how a media company or a publishing company can work.”

Medium

Medium was founded in 2012 as a blogging tool with a cleaner interface, but quickly set itself apart from other content management systems like WordPress by hiring reputable literary agents and legendary editors — including Wired.com’s former editor-in-chief Evan Hansen, who was tasked with developing original editorial content for the platform by recruiting “collection editors.” As Williams positioned the company from the outset, it would be more involved with the media and publishing worlds than any other content platform that had come before it.

“We … in order to make sure [Medium is] as good as possible, publish on [the Medium] platform,” Williams told journalist Kara Swisher, during an onstage interview at Recode’s Code/Media conference in 2015. “So Medium the company is both a publisher and a platform, but our effort is to build the best publishing platform there is.”

Within a couple of years, Medium had hired writers and editors to work for the company directly, and was running four publications that functioned like professional online magazines: Matter (its flagship longform publication), Backchannel (a tech-focused publication led by veteran Wired reporter Steven Levy), Cuepoint (focused on music), and The Nib (comics). Pundits started referring to it as a “platisher” — a new kind of hybrid platform-publisher company. The future was bright: By early 2016, Matter had won a National Magazine Award for its reporting, and it seemed like Medium had finally cemented its reputation as a home for some of the best writing and reporting on the web.

Then Medium shifted to branded content partnerships. And then decided it wanted to host boutique online publications. In late 2015 and early 2016, it brought more than a dozen small, separate publishing operations onto the platform, while Medium’s in-house publications either quietly wound down or moved away from the platform. A year later, the platform pivoted again, firing a third of its employees — 50 workers in nonengineering roles — and shutting down its New York and DC offices. The publishing partners — beloved sites like The Awl, The Ringer, Pacific Standard, and ThinkProgress — left Medium in a mass exodus.

Now, a few months later, Williams has a new model, one that he maintains is the right one for today’s state of affairs in online publishing. The current membership model includes a small team of editors — jobs that had existed at the company until January 2017 when it unceremoniously eliminated them. The only difference now seems to be that the company’s new-again editorial staff will be much smaller — and this time, editors won’t be attached to particular editorial brand names, but rather work for Medium as a whole. It appears, in other words, that Williams has pivoted so many times he’s ended up right back where he started.

A company spokesperson emphasized the difference between editors' roles now and in the platform's previous incarnation. “When Medium had its own in-house publications, the editors acted in the more traditional editorial role — they would assign stories, shape the content for each publication, help control the voice and tone,” the spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

Now, the role of the editor at Medium is more like a creative services function in the vein of a platform like YouTube, the spokesperson said. “[Editors offer] copy editing and feedback for commissioned and higher-end content,” the spokesperson wrote. “Writers are in complete control over the content they write, the subjects they take on, and the overall narrative. Medium’s position is not to dictate that kind of creative and artistic oversight.”

“Our effort is to build the best publishing platform there is.”

“What I’m trying to make clear is that it was never the strategy to become publishers ourselves,” Williams told BuzzFeed News on a recent morning, sitting on the patio of a Manhattan hotel.

“I don’t want to make light of it — [Medium running its own publications] was a serious effort … But it was an experimental part of what we were doing that was meant to teach us, and provide both models and learning.”

Models and learning. Williams repeated these words twice during our conversation. “The reason why we’re talking about an editorial layer now is because we have a different model,” he said. “Our mission and the core thesis has always been that we can build a system where the incentives and feedback loops fuel better and better content.”

It all sounds promising enough. But over the past five years, Medium has burned bridges with the very writers, editors, and media executives it now hopes will flock to its re-re-re-re-reimagined platform.

For some of them, the trouble started back when Medium was just trying to gain a foothold in the industry. In 2014, Arikia Millikan, founder of the female tech collective LadyBits, wrote a post called “LadyBits’ First and Last Year on Medium.” In it, Millikan described how life as a Medium “collection editor” in 2013 meant waking up to various tweaks from production and engineering teams that sent dozens of emails into her inbox and bottlenecked her workflow; traffic tallies that fluctuated wildly because of the choices of Medium’s curation team; and unreliable income. “I began to think of Ev Williams like Willy Wonka, and the Collection Editors as the golden ticket ‘winners’ in his chocolate factory,” Millikan wrote. “We couldn’t anticipate what was coming next. We just had to make it through one obstacle after the other and stay alive.”

“We were promised stability,” Millikan told BuzzFeed News this week, “and then the rug was pulled out from under us, with a dismissive explanation only granted as an afterthought.”

Bill Rosenblatt, a media technology consultant, suspects each shift Williams implements at Medium is driven by external signals from the changing winds of the wider media and publishing industry. For example, when Medium hired employees for Matter, Backchannel, The Nib, and Cuepoint, venture capitalists were just ramping up their spending on online media upstarts. Medium, it seemed, was chasing a trend.

Former Medium employees recall the trappings of a cushy startup life. The San Francisco office is in an airy industrial warehouse dating back to 1908, with exposed beams, lots of light, a fully stocked bar, and in-house nap nooks, yoga, and meditation rooms. “It was really over the top, kind of like the stuff you see in the [HBO] show Silicon Valley,” said one former employee. “I was so suspicious of it. Especially when you get laid off — you see there’s money for this, but not for that.”

Williams was a soft-spoken, rather aloof boss with a dry sense of humor, sources who used to work at Medium said. “He’s a man who, when he speaks, his words have value — because he doesn’t dole out a lot of them,” said one ex-employee. At Medium, there was a meeting every Friday called “Fam,” during which people shared what they were working on with the rest of the company. “Ev led it, and he was like a standup comic sometimes,” said the ex-employee. Still, you never wanted to be the one to demand face time with him, the source said. “You didn't want to make him uncomfortable. He was very low-key. You didn’t want to be the person who's like, ‘Hey, Ev, Ev, I need to talk to you!’ He had this attitude of ‘Just be cool, and we’ll get it all done.’”

@thenib / Twitter

Things were good in the early days of the company, sources told BuzzFeed News. Williams gave editors a lot of freedom over their publications, according to one former Medium employee — and from an editorial, creative standpoint, it felt almost too good to be true. “We got very fair, generous budgets, we got to call all our writer friends and figure out a way to work with them,” the former employee said. “Interestingly, there was very little talk of ads or revenue. Everyone knew we had to make money, but it wasn’t the priority — it was number 12 on the list.” Matter in particular had a budget that far outstripped other web publications at the time, the former Medium employee recalled. “But I knew that the sun would eventually have to shine on [the revenue] side of the business,” the source said.

According to the source, as the months went by, it became clear how Williams dealt with problems at the company. “The way he works — and I guess the way that a lot of successful Silicon Valley executives work — is that they have a problem they want to solve, and they take smart people, money, and resources, and they throw it at the problem,” said the source.

At a 2015 company retreat in Napa Valley, California, Williams showed he apparently thought the current editorial strategy was a problem. During the getaway, two former Medium employees said, Williams called a meeting for just the editorial folks, and said that he wasn’t happy with the way things were going. “He wanted to make things more about ‘network’ connections and responses on Medium,” one recalled. “For everyone on the editorial side, it sounded really foreboding to what we were doing there.”

“The meeting was the result of Williams basically waking up one day saying he didn’t want Medium to be a publisher,” added another. After the meeting, Williams penned a blog post outlining his new vision for the company.

(A Medium spokesperson said the company is unable to confirm this anecdote, since it happened so long ago, and given that the employees cited are no longer with Medium. “It’s an antiquated notion, though, because the definition of a publisher has changed since 2015,” the spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. Medium can be seen as a publisher, a platform, and a network, the spokesperson added: “People have always tried to define us based on outdated buzzwords, while we are focused on building a new, modern model that works.”)

At the time of the Napa retreat, the company practiced “holocracy,” a management philosophy that in theory avoids a hierarchical management structure by empowering employees to make business decisions. But it didn't always work that way at Medium. Former employees said they often had to work backward, unpacking Williams’ vague and shifting mission statements to figure out what, exactly, he wanted them to do. After the company retreat, several sources said, Medium’s 25 or so editorial employees entered into a months-long period of awkwardness: They weren’t laid off outright, but they got signals that the goals of the company were no longer aligned with their presence. “We had this series of work groups where you tried to figure out what your job and the future of publishing was,” one source said. Former employees suspected that Medium was trying to thin out its editorial staff by attrition.

Some people took offers to leave. All of the in-house publications eventually moved away from Medium. Matter was spun off as Matter Studios, then quietly shut down.

(Medium said it no longer practices holocracy. “As we grew and scaled, it became a less intuitive structure for us,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. The spokesperson also emphasized that the company parted on good terms with Matter. “We are proud of the work they did,” they wrote.)

Williams himself defended how the changes within the company took place. “Some of those efforts were pared down before we had any change in business model,” he told BuzzFeed News. “And I don’t think it was ideal for the people working on those teams, because we couldn’t set them up for success as much as I’d like.” He said Medium started to have conversations with Condé Nast about acquiring Backchannel (which it eventually did), partly so Levy and company could do even more ambitious work. “They wanted to expand, and we were like, ‘We’re happy to have you as part of Medium at this level — it’s not a huge problem for us. But I’d love to see you grow in doing what you want to do, and you’re probably better off in an editorial organization to do that.’ And that seemed like a win-win.”

Medium

Quelle: <a href="Ev Williams Wants To Save Media — Again. But Some Writers And Publishers Are Skeptical.“>BuzzFeed

Amazon Is Finally Releasing A Waterproof Kindle

The second-generation Kindle Oasis is now pool- and bathtub-friendly.

They want to read e-books in the bath tub without fear.

OWN / Via youtube.com

And here, in the pool, whilst floating.

Giphy Originals / Via giphy.com

The wait is over — Amazon is finally releasing a water-resistant Kindle Oasis.

With Project Ark, Uber Aims To Consolidate Its Splintered Engineering Division

Noah's Ark construction on Ararat

Photostockam / Getty Images

After a year marked by scandals and chaos, there’s an operation underway inside Uber aimed at restoring a sense of order. Project Ark, which was announced internally in September, is supposed to unify Uber’s splintered engineering team, sources close to the company tell BuzzFeed News.

After years of rapid scaling under the leadership of Chief Technology Officer Thuan Pham, Uber’s core engineering architecture became disorganized. In some cases, engineers on different teams were doing the same job, which created redundancy and inefficiency, current and former employees in the engineering division tell BuzzFeed News.

“So many people built similar stuff, it’s hard to maintain,” said a source familiar with Uber who asked not to be named in this story.

Another source said it was common for two separate engineering teams to build competing solutions to the same problem. Sometimes this was by design — having multiple groups compete to design or fix a product helps ensure the best results. But the goal of Project Ark is to reduce this kind of overlap, in part because continuing to maintain duplicated code taxes the company's resources.

One independent faction inside the engineering department, the realtime team, was led by Amos Barreto, who joined Uber in 2011 but recently left the company, BuzzFeed News has learned. Barreto was named in ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s 2013 letter asking employees not to sleep with each other during a company trip to Miami. Sources close to Uber who spoke with BuzzFeed News on conditions of anonymity said Barreto’s leadership style was an exemplar of Uber’s notoriously cliquey, hard partying work culture.

Project Ark will be led by a coalition of over a dozen managers who sources say will be tasked with streamlining and centralizing Uber’s engineering department. So far, there’s been no talk of layoffs, sources tell BuzzFeed News. In fact, Uber says it plans to hire executives to its engineering division. The project is being overseen by Pham, who, despite allegations that he ignored reports of sexual harassment within the engineering division, emerged from the terminations that followed Uber’s internal investigations unscathed.

“Basically a question came up. Why is everything so hard and why are we spending so much on engineering?” said an anonymous Uber engineer. “Kalanick always considered engineering an investment. Someone might be finally looking at it like a cost.”

Uber has been investigating its costs more closely lately. At the end of last month, Uber started shutting down its Xchange leasing program after learning that the program was costing the company not $500 per vehicle, as originally estimated, but closer to $9,000 per vehicle. In ending the program, Uber eliminated roughly 500 jobs.

Reached for comment, an Uber spokesperson said Project Ark isn’t about saving money, but about preparing the company growth over the next year. Uber is currently aiming for a 2019 IPO. “During previous years of hyper-growth when we needed to move incredibly fast on all fronts, we emphasized decentralization. While that approach delivered rapid results and early successes for the company, it's now time to unify and simplify our technology stack, strengthen our core infrastructure, and improve our engineering productivity,” the spokesperson said. “This will better align our teams, reduce duplication, and increase leverage across our tech stack.”

Separately, Uber is moving to physically consolidate its Bay Area workforce, which is currently scattered across at least three separate building in San Francisco, into a single Mission Bay office that’s currently under construction. In August, Uber announced it was abandoning its plans to move into the Oakland office building it had purchased in 2013. The company told BuzzFeed News it was looking to sell the building in hopes of saving money and creating a more cohesive workplace culture.

Project Ark is more comprehensive continuation of a 2016 Uber project called Project Panama, sources close to the company tell BuzzFeed News. Panama was aimed at streamlining the infrastructure division of Uber's engineering department, while Ark will consolidate all teams under the engineering umbrella. Panama, which didn't meet all of its goals, was overseen by AG Gangadhar, sources say.

Gangadhar left Uber in July after former Uber engineer Susan Fowler wrote a blog post about the sexual harassment and discrimination she experienced at Uber. After the post went viral, it ignited internal investigations into the company’s culture. Gangadhar was Fowler’s manager; at the time he left the company, Uber told Recode that his departure was unrelated to Fowler’s allegations.

After a chaotic year involving sexual harassment allegations, shady business practices, a blockbuster trade secrets lawsuit, and more, the Uber board voted to oust founder Kalanick from his CEO role in June. In August, the board replaced him with former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. In selecting Khosrowshahi, Uber’s board hopes to bring a sense of order to the $69 billion ride hail company and correct the leadership failings that led to Uber’s 2017 tailspin.

At Khosrowshahi’s first company all hands meeting in August, he told employees that one of his priorities at Uber would be to “pay the bills.”

“This company has to change,” Khosrowshahi said back in August. “What got us here is not what’s going to get us to the next level.”

Getting Uber’s engineers on board Project Ark after the company’s flood of problems may be a step in that direction.

Quelle: <a href="With Project Ark, Uber Aims To Consolidate Its Splintered Engineering Division“>BuzzFeed

Facebook Execs Have Donated To Lawmakers On Congressional Intel Committees This Year

Sheryl Sandberg

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty Images

Some top Facebook executives have donated money to lawmakers serving on the two intelligence committees that are investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In February of this year, according to federal election filings, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg gave $2,700 to Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich. In May, she donated $2,700 to Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member of the intel committee.

In April of this year, Elliot Schrage, the vice president of communications and public policy, donated $1,000 to Heinrich and $2,700 to Warner.

And in March of this year, chief security officer Alex Stamos donated $2,700 to both Reps. Will Hurd and Eric Swalwell, who are a Republican and Democrat respectively and serve on the House intel committee. He also donated $2,500 to Heinrich in February.

The donations aren’t particularly big and are somewhat isolated — there are 41 total lawmakers serving on the committees combined. All three executives have given politically prior to this year and this isn’t the first time that the executives have given to some of these lawmakers. (Sandberg last donated $2,600 to Warner in 2014 and Schrage contributed $1,000 to his campaign in both 2014 and 2016. Stamos donated $2,700 to Swalwell in 2015 and $2,700 in 2016.)

But Facebook and other tech giants like Google and Twitter are also dealing with increased scrutiny over the platforms handled political advertising and misinformation during the 2016 campaign.

A spokesperson for Facebook referred BuzzFeed News to the company’s political engagement report which says, “Facebook employees may participate in personal political activities, on their own time and with their own funds. Employees must keep such activity separate from work and never represent that such activities are being conducted on behalf of Facebook.”

A spokesperson for Rep. Swalwell said that he knew Stamos before he began working for Facebook and noted that he’s contributed to Swalwell in the past. Offices for other senators and representatives did not respond immediately for comment.

Just this week, Facebook turned over a cache of ads purchased by a Russian troll farm to congressional investigators. Schrage authored the company’s public statement on those ads, and Stamos is heading up the internal investigation into the matter. Both Facebook and Twitter have said they will testify at an upcoming open Senate intelligence committee hearing, though neither CEO Mark Zuckerberg nor Sandberg are expected to participate. Stamos is a likely alternative, according to a report from CNBC.

Sandberg in particular has a long track record of donating to Democrats and publicly supporting candidates like Hillary Clinton. In this cycle, for instance, she has given to four other Democratic candidates who do not serve on intelligence committees (primarily Sen. Claire McCaskill, who faces a difficult re-election bid in 2018). She also wrote a $25,000 check to Women Vote!, a project of EMILY’s List, which supports pro-choice Democratic candidates.

Schrage has also given to Democrats in the past, and the DSCC and the DCCC in 2017, as has Stamos, which was noted by the Free Beacon earlier this week.

Warner is not up for re-election until 2020. In a press conference Wednesday, he called for stronger regulations for political ads appearing on social media sites and has joined Sen. Amy Klobuchar sponsoring a bill to disclose more information about political advertisements and their sponsors.

“I was concerned at first that some of these social media platform companies did not take this seriously enough,” Warner told reporters at the press conference. “I believe they are recognizing that threat now.”

Quelle: <a href="Facebook Execs Have Donated To Lawmakers On Congressional Intel Committees This Year“>BuzzFeed

AIM Is Officially Dying, And So Is Your Childhood

*~ RIP AIM, 4ever in our ♥ ~*

*~RIP in peace, AIM~*

Julia Reinstein / BuzzFeed

Quelle: <a href="AIM Is Officially Dying, And So Is Your Childhood“>BuzzFeed