Iulia's Profile

Great question, Akram! Rocket’s company closed it after 6 months and ended up moving its flash sale-business into Westwing home and living (another Rocket startup) – a home flash sale website. It appears that home products are a much more sustainable business model for this, and actually fab.com was focused on home initially.

I think this is the 900 million dollar question … literally. The general opinion is that he shouldn’t have been allowed to change the company’s operating model, and that the VC funds shouldn’t have allowed him to expand so quickly. On the other hand, they are now financing him to create a spin-off from this company. All we know is that Goldberg has driven 3 companies into the ground and burnt over $1 bn, which should raise some red flags.

I don’t think public transportation should run at a profit, since the cost to society is much higher. I wonder if adopting some of the European success stories would work. What are the European cities such as Vienna, Zurich, Berlin etc. doing so much better that they manage to maintain a modern public transportation system? Is it just public funding? Or did the authority manage to achieve efficiencies that are not yet achieved by the MBTA. The fact is that not repairing the system is unsustainable and can endanger the citizens who use it.

This is really interesting. The alignment between the company’s operating model and it’s low cost value proposition are done up to the smallest detail. I wasn’t aware of this. I wonder, however, if the contract-based payment of employees – especially of pilots could raise any safety concern. Even the smallest incident could ruin the reputation of the airline – so is Ryanair doing enough for this?

This is a pretty nice concept. I would be interested to hear how they fared in the current market situation with the low oil prices, especially since more and more companies are starting to survive by offering the ability to earn into equity ownership of the project.