Monat: April 2017

What Happens When Your Neighbor Is A Venture Capitalist

Via sfphoenix.wixsite.com

Waging a public battle against your rich neighbor with obscene tech money is practically a Bay Area tradition. In David Cowfer’s case, his angry website about an invasive species of Silicon Valley billionaire practically wrote itself. Cowfer is fighting plans to turn a six-bedroom family home in a sleepy cul-de-sac on a picturesque Glen Park hilltop into the ultimate bachelor gymnasium, including a basketball court, lockers, sauna, wet bar, lounge, and a cantilevered swimming pool. Plans also include a two-story garage door with glass panels will roll open to show a spectacular view of San Francisco — and could cause a spectacular nuisance for Cowfer, who lives next door.

The house, which sold for $2.35 million in 2015, was purchased under an anonymous LLC. So it took Cowfer nine months to figure out that the baller behind the renovation was prominent venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a Silicon Valley veteran with a contrarian Twitter account and a Stanford pedigree, who, like his buddy Peter Thiel, is also part of the so-called PayPal mafia.

This is when an ordinary NIMBY narrative — of the haves vs. the have-mores — veered in caricature. San Francisco’s Planning Department found nothing objectionable about Rabois’ construction plans, but Cowfer filed for a discretionary review to bring the issue before the city’s seven member Planning Commission. At a hearing on Thursday, neighbors told the the commission that Rabois is building a personal recreation center, not a home, because Rabois already lives in another home in the same small cul-de-sac, purchased for $3.5 million in 2011. What’s more, his co-worker at Khosla Ventures, venture capitalist Benjamin Ling, owns a $1.8 million house, purchased in 2013, next door to Rabois’ primary residence.

“It's like a Zuckerberg-style neighborhood takeover!” Ryan Patterson, Cowfer’s lawyer, told BuzzFeed News after the hearing, in reference to the CEO of Facebook secretly buying up the four houses surrounding his Palo Alto mansion in 2013. “It’s a cul-de-sac with a lot of homes built in the ‘60s. Now we have two billionaires who own three homes within 150 feet of each other,” said resident Mark Brennan, who grew up across the street in the same house where his parents still live.

Rabois, however, didn’t see the big deal. “What does that have to do with anything?” he asked BuzzFeed News in response to questions about how two investors from the same firm happened to live on the quiet same block. “He bought a house, people are allowed to buy houses. People think it’s some kind of conspiracy, but I found a cool neighborhood,” and my friend followed, said Rabois.

Cowfer’s website, No Court @ Everson, refers to both investors as billionaires, a claim that was picked up in coverage of the dispute in Curbed, SFist, and a local CBS station. There is one small glitch in the all-powerful techie narrative: Ling is not a billionaire. When BuzzFeed News asked Rabois to verify the billionaire claim for himself, Rabois wrote back, “Lol.”

The view from the property being renovated

Via zillow.com

For Cowfer, however, signs of a hostile takeover kept adding up. A few months ago, a real estate agent cold-called him on behalf of Ling about buying his home, which Cowfer interpreted as an attempt “to remove me from the equation,” he said. Ling characterized it differently in an email to BuzzFeed. “I had heard that the property might be coming on the market shortly, and had made a single inquiry in hopes of getting an early look, but nothing ever came of it.”

Rabois insists that he’s made every effort to follow the rules. “[San Francisco is] one of the most heavily regulated real estate markets in history. This is so in the middle of what’s acceptable to complain about,” he said.

But at the hearing on Thursday in City Hall, neighbors argued that the renovation is out of character for Glen Park. Cowfer told the commission that lights and noise could drive down the value of homes by as much as 25 percent. “In a neighborhood where the homes are priced anywhere between $2 million and $4 million, this is not insignificant,” he said.

“I have no problem with him spending his money; he should be spending that in Pacific Heights,” said Joe O&039;Donoghue, the former head of the Residential Builders Association and final resident to argue against Rabois at the hearing. O&039;Donoghue, who speaks in a heavy Irish brogue, was the most animated speaker that afternoon, throwing his hand out with disgust when he mentioned Rabois’ plan to build “a garage door going nowhere.”

The Bay Area has a rich and varied history of absurd real estate spats between tech moguls and their neighbors. In 2011, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison got ticked off because his neighbor’s redwood trees blocked the view from his house on Billionaire’s Row in Pacific Heights. (The Wall Street Journal tried to inquire about the debacle, but “Mr. Ellison would only speak through his tree attorney,” the paper reported.) Typically these kind of clashes happen in tonier neighborhoods. Perhaps the basketball tussle in Glen Park, once a streetcar suburb for working and middle class residents, is just a sign that these disputes are moving down market.

Like real estate fights everywhere, each side is painting the other as unreasonable. Rabois had a company board meeting and couldn’t attend the hearing, but he told BuzzFeed News, “[Cowfer is] wasting taxpayer money, driving the staff actually crazy.”

Residents, however, insist that Rabois is downplaying the scope of initial plans of the basketball court. “The way Rabois’ team is talking now, it almost sounds like they’ve got a nerf hoop down there [and are] just goofing around,” said Brennan, who also pointed out that Rabois pushed through related permits before this dispute was settled.

The Planning commissioners concluded that there was enough common ground around Cowfer’s request — to shift the basketball court into the hill, so that it doesn’t jut out as far — that they told the two parties to take a few weeks and see if they could sort it out.

“This is a fairly quiet neighborhood. I don’t think people want a bunch of valet partners coming up here all the time and having all these wild parties, said Brennan “It’s not the Red Army coming out of the mountains to try to take this guy’s property away from him.”

Nitasha Tiku / BuzzFeed News

Quelle: <a href="What Happens When Your Neighbor Is A Venture Capitalist“>BuzzFeed

Delta Suffered "Failure Of Crew Tracking Systems" During Canceled Flight Fiasco

Instagram: @jolieice7

As masses of Delta fliers were left stranded at airports across the country last week, a separate drama was unfolding behind the scenes.

With thousands of flights delayed and cancelled during the five-day crisis, crew members said the airline&#039;s computer system lost track of them amidst the chaos. That failure poured gas on the fire, delaying more flights as the airline scrambled to get crew and pilots to the airports where they were needed. It helped turn a storm in Delta&039;s Atlanta hub on Wednesday into a multi-day fiasco that played out across the country.

The disruption was worse than the one Delta experienced last August when it suffered from a power outage that knocked out systems and grounded hundreds of flights.

This time around, “pilots and flight attendants proactively attempted multiple contacts with Crew Scheduling, went days without receiving Crew Scheduling or Tracking contact, were placed on hold (in some cases for over six hours), and were camped out in crew lounges and airports resembling refugee camps,” the chairman of Delta&039;s pilot union said in a letter to pilots on Tuesday.

The problem was acknowledged by Delta CEO Ed Bastian in an internal memo to sent to employees on Monday.

“Our recovery was hampered by a lack of available seats to accommodate customers as well as a failure of crew tracking systems to adequately position our people to do their jobs,” he wrote in the memo, which was reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

instagram.com

By Monday morning, Delta said its operations were mostly recovered, and it expected to operate more than 99% of its scheduled flights.

But at the height of the crisis, staff said the company&039;s systems were struggling to cope with a massive disruption. “The problem compounds over and over again, as more crews become stranded, a Delta employee told BuzzFeed News on Friday. “Right now, as we speak, there are hundreds of flights in our internal system that will not leave because we just don&039;t have the staff to cover them.”

According to private social media posts seen by BuzzFeed News, some crew members said they were unable to sign into Delta&039;s scheduling system, or faced hours-long waits (and sometimes disconnections) trying to get through to scheduling by phone.

BuzzFeed News source

“Many couldn&039;t log in,” another Delta employee said. “Phone lines are useless. There is definitely an issue regarding wait times.”

Other crew members said they were not accurately tracked by Delta, which scheduled them for a flight in one airport when they were in fact in another city. Some said they were not receiving updates about their flights.

“I feel like we are lost in the system,” an employee wrote.

Many flight attendants were stranded in airport lounges far from their home cities, said one staffer who asked not to be named. Like Delta&039;s passengers, some were unable to stay in hotels and slept in the airport.

“The average wait time for crews to even get ahold of scheduling was five hours. As of [Friday], our phone line to contact scheduling and crew tracking no longer work. Crews literally have no where to turn,” said an employee.

The pilots union letter said the main problem was about connecting crew to planes, and called on the company to improve its systems. “Answers will include corporate information technology (IT) investments in crew tracking and operational control, and likely enhanced staffing in those areas. We encourage the Company to expand the technology investments they have already accelerated since the recent IT &039;disruption&039;,” the letter said.

Delta did not immediately respond to a request for more details. Bastian said in his memo that Delta continues to make investments in replacing and upgrading technology, including “significant enhancements to our crew tracking system,” and has a new data center scheduled to go on line this summer.

Last August, Delta suffered a similar widespread debacle when a power outage in Atlanta disrupted hundreds of flights.

“Since the technology outage in August, it has been my top priority to make sure Delta people don’t have to endure this type of situation again,” Bastian said. “We have made progress but clearly must redouble our efforts.”

Quelle: <a href="Delta Suffered "Failure Of Crew Tracking Systems" During Canceled Flight Fiasco“>BuzzFeed