House of Drones
Here are the numbers we're reading and watching for Thursday.
$1.93 billion
Etsy’s gross merchandise sales last year, as reported by Venture Beat. The online marketplace for crafty, artisan goods has yet to make a profit, but it filed paperwork to go public Wednesday.
14,000 restaurants
That’s approximately how many McDonald’s restaurants will phase out purchasing chickens injected with human antibiotics, as reported by Reuters. That number represents all of the franchise’s U.S. locations, but not its international stores. Some are concerned that using antibiotics to treat chickens decreases their effectiveness in humans by eliminating weaker strains of bacteria while allowing the strong to survive.
25
That’s how many people work at Berkshire Hathaway HQ in Omaha, Nebraska, largely leaving the companies in the empire to govern themselves. That decentralization and lean management, the Upshot notes, are part of the reason Warren Buffet’s conglomerate has flown in the face of conventional wisdom and become the fourth most-valuable company in the U.S.
1 rule
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mark Zuckerberg said he has just one rule for hiring employees to work for him: “I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person.” The Telegraph has more on the Facebook founder’s remarks, including his praise of Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer.
100 percent
The portion of 2013 film executives who were male, and 94 percent of them were white that year, according to new data published by the Hollywood Reporter, which has a great breakdown of how deep the industry’s representation problem is.
150,000 jobs
The House of Lords EU Committee has issued a report recommending a registry for drones used by businesses and professionals, as reported by the BBC. They also said, however, that placing too many rules on drone expansion would hinder the estimated 150,000 jobs the industry would create across Europe by the year 2050.


