Welcome back! Time for another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we round up the week’s most-read TBEN stories in one quick, easy-to-read blast. Get it delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning by signing up here.
(There won’t be a newsletter this Saturday because I’m thankful/eat leftovers/thankful for leftovers, but we’ll go back to our regular programming the following weekend.)
If you read last week’s edition, you’ll notice some echoes here: more layoffs, more FTX drama, and more absurdity on Elon’s Twitter. Let’s dive in!
—Greg
most read
Mass layoffs on Twitter: After firing thousands of Twitter employees in recent weeks, Elon presented an ultimatum of sorts to those remaining: commit to being “extremely hardcore” as “part of the new Twitter” or leave with a three-month severance package.. … and, well, a lot of people took door number 2. It’s unclear at this point (even to Twitter, it seems) how many rejected the ultimatum, but everything points to hundreds/thousands of them.
SBF DMs: For some reason, the founder of FTX — the once huge crypto exchange that imploded last week — decided to do an impromptu interview with a Vox reporter via DM. Seemingly without any agreement that there was anything off-the-record, the said DMs were of course quickly published. His biggest regret in all of this? Strangely filing for bankruptcy.
Evernote is purchased: Evernote was once a darling on the App Store – an early example of design, quality and corporate leadership. Then, after a series of price/privacy/design changes pissed off the user base, it just sort of faded away. This week, the company was acquired by Italian app developer Bending Spoons, in what Kyle Wiggers calls “the end of an era.”
Fired from Amazon: Rumors suggested layoffs were imminent at Amazon, with some estimates suggesting more than 10,000 layoffs. The layoffs began this week, with CEO Andy Jassy writing in a memo that the layoffs will continue into next year.
Ticketmaster face plants: Tickets for Taylor Swift’s first tour in years went on sale this week and Ticketmaster, the website no one in the world likes to use, couldn’t keep up with the Swifties. Things went so wrong with the closed presale that the planned public sale was canceled outright. You know your site going down is bad when it rekindles the political fire to break the overwhelming dominance of your company.
audio summary
podcasts! We’ve got them! People seem to like them! Or many people just download/subscribe to inflate our collective ego. That’s okay too. Here’s what’s been in TC podcasts lately:
- Live from our TBEN Sessions: Crypto Event during one of crypto’s wildest weeks in ages, the Chain Reaction crew “torn up the script” and talked all about Sam Bankman-Fried’s “surreal, absurd” DM conversation with Vox.
- What does a corporate communications team do? The Equity team sat down with some very experienced communications people to learn how all those machines work behind the scenes.
TBEN+
Two states received 80% of the venture capital funds raised“During the third quarter of 2022, U.S. venture capital firms raised $150.9 billion across 593 funds,” writes Rebecca Szkutak. Where did it all go? Rebecca analyzes the statistics.
A look at Sateliot’s Serie A deck: 90% of the planet has no mobile connectivity. What if you need an IoT device to call home from, say, the middle of the ocean? That’s the idea behind Satelot, which grossed $11.4 million Series A earlier this year. The company shared the pitch deck it used with our resident pitch expert Haje Jan Kamps, who explored “the good and the bad of this high-flying space deck.”
