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This week saw FTX shrink from $32 billion of value to zero in less than 48 hours. @TheInformation is doing great reporting. It seems the ill-named founder @SBF_FTX - Sam Bankman-Fried - invested hundreds of millions into Sequoia and other funds. The @SECGov failure to provide a regulatory framework for Crypto seems even more silly. But @DavidKirkpatric and @LHSummers provide a thoughtful distraction from the noise.
Essays of the Week: The end of the Internet?
In Our Own Best Interests - Techonomy - David Kirkpatrick
Larry Summers Compares the Surge of Pain in Tech to the Dot-Com Bubble
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Late-Night Move and How the FTX House Crumbled
FTX’s $2 Billion Startup Fund Ensnared in Collapse
FTX’s Bankman-Fried Quietly Invested More than $500 Million in Sequoia and Other VCs — The Information
Binance walks away from FTX deal, citing ‘mishandled customer funds,’ regulatory scrutiny
Introducing Mentions and Cross-Posts
The Substack Bestseller Badge
Zoom is coming for Microsoft’s territory with email and calendar services
Tesla vehicles will soon have Zoom video conferencing
Musk Warns Twitter May Lose Billions Next Year
Musk ends remote work at Twitter
Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $4bn
Meet The New Unicorns Minted In October 2022
Tiger Global Slashes Value of Private Tech Bets by Billions, Documents Show
VC firm Molten Ventures cuts portfolio value after tech sell-off
Changing times (or, why is every layoff 10-15%?
Stripe will lay off 14% of its employees
The Internet
Sam Bankman-Fried
The mood this week is certainly somber. The widespread assault on Elon Musk from the more self-righteous wing of media tech, combined with the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, has created a sense of chaos and waywardness.
The fact that the consumer price index on Thursday indicated a slowing of inflation, and in response, the stock markets rebounded strongly, has done nothing to stem the fear and loathing in Silicon Valley mentality.
On Sunday David Kirkpatrick’s Techonomy event takes place in Sonoma. He wrote a piece staging the event and stated:
I’ve been thinking recently how many people, especially powerful people, have been taking steps that seemed so harmful, not only to themselves, but to the world. But the conference and the UN are all about finding ways to do the opposite—work together to help ourselves and everyone, everywhere.
He calls out Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Kanye West, Kyrie Irving, Mark Zuckerburg, and Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the problem.
And then notes:
By contrast, people speaking at Techonomy 2022 are uniformly thinking about our collective best interest. How can we get past our emotional and instinctual blockages and think big and creatively? How can we innovate without ego?
I get that contrast, although I may quibble with Musk being grouped with the others.
At the same time, Larry Summers was interviewed by the ever-excellent The Information. He is asked to characterize the present and says:
I think the way to understand what’s happening now is that you have a combination of two things going on. You have a combination of a tech sector that has over-extrapolated from past success to believe that trees grow to the sky, magnified by extra-transitory success that took place during the synergies between tech and dealing with Covid that led to a kind of excessive euphoria in tech. Peloton equals Pets.com is a very important equation for understanding what’s going on. Today, there are viable business models that are a lot like Pets.com—they just weren’t viable then. You have that dynamic.
And then you have another dynamic, which is that you have an overheating economy, sort of the opposite of what we had in 2008. The response to an overheating economy is to raise real interest rates. And when you raise real interest rates sharply, that discriminates against long-duration assets. Tech is a long-duration asset because it’s all about hopes and dreams down the road. You have the combination of a tech bubble dynamic, and a fundamental change coming from the overheating of the regular economy that’s leading to the brakes being put on the economy in a way that disproportionately hurts long-duration assets. And those things are coming together to produce the substantial pain in tech that you’re observing.
Both writers are trying to disentangle the negative parts of the present from the positive potential. In doing so, they both weave in a bit of (what I consider) a populist current narrative. David chooses to throw dirt at Musk. Seemingly an easy target this week. And Summers throws some at venture capital:
When cheap money and venture capital are subsidizing the delivery of products to customers in the hope of addicting customers, it’s hard for people with fundamental business models to compete.
But if we ignore the dirt-throwing both end up as optimists. David looks to biomanufacturing, cheaper medicines, fusion nuclear power, and robotics as sources of future progress. With a large focus on climate change.
Summers focuses on the need for long-term thinking. In other words venture capital plus plus. And more specifically:
My broad view has been that the 20th century was the century of physics, and that the 21st century is going to be a century of the life sciences. I think we’re going to see more change around healthcare and the implications of biology for doing other things in the years ahead
Many of the reasons for optimism are true. And there are many more that go unmentioned. AI, data-driven decisions, automation of many work tasks, and food growth innovation. The human race, leveraging science, has more potential to transform life than at any previous point in history.
The collapse of FTX, while newsworthy in itself, is not a signpost to the future. At best it is a blip.
The next ten years are likely to be years of significant innovation and change, set in a context of ever more complex global relations.
What we do as people is a key determinant as to whether the change or the challenges dominate. I vote for change.
The Video and Podcast with @kteare and @ajkeen accompanying That Was The Week is recorded separately and delivered to paying subscribers via email on Friday or Saturday each week. To subscribe, go to our home at Substack.
In Our Own Best Interests - Techonomy
I’ve been thinking recently how many people, especially powerful people, have been taking steps that seemed so harmful, not only to themselves, but to the world. But the conference and the UN are all about finding ways to do the opposite—work together to help ourselves and everyone, everywhere.
Finding myself in front of the UN reminded me of the colorful pin I always wear on my lapel or jacket, the logo of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. In the United States, people routinely admire the pin and ask what it is. Proud as I am of it, and handsome as I think it to be, I’m always mildly distressed when they ask that. Because Americans just aren’t aware of the goals, and barely of the UN itself, sadly. And in fact it doesn’t happen nearly so often when I’m traveling in most other countries, where the UN and the SDGs are more understood. (Learn more about the 17 Goals here.)
The UN SDGs represent perhaps the apex of working in our own best interests. They emerged at a shining moment in global history when countries were able to think about how to work together, at least briefly. In 2015, during the Obama presidency, all 193 nations of the United Nations–every single one of them–signed on to a project to collectively address the world’s gravest issues and work to solve those grotesque systemic problems by 2030. The UN describes the 17 goals as “a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.” Goal number one is “No poverty.” Number two is ”Zero Hunger.” Other goals include “Climate Action” and “Gender Equality.”
Well here we are. It is almost 2023, and we’re not making enough progress, to say the least. Instead, our leaders, such as they are, seem mostly intent on taking rash actions that may seem beneficial to them in the short term but which are egregious for the rest of us, and even, ultimately, for them. It’s weird and painful to observe the self-defeating actions that seem to surround us these days. Most serious is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which cannot end well for him and his country. But look also at phenomena as diverse as the antisemitic tweets issued by Kanye West and the NY Nets’ Kyrie Irving or Musk’s ill-considered acquisition of Twitter–probably the most expensive purchase of anything by an individual in human history.
Larry Summers Compares the Surge of Pain in Tech to the Dot-Com Bubble
Jessica Lessin: Larry, as we’re sitting here this morning, Meta’s laid off 11,000 people, and we’ve seen layoffs across the board at the big tech companies, major hiring freezes at others. Yet the U.S. economy is adding jobs. What’s playing out and how does this compare to what we saw in 2008?
Larry Summers: I think that 2000 is broadly a better way of thinking about it for this audience than 2008 is. [The year] 2008 was destruction in the mainstream financial system that led to a breakdown of credit flows, that led to a collapse of economic activity that needed to be responded to with a set of stimulative and liquidity-providing policies. That is not the way to understand what’s happening now.
I think the way to understand what’s happening now is that you have a combination of two things going on. You have a combination of a tech sector that has over-extrapolated from past success to believe that trees grow to the sky, magnified by extra-transitory success that took place during the synergies between tech and dealing with Covid that led to a kind of excessive euphoria in tech. Peloton equals Pets.com is a very important equation for understanding what’s going on. Today, there are viable business models that are a lot like Pets.com—they just weren’t viable then. You have that dynamic.
And then you have another dynamic, which is that you have an overheating economy, sort of the opposite of what we had in 2008. The response to an overheating economy is to raise real interest rates. And when you raise real interest rates sharply, that discriminates against long-duration assets. Tech is a long-duration asset because it’s all about hopes and dreams down the road. You have the combination of a tech bubble dynamic, and a fundamental change coming from the overheating of the regular economy that’s leading to the brakes being put on the economy in a way that disproportionately hurts long-duration assets. And those things are coming together to produce the substantial pain in tech that you’re observing.
www.theinformation.com • Share
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Late-Night Move and How the FTX House Crumbled
He would be selling his startup, which had helped transform the world of crypto investing and been valued at an astonishing $32 billion by the world’s leading private investors, for nothing. And for a while now, a lot of people have had a funny feeling about crypto and specifically about FTX, one of the world’s most popular places to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.
www.theinformation.com • Share
FTX’s $2 Billion Startup Fund Ensnared in Collapse
The Lehman Brothers–style collapse of crypto exchange FTX is shaping up to be a major embarrassment for the venture investors who backed it. Already it’s left one VC fund in shambles: FTX’s own venture investing arm, FTX Ventures.
In fact, at least one startup that received an investment from the 10-month fund has taken advantage of FTX’s reversal of fortunes to buy back its stake, I’ve learned. It’s a rare move and one that speaks to how both investors and founders are ducking shrapnel from the FTX blowup. (For more on the widening fallout, read my scoop on how Sequoia, Paradigm and others raised more than $500 million in cash from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s entities.)
www.theinformation.com • Share
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was not only a tireless fundraiser from venture capital firms including Paradigm and Sequoia Capital, but also quietly made investments in those same funds, according to two people familiar with the matter. The unusual moves show how entangled Silicon Valley VC …
www.theinformation.com • Share
Binance walks away from FTX deal, citing 'mishandled customer funds,' regulatory scrutiny
Binance stated FTX issues were beyond its control and ability to help. So, it is walking out of the deal to purchase the exchange.
Introducing mentions and cross-posts - On Substack
Today we’re announcing two new features that are designed to help Substack writers grow and collaborate: mentions and cross-posting.
We’ve seen great results from features that give writers the ability to supercharge growth for other writers on the platform, including recommendations and blurbs. Today, more than 40% of all free subscriptions and 12% of paid subscriptions are driven by the Substack network. These new features represent a further investment in that writer-centered philosophy.
Mentions and cross-posts are now live for all publications.
Introducing the Substack Bestseller badge - On Substack
Today we’re introducing a way to see, at just a glance, whether or not someone is a top-performing writer on Substack: Bestseller badges.
A Bestseller badge sits alongside a writer’s byline and is displayed on their Substack profile, ranking them in one of three categories according to how many paid subscribers they have.
Paying readers, not Substack, decide who gets a badge. We don’t give out these badges for subjective reasons and they can’t be bought. They are assigned solely according to how many paid subscribers a writer has on Substack. Upon qualifying for a badge, writers will receive a congratulatory email and can choose whether or not to display their badge.
The badges come in three colors:
Purple: tens of thousands of paid subscribers
Orange: thousands of paid subscribers
White: hundreds of paid subscribers.
Zoom is coming for Microsoft’s territory with email and calendar services
Available as a beta release, the Outlook-like Mail and Calendar will slot neatly into the company’s new unified Zoom One interface alongside its other tools like Team Chat, Whiteboard, Phone, and Meetings. Zoom is releasing new Mail and Calendar clients and services as part of its latest round of business features announced at its annual Zoomtopia event.
Tesla vehicles will soon have Zoom video conferencing
Zoom is working with Tesla to bring video conferencing into its vehicles. The announcement, made at the 2022 Zoomtopia conference, was light on details. But according to Zoom’s group product manager Nitasha Walia, the video conferencing feature “will come standard on all new Tesla models soon.” “You’ve been zooming from your home, your office, your […]
Tesla vehicles will soon have Zoom video conferencing by Kirsten Korosecoriginally published on TechCrunch
Musk Warns Twitter May Lose Billions Next Year
Elon Musk told Twitter employees on Thursday the company may have a “net negative cash flow of several billion dollars” next year, adding that “bankruptcy is not out of the question” if the company can’t “bring in more cash than we spend.“
“We can’t scale to a billion users and take massive losses along the way, that’s not feasible,” Musk said, speaking at an all-hands meeting for Twitter’s product team. But “if you have a compelling product, people will buy it. That has been my experience at SpaceX and Tesla,” he said, adding that making Twitter more compelling involves adding video content and making Twitter more of a home for content creators by improving how they’re compensated.
www.theinformation.com • Share
Musk ends remote work at Twitter
Elon Musk sent his first email to Twitter staff late Wednesday, warning of a difficult economic road ahead and telling employees they need to be in office for a minimum of 40 hours per week. “Sorry that this is my first email to the whole company, but there is no way to sugarcoat the message,” he began, ominously.
Musk continued by emphasizing that relying on advertising revenue makes Twitter vulnerable, which is why he’s pushing the new Twitter Blue Verified subscription so hard. The subscription costs $8 a month and is already causing problems with impersonation. “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the economic transition,” the email, seen by Protocol, reads. Musk doesn’t completely throw advertising under the bus, however, linking to a recording of his Twitter Spaces on the topic.
Remote work is no longer allowed at Twitter starting Thursday.
Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $4bn
Musk said he was done selling Tesla stock back in August, before Twitter’s legal action sealed the deal for the $44bn takeover
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold 19.5 million of his shares in the electric car company, according to filings published by the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, in a transaction worth $3.95bn.
The move comes in the wake of his purchase of Twitter for $44bn.
Meet The New Unicorns Minted In October 2022
Fourteen companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in October as late-stage funding plummeted worldwide.
Tiger Global Slashes Value of Private Tech Bets by Billions, Documents Show
Hedge fund Tiger Global Management invested at least $19 billion in private tech companies in the past 19 months, an astonishing pace in a period in which startups’ valuations were at or near a peak. As tech stocks crumbled this year, cutting the value of Tiger’s public stock holdings by half, the firm also marked down the value of its private stock in companies such as non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea and cybersecurity firm Lacework.
As of the end of June, for instance, Tiger said its biggest private fund, a $12.7 billion vehicle that launched in October 2021, showed a paper loss of 8%, net of management fees, according to internal documents viewed by The Information. The documents also showed that Tiger significantly marked down the paper returns from earlier funds. Given that public tech stocks have fallen further in recent months and many private companies are overvalued compared with their public counterparts, Tiger’s markdowns are likely far from over.
www.theinformation.com • Share
VC firm Molten Ventures cuts portfolio value after tech sell-off - Yahoo Finance
VC firm Molten Ventures cuts portfolio value after tech sell-off Yahoo Finance
Changing times (or, why is every layoff 10-15%?)
Changing economic markets suggests a shift in how some companies should operate, as well as what risks to assume for 2023
Stripe will lay off 14% of its employees
Stripe is laying off 14% of its staff, its co-founders said Thursday, as the fintech startup must start “building differently for leaner times.”
The layoffs will bring the online payments company down to about 7,000 employees, according to a memo to staff from co-founders Patrick and John Collison that Stripe also posted publicly.
“We have always taken pride in being a capital efficient business and we think this attribute is important to preserve,” the email said. “To adapt ourselves appropriately for the world we’re headed into, we need to reduce our costs.”
Stripe in March 2021 raised a $600 million venture round at a $95 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.
The company’s revenue and payment volume tripled from the start of the pandemic as the “world rotated overnight towards e-commerce,” the Collison brothers’ memo said. But Stripe made mistakes mistakes leading into 2022, they acknowledged.
“We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown,” the Collisons wrote. “We grew operating costs too quickly. Buoyed by the success we’re seeing in some of our new product areas, we allowed coordination costs to grow and operational inefficiencies to seep in.”
The Internet. ‘Nuff Said
1) I'm sorry. That's the biggest thing. I fucked up, and should have done better.
This week saw FTX shrink from $32 billion of value to zero in less than 48 hours. @TheInformation is doing great reporting. It seems the ill-named founder @SBF_FTX - Sam Bankman-Fried - invested hundreds of millions into Sequoia and other funds. The @SECGov failure to provide a regulatory framework for Crypto seems even more silly. But @DavidKirkpatric and @LHSummers provide a thoughtful distraction from the noise.
Essays of the Week: The end of the Internet?
In Our Own Best Interests - Techonomy - David Kirkpatrick
Larry Summers Compares the Surge of Pain in Tech to the Dot-Com Bubble
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Late-Night Move and How the FTX House Crumbled
FTX’s $2 Billion Startup Fund Ensnared in Collapse
FTX’s Bankman-Fried Quietly Invested More than $500 Million in Sequoia and Other VCs — The Information
Binance walks away from FTX deal, citing ‘mishandled customer funds,’ regulatory scrutiny
Introducing Mentions and Cross-Posts
The Substack Bestseller Badge
Zoom is coming for Microsoft’s territory with email and calendar services
Tesla vehicles will soon have Zoom video conferencing
Musk Warns Twitter May Lose Billions Next Year
Musk ends remote work at Twitter
Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $4bn
Meet The New Unicorns Minted In October 2022
Tiger Global Slashes Value of Private Tech Bets by Billions, Documents Show
VC firm Molten Ventures cuts portfolio value after tech sell-off
Changing times (or, why is every layoff 10-15%?
Stripe will lay off 14% of its employees
The Internet
Sam Bankman-Fried
The mood this week is certainly somber. The widespread assault on Elon Musk from the more self-righteous wing of media tech, combined with the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, has created a sense of chaos and waywardness.
The fact that the consumer price index on Thursday indicated a slowing of inflation, and in response, the stock markets rebounded strongly, has done nothing to stem the fear and loathing in Silicon Valley mentality.
On Sunday David Kirkpatrick’s Techonomy event takes place in Sonoma. He wrote a piece staging the event and stated:
I’ve been thinking recently how many people, especially powerful people, have been taking steps that seemed so harmful, not only to themselves, but to the world. But the conference and the UN are all about finding ways to do the opposite—work together to help ourselves and everyone, everywhere.
He calls out Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, Kanye West, Kyrie Irving, Mark Zuckerburg, and Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the problem.
And then notes:
By contrast, people speaking at Techonomy 2022 are uniformly thinking about our collective best interest. How can we get past our emotional and instinctual blockages and think big and creatively? How can we innovate without ego?
I get that contrast, although I may quibble with Musk being grouped with the others.
At the same time, Larry Summers was interviewed by the ever-excellent The Information. He is asked to characterize the present and says:
I think the way to understand what’s happening now is that you have a combination of two things going on. You have a combination of a tech sector that has over-extrapolated from past success to believe that trees grow to the sky, magnified by extra-transitory success that took place during the synergies between tech and dealing with Covid that led to a kind of excessive euphoria in tech. Peloton equals Pets.com is a very important equation for understanding what’s going on. Today, there are viable business models that are a lot like Pets.com—they just weren’t viable then. You have that dynamic.
And then you have another dynamic, which is that you have an overheating economy, sort of the opposite of what we had in 2008. The response to an overheating economy is to raise real interest rates. And when you raise real interest rates sharply, that discriminates against long-duration assets. Tech is a long-duration asset because it’s all about hopes and dreams down the road. You have the combination of a tech bubble dynamic, and a fundamental change coming from the overheating of the regular economy that’s leading to the brakes being put on the economy in a way that disproportionately hurts long-duration assets. And those things are coming together to produce the substantial pain in tech that you’re observing.
Both writers are trying to disentangle the negative parts of the present from the positive potential. In doing so, they both weave in a bit of (what I consider) a populist current narrative. David chooses to throw dirt at Musk. Seemingly an easy target this week. And Summers throws some at venture capital:
When cheap money and venture capital are subsidizing the delivery of products to customers in the hope of addicting customers, it’s hard for people with fundamental business models to compete.
But if we ignore the dirt-throwing both end up as optimists. David looks to biomanufacturing, cheaper medicines, fusion nuclear power, and robotics as sources of future progress. With a large focus on climate change.
Summers focuses on the need for long-term thinking. In other words venture capital plus plus. And more specifically:
My broad view has been that the 20th century was the century of physics, and that the 21st century is going to be a century of the life sciences. I think we’re going to see more change around healthcare and the implications of biology for doing other things in the years ahead
Many of the reasons for optimism are true. And there are many more that go unmentioned. AI, data-driven decisions, automation of many work tasks, and food growth innovation. The human race, leveraging science, has more potential to transform life than at any previous point in history.
The collapse of FTX, while newsworthy in itself, is not a signpost to the future. At best it is a blip.
The next ten years are likely to be years of significant innovation and change, set in a context of ever more complex global relations.
What we do as people is a key determinant as to whether the change or the challenges dominate. I vote for change.
The Video and Podcast with @kteare and @ajkeen accompanying That Was The Week is recorded separately and delivered to paying subscribers via email on Friday or Saturday each week. To subscribe, go to our home at Substack.
In Our Own Best Interests - Techonomy
I’ve been thinking recently how many people, especially powerful people, have been taking steps that seemed so harmful, not only to themselves, but to the world. But the conference and the UN are all about finding ways to do the opposite—work together to help ourselves and everyone, everywhere.
Finding myself in front of the UN reminded me of the colorful pin I always wear on my lapel or jacket, the logo of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. In the United States, people routinely admire the pin and ask what it is. Proud as I am of it, and handsome as I think it to be, I’m always mildly distressed when they ask that. Because Americans just aren’t aware of the goals, and barely of the UN itself, sadly. And in fact it doesn’t happen nearly so often when I’m traveling in most other countries, where the UN and the SDGs are more understood. (Learn more about the 17 Goals here.)
The UN SDGs represent perhaps the apex of working in our own best interests. They emerged at a shining moment in global history when countries were able to think about how to work together, at least briefly. In 2015, during the Obama presidency, all 193 nations of the United Nations–every single one of them–signed on to a project to collectively address the world’s gravest issues and work to solve those grotesque systemic problems by 2030. The UN describes the 17 goals as “a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.” Goal number one is “No poverty.” Number two is ”Zero Hunger.” Other goals include “Climate Action” and “Gender Equality.”
Well here we are. It is almost 2023, and we’re not making enough progress, to say the least. Instead, our leaders, such as they are, seem mostly intent on taking rash actions that may seem beneficial to them in the short term but which are egregious for the rest of us, and even, ultimately, for them. It’s weird and painful to observe the self-defeating actions that seem to surround us these days. Most serious is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which cannot end well for him and his country. But look also at phenomena as diverse as the antisemitic tweets issued by Kanye West and the NY Nets’ Kyrie Irving or Musk’s ill-considered acquisition of Twitter–probably the most expensive purchase of anything by an individual in human history.
Larry Summers Compares the Surge of Pain in Tech to the Dot-Com Bubble
Jessica Lessin: Larry, as we’re sitting here this morning, Meta’s laid off 11,000 people, and we’ve seen layoffs across the board at the big tech companies, major hiring freezes at others. Yet the U.S. economy is adding jobs. What’s playing out and how does this compare to what we saw in 2008?
Larry Summers: I think that 2000 is broadly a better way of thinking about it for this audience than 2008 is. [The year] 2008 was destruction in the mainstream financial system that led to a breakdown of credit flows, that led to a collapse of economic activity that needed to be responded to with a set of stimulative and liquidity-providing policies. That is not the way to understand what’s happening now.
I think the way to understand what’s happening now is that you have a combination of two things going on. You have a combination of a tech sector that has over-extrapolated from past success to believe that trees grow to the sky, magnified by extra-transitory success that took place during the synergies between tech and dealing with Covid that led to a kind of excessive euphoria in tech. Peloton equals Pets.com is a very important equation for understanding what’s going on. Today, there are viable business models that are a lot like Pets.com—they just weren’t viable then. You have that dynamic.
And then you have another dynamic, which is that you have an overheating economy, sort of the opposite of what we had in 2008. The response to an overheating economy is to raise real interest rates. And when you raise real interest rates sharply, that discriminates against long-duration assets. Tech is a long-duration asset because it’s all about hopes and dreams down the road. You have the combination of a tech bubble dynamic, and a fundamental change coming from the overheating of the regular economy that’s leading to the brakes being put on the economy in a way that disproportionately hurts long-duration assets. And those things are coming together to produce the substantial pain in tech that you’re observing.
www.theinformation.com • Share
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Late-Night Move and How the FTX House Crumbled
He would be selling his startup, which had helped transform the world of crypto investing and been valued at an astonishing $32 billion by the world’s leading private investors, for nothing. And for a while now, a lot of people have had a funny feeling about crypto and specifically about FTX, one of the world’s most popular places to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.
www.theinformation.com • Share
FTX’s $2 Billion Startup Fund Ensnared in Collapse
The Lehman Brothers–style collapse of crypto exchange FTX is shaping up to be a major embarrassment for the venture investors who backed it. Already it’s left one VC fund in shambles: FTX’s own venture investing arm, FTX Ventures.
In fact, at least one startup that received an investment from the 10-month fund has taken advantage of FTX’s reversal of fortunes to buy back its stake, I’ve learned. It’s a rare move and one that speaks to how both investors and founders are ducking shrapnel from the FTX blowup. (For more on the widening fallout, read my scoop on how Sequoia, Paradigm and others raised more than $500 million in cash from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s entities.)
www.theinformation.com • Share
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was not only a tireless fundraiser from venture capital firms including Paradigm and Sequoia Capital, but also quietly made investments in those same funds, according to two people familiar with the matter. The unusual moves show how entangled Silicon Valley VC …
www.theinformation.com • Share
Binance walks away from FTX deal, citing 'mishandled customer funds,' regulatory scrutiny
Binance stated FTX issues were beyond its control and ability to help. So, it is walking out of the deal to purchase the exchange.
Introducing mentions and cross-posts - On Substack
Today we’re announcing two new features that are designed to help Substack writers grow and collaborate: mentions and cross-posting.
We’ve seen great results from features that give writers the ability to supercharge growth for other writers on the platform, including recommendations and blurbs. Today, more than 40% of all free subscriptions and 12% of paid subscriptions are driven by the Substack network. These new features represent a further investment in that writer-centered philosophy.
Mentions and cross-posts are now live for all publications.
Introducing the Substack Bestseller badge - On Substack
Today we’re introducing a way to see, at just a glance, whether or not someone is a top-performing writer on Substack: Bestseller badges.
A Bestseller badge sits alongside a writer’s byline and is displayed on their Substack profile, ranking them in one of three categories according to how many paid subscribers they have.
Paying readers, not Substack, decide who gets a badge. We don’t give out these badges for subjective reasons and they can’t be bought. They are assigned solely according to how many paid subscribers a writer has on Substack. Upon qualifying for a badge, writers will receive a congratulatory email and can choose whether or not to display their badge.
The badges come in three colors:
Purple: tens of thousands of paid subscribers
Orange: thousands of paid subscribers
White: hundreds of paid subscribers.
Zoom is coming for Microsoft’s territory with email and calendar services
Available as a beta release, the Outlook-like Mail and Calendar will slot neatly into the company’s new unified Zoom One interface alongside its other tools like Team Chat, Whiteboard, Phone, and Meetings. Zoom is releasing new Mail and Calendar clients and services as part of its latest round of business features announced at its annual Zoomtopia event.
Tesla vehicles will soon have Zoom video conferencing
Zoom is working with Tesla to bring video conferencing into its vehicles. The announcement, made at the 2022 Zoomtopia conference, was light on details. But according to Zoom’s group product manager Nitasha Walia, the video conferencing feature “will come standard on all new Tesla models soon.” “You’ve been zooming from your home, your office, your […]
Tesla vehicles will soon have Zoom video conferencing by Kirsten Korosecoriginally published on TechCrunch
Musk Warns Twitter May Lose Billions Next Year
Elon Musk told Twitter employees on Thursday the company may have a “net negative cash flow of several billion dollars” next year, adding that “bankruptcy is not out of the question” if the company can’t “bring in more cash than we spend.“
“We can’t scale to a billion users and take massive losses along the way, that’s not feasible,” Musk said, speaking at an all-hands meeting for Twitter’s product team. But “if you have a compelling product, people will buy it. That has been my experience at SpaceX and Tesla,” he said, adding that making Twitter more compelling involves adding video content and making Twitter more of a home for content creators by improving how they’re compensated.
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Musk ends remote work at Twitter
Elon Musk sent his first email to Twitter staff late Wednesday, warning of a difficult economic road ahead and telling employees they need to be in office for a minimum of 40 hours per week. “Sorry that this is my first email to the whole company, but there is no way to sugarcoat the message,” he began, ominously.
Musk continued by emphasizing that relying on advertising revenue makes Twitter vulnerable, which is why he’s pushing the new Twitter Blue Verified subscription so hard. The subscription costs $8 a month and is already causing problems with impersonation. “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the economic transition,” the email, seen by Protocol, reads. Musk doesn’t completely throw advertising under the bus, however, linking to a recording of his Twitter Spaces on the topic.
Remote work is no longer allowed at Twitter starting Thursday.
Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $4bn
Musk said he was done selling Tesla stock back in August, before Twitter’s legal action sealed the deal for the $44bn takeover
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has sold 19.5 million of his shares in the electric car company, according to filings published by the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, in a transaction worth $3.95bn.
The move comes in the wake of his purchase of Twitter for $44bn.
Meet The New Unicorns Minted In October 2022
Fourteen companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in October as late-stage funding plummeted worldwide.
Tiger Global Slashes Value of Private Tech Bets by Billions, Documents Show
Hedge fund Tiger Global Management invested at least $19 billion in private tech companies in the past 19 months, an astonishing pace in a period in which startups’ valuations were at or near a peak. As tech stocks crumbled this year, cutting the value of Tiger’s public stock holdings by half, the firm also marked down the value of its private stock in companies such as non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea and cybersecurity firm Lacework.
As of the end of June, for instance, Tiger said its biggest private fund, a $12.7 billion vehicle that launched in October 2021, showed a paper loss of 8%, net of management fees, according to internal documents viewed by The Information. The documents also showed that Tiger significantly marked down the paper returns from earlier funds. Given that public tech stocks have fallen further in recent months and many private companies are overvalued compared with their public counterparts, Tiger’s markdowns are likely far from over.
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VC firm Molten Ventures cuts portfolio value after tech sell-off - Yahoo Finance
VC firm Molten Ventures cuts portfolio value after tech sell-off Yahoo Finance
Changing times (or, why is every layoff 10-15%?)
Changing economic markets suggests a shift in how some companies should operate, as well as what risks to assume for 2023
Stripe will lay off 14% of its employees
Stripe is laying off 14% of its staff, its co-founders said Thursday, as the fintech startup must start “building differently for leaner times.”
The layoffs will bring the online payments company down to about 7,000 employees, according to a memo to staff from co-founders Patrick and John Collison that Stripe also posted publicly.
“We have always taken pride in being a capital efficient business and we think this attribute is important to preserve,” the email said. “To adapt ourselves appropriately for the world we’re headed into, we need to reduce our costs.”
Stripe in March 2021 raised a $600 million venture round at a $95 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.
The company’s revenue and payment volume tripled from the start of the pandemic as the “world rotated overnight towards e-commerce,” the Collison brothers’ memo said. But Stripe made mistakes mistakes leading into 2022, they acknowledged.
“We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown,” the Collisons wrote. “We grew operating costs too quickly. Buoyed by the success we’re seeing in some of our new product areas, we allowed coordination costs to grow and operational inefficiencies to seep in.”
The Internet. ‘Nuff Said
1) I'm sorry. That's the biggest thing. I fucked up, and should have done better.
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