This week's startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-hostNatasha Mascarenhas is the subject of a new weekly show. You need to subscribe to get this.
We have been through a lot of tech history over the past two years, but the brutal layoffs on social media feel particularly sad and exhausting to anyone who follows the industry. We knew it was coming and we were told it wasn't. Half of the team will lose their jobs, according to reports.
I don't have a response to Musk's comment about this moment. I empathise with the people who may or may not lose their jobs because they invested time, energy and care in buildingTwitter. To thank each other, and to share personal news, employees are using the #LoveWhereYouWorked, a parody of the internal #LoveWhereYouWork slogan. The new # is a sweet phrase, not because I'm gone, but because it's gone.
The macroeconomic environment has caused us to adjust expectations, impacting a percent of our workforce. The way in which they were conducted was devoid of emotion and acknowledgement. One of the worst layoffs of the year happened at Better.com. You can see below.
On Thursday evening, all Twitter employees received an email stating that they would be informed of their employment status at 9 a.m. PDT on Friday. Each email was to be sent with the subject line “Your Role at Twitter.” If an employee is keeping their job, they were to be notified via their work email — if they are let go, they would be notified on a personal address.
“To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended,” Thursday’s email read. “If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.”
The email was impersonally signed: “Twitter.”
Jack Dorsey breaks his silence, owns “responsibility for why everyone is in this situation” at Twitter
The thread for former Tweeps looking for a job will be updated. I was joking that some high-ranking members may join the alumni network, but I am not sure how they will do. Is it going to be in a startup? Is that a venture or something else? Is it possible that they will seek refuge in roles that are less risky? Start a career outside of the tech industry.
I can only imagine that this experience feels like a warm spotlight finally letting up, but you can't see the audience or stage that you were once in charge of entertaining.
I am just as lost as the rest of us when it comes to predicting what will happen in the future, but it is clear that this is an important point in tech history. What will the alumni think of the current situation? I like to nerd out about networks and how they start and stop people.
In the rest of the newsletter, we will discuss Gen Z turnover, as well as other topics. You can follow me on the social networking site for my thoughts.
She is leaving Lerer Hippeau to become a full time member of Gen Z VC. In a thread announcing the news, she said she was teaching a course, starting a newsletter, and working with firms to demystify the Gen Z generation.
The news came around a month after Terri Burns, the firm's youngest and first black female partner, announced she was leaving. Her investment thesis is Gen Z.
While we don't know what Burns is doing next, her and Loyst's departure from institutional firms during a volatile moment in tech is a good reminder of how cycles can be. As time goes on, investors are either ghosting, quiet, quitting or rewriting their entire playbook as the job of a venture capitalist expands and rewrites itself.
Despite its ability to attract venture dollars, the financial technology industry is still experiencing volatility, as evidenced by the layoffs of Chime and Stripe this week.
Companies don't only cut staff when they have to, here's why Patrick Collision snuck in that the company signed 75% more new customers in the third quarter of the year than in the third quarter of the year before, and that they recently set a record for total daily transaction volume. Another partnership was announced by Brex this week. It feels odd that the same startup that is growing is the same startup that is cutting staff. I am sorry for jinxing this, but the weeks ahead of the holiday season could bring more cuts.
The image is called "ersinkisacik."
In her column this week,Amanda Silberling talked about the Only Fans opportunity. At the same time, it may be Musk's best bet on trying to make his $44 billion purchase make some sense, since there is a lot of work to be done before it can help adult content creators safely and securely monetize on the platform.
Twitter is the only major social media site that allows users to post porn. So, for online sex workers, Twitter has historically functioned as an advertising tool for their OnlyFans accounts. But what if those creators could just monetize on-platform and bypass the friction of sending fans elsewhere?
“Sex sells” isn’t a cliche for nothing, and OnlyFans’ financials prove it. In 2021, the company earned $433 million in pre-tax profit, up from $61 million in 2020. The company makes its money by taking a 20% cut of all payments to creators — since 2016, the company has paid out $8 billion to creators, with $4 billion of that paid out in 2021 alone.
The market for online sex work is large enough that it could compensate for the fallout from advertisers.
Tell me what you think by reading the entire piece here.
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