π Last Week on Tech Twitter TLDR - Aug 12
Yo! Hereβs what happened on Tech Twitter this week.
As always, reply with feedback and forward to friends!
Tumblr sold for <$3M
Automattic acquired Tumblr from Yahoo for <$3M. Thatβs a lot lower than $1B, which Yahoo originally paid for Tumblr. Everyone is shook.
Itβs notable that Tumblr was sold for less than $3M
Itβs more notable that it
- lasted 12 years in a changing digital world
- still has 100M+ MAU
- employees 100s
- ranks top 100 websites
An incredible feat
Most of the people trolling this have accomplished far less
When a pre-product startup ends their pitch by saying "we are raising at $20 pre" - I will quietly respond with:
"Tumblr sold for $3M."
If that sale doesn't reset early stages prices, nothing will.
lmao apparently they sold Tumblr to the guys that own Wordpress for $3 million, when it was originally sold to Yahoo for $1 billion
$997 million. That's how much all those porn blogs they banned were worth
An internal Google protester speaks out
A female engineer and participant in the recent internal protests against Googleβs military contracts, censored products for China, sexual misconduct of execs, and generally shadiness, spills the beans on why she left. Maybe Google isnβt the happiest place on earth after all.
When I joined Google, I fell in love with the company immediately. I was excited to come to work, not just for the technical challenges, but because I really felt I was making a difference and working for the good guys.
In 2017, Google bid for Project Maven, a contract with the US Government that would incorporate AI into drones. "When Google won the Maven contract in late September, the company opted not to say anything at allβeven to its own employees."
In 2018, it came out that Google had been planning to relaunch in China with censored search, a project known as Dragonfly.
"The engine would blacklist search terms like 'human rights' and 'student protest,' and would produce government-controlled results for 'air quality.' "
In 2018, it came out that "a woman who worked for Google had accused Android cofounder Andy Rubin of coercing her to perform oral sex in a hotel room". Rubin had been let go with a $90 million severance package.
On November 1, 2018 I walked out with twenty thousand other employees around the world. In New York, there were so many of us I couldn't get anywhere near close enough to hear the speakers.
In December 2018, one of the walkout organizers, Meredith Whitaker "was told she would have to leave the Google Cloud organization, where she had worked for three years."
Interesting Stuff
Topics that interest me right now:
1. Future of consumer
2. Mental health
3. Apple Watch/biometrics
4. ISA's
5. The rise of operator/angels
6. Silicon Valley exodus - real or not?
7. Luxury software
8. Slow onboarding
9. Vocational schools
10. Monetization
What's on your list?
Thinking: the internet will crush businesses that rely on information asymmetry or opacity.
Some biz models depend on occasional "bargains," like hiring a 5x dev for a 2x salary, or insuring a 5x safer driver for 1/2 the premium. These models will struggle more & more over time.
1/ A number of people have asked me what I mean by "Synthetic Reality.β It doesnβt fit in a single tweet, but hereβs how I think about it...
Finding the right life partner is:
2x more important than your career (30 yrs)
12x more important than your job (5 yrs)
7x more important than a lifelong friend (1 day/wk)
60x more important than a short term goal (1 year)
6/ In the future, commenting on photos will seem quaint for those who grew up playing online games with their friends where they can build huge cities block by block, explore new planets, or compete to be the last team standing in their favorite sports
@Twitter @kayvz @sriramkri, who works on Twitter's product team, offers a metaphor: You're at a party where you don't know anyone. What if (instead of awkwardly mingling around) you could immediately head to a table with people who shared your mutual interests? That, he says, is Twitter.
When evaluating a new product design, what should I be thinking about?
Focus on the (1) Impact, and (2) User Experience. Thread π
People don't want to use your software.
They want to lose weight, laugh, be entertained, get smarter, spend time with loved ones, go home on time, sleep adequately, eat good food, be happy.
Your product is only as good as the experiences it enables people to have.
My Personal PhD:
β’ Teaching: No boring lectures. Hiring personal tutors instead.
β’ Interviewing: Speaking to experts on my podcast
β’ Writing: Iβll publish more than 1 million words on my website in the next 5 years.
Self-paced. Self-directed.
Way cheaper than grad school.
I replaced my $175/h architect with one online who draws for $25. Meanwhile my electrician gets $150/h.
Knowledge work can happen remotely so its a liquid competitive mkt. Physical work is local. Ironically blue collar workers are the valuable ones here, not those w college deg.
When people visit your startup, they should be surprised how few people you have. A visitor who walks around and is impressed by the magnitude of your operation is implicitly saying "Did it really take all these people to make that crappy product?"
Funny Stuff
OH: "Next week is YC demo day and the week after that is burning man, so dont expect people to reply to emails on time"
Ask in London: So where did you study?
Person: I went to Cambridge, then did a year abroad in Basel.
Ask in SF: I was home-schooled by an inventor then went to Yale at 12, wrote a book, sold a company at 17, dropped out of a PhD, filmed a few docs, and now I'm into *Sun stuff*.
Waiting for the Elizabeth Warren proposal to regulate music. https://t.co/xNAvz2cGGJ
The Economist @TheEconomist
Them: you know what's cool?
β¨A billion dollarsβ¨
You: meh... I'd probably be happier running a sub $10M ARR lifestyle business with a few buddies.
tumblr nosediving and getting sold for peanuts after banning porn instead of nazis we LOVE to see it
Cool Stuff
INSANE.
The line between reality <> fiction blurs further.
Very surreal + disorienting how Bill Hader morphs digitally into Tom Cruise & Seth Rogenβand back without missing a beat.
When fakes get abundantβvalue what is scarce: veracity + TRUTH.
From the @6d_ai lab. Building a 3D model of the world means fusing crowdsourced scans into huge models & here's a demo of that in action. The model is a SLAM map, it improves every scan & map coords are real world coords. Imagine using it for remote authoring of Location Based AR
Jobs & Launches
πAnnouncement π
The project Iβve been hinting at is NOW LIVE!!
2020Madness.com
2020 Madness is an online social game that is designed to raise money for the eventual Democratic candidate. And make it FUN. Weβd love your help spreading the word.
More π
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