👉 Last Week - remote worker pay cuts, education post-pandemic, Tik Tok explodes, xGoogle CEO building local newsrooms around US

What happened on Tech Twitter the week of May 17th

May 25, 2020

Yo! Happy Monday. I’ve got some exciting news - Christmas came early this year:

🚨FREE SWAG ALERT!🚨

I will be randomly selecting ONE Tech Twitter TLDR subscriber to be the proud owner of this Naval Ravikant inspiration mug.

Brett Goldstein @thatguyBG

Thinking about giving out motivational mugs to a few lucky tech.TwitterTLDR.com readers. What other tweets would be good? cc: @naval

All you gotta do is share Tech Twitter TLDR with your friends. The more friends that sign up, the more of a chance you have to win.

Here’s how to do it:

Share Tech Twitter TLDR with your friends (below or by sharing the link)
Send me the list of emails you shared TLDR with via Twitter or by replying to one of the emails.

On June 15th, I’ll randomly select someone from the top 10 referrers as the winner! ✨Good luck!✨

Share Tech Twitter TLDR

💻 You won’t make Silicon Valley money working remotely

With Shopify joining Square and Twitter on the “indefinite WFH” bandwagon and Facebook announcing they’d shift towards more remote work permanently, tech employees are getting realllly excited.

Bryan Beal 🎧 @bryanrbeal

75% of Facebook employees who want to work remotely plan on moving out of Silicon Valley. Dang. And 62% say they aren’t moving into another city but will instead opt for rural or suburban living. Double dang. The urban real estate reckoning is about to commence.

What could be better than making Silicon Valley but living in Portland or Austin?

Unfortunately, Zuck also announced that there would be downward salary adjustments for people living in cheaper cities. There also looks like there’s no way out since remote work enables competition from all over the world rather than just your city.

Eric Stromberg @ericstromberg

Good luck telling the engineer moving from CA to Florida that you are issuing a downward salary adjustment -- at the precise moment a global supply of remote jobs is coming online.

Tanay Jaipuria @tanayj

American remote workers when they realize they'll have to compete against global talent willing to work for a quarter of the compensation

👨‍🏫 Education post-pandemic

COVID19 is changing a lot.

Alex Lieberman @BUSlNESSBARISTA

Want a peek into the COVID Economy? 99% - 👇 in travel spending by @Discover customers this month 23,000 - @onepeloton single live-streamed class attendance 50,000 - @Etsy sellers that have sold ≥1 mask 12.3 mm - concurrent @FortniteGame(rs) during Travis Scott performance

Across higher education and K-12, the world as we know it is changing significantly.

Anne Lee Skates @anneleeskates

1/ COVID-19 will WIDEN the gap in educational inequality: at home, kids are more dependent on parental resources. I’m interested in products that democratize access and affordability to high-quality education.

Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele

On higher education: “Think of another product that charges over $100,000 with a 90% profit that is not a pharmaceutical”—@profgalloway Pure brilliant honesty.

Lot’s of education startups are shifting to online, which may actually be better than offline.

ᴅᴀᴠɪᴅ ᴘᴇʀᴇʟʟ ✌ @david_perell

For many topics, online education is already better than traditional education. Most information is already free — that’s why students really pay for structure and accountability.

ᴅᴀᴠɪᴅ ᴘᴇʀᴇʟʟ ✌ @david_perell

Here are the skills you need to run an online course. They fall into four buckets: (1) business, (2) marketing, (3) entertainment, and (4) education. Traditional teachers are at a disadvantage in online education because they over-estimate the importance of teaching. https://t.co/v8yTYAPHNi

Brett Goldstein @thatguyBG

Working on something for all the stressed out parents out there with @ericries and @manisharoses - Hour of Sanity. For one hour, one of our incredible tutors will work with your child (for free!) so you're finally free to do whatever the hell you want.

hourofsanity.comHour of Sanity

🎤 Going deep on Tik Tok

People have a lot of free time on their hands amidst the lockdown and Tik Tok is eating up a lot of it for a lot of people.

aisha @aishrae

I did the whipe it down trend

Turner Novak put together one of the deepest analysis of Tik Tok we’ve seen. It’s worth reading so click away:

Turner Novak @TurnerNovak

I wrote deep dive on how TikTok suddenly became the most culturally significant product in the world. It rode the tailwinds of AirPods and memes to reach over 1 billion DAU’s and is now the best way to create and consume video on mobile. Some takeaways:

turner.substack.comThe Rise of TikTok and Understanding Its Parent Company, ByteDanceIn November of 2017, Bytedance acquired Musical.ly for $1 billion. In August of 2018, Bytedance officially rebranded Musical.ly and TikTok into one app. Shortly after, ByteDance raised $3 billion and was valued at ~$75 billion. Analysts estimate its 2019 revenue was anywhere from

One of the most interesting defining features of Tik Tok is that it focuses on remixing and creative prompts more than any other platform. One of the biggest challenges with creating content is knowing what to create. Tik Tok solved this brilliantly by allowing anyone to create videos directly from the audio (or effects) of any video. See a dance you think you can do better or a skit you want to try? You’re a click away.

As a fun aside, I am releasing a new song on June 5th and working with a Tik Tok influencer marketing agency to try to turn it into the next Old Town Road.

Follow my Tik Tok account to keep up with the action.