👉 What Happened on Tech Twitter in February

👏VCs congratulated themselves, 🇺🇸Tech = Democrat Twitter, 🤢Remote work, 😡LambdAnger,✨Tweeter of the Month @balajis, and more!

Yo! It’s Brett again. Welcome back to Tech Twitter TLDR, a newsletter that brings you the juiciest tweets from Tech Twitter every week.

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Best of February 2020

Here are the biggest stories from February.

👏VCs congratulated themselves

VCs (and Founders) took a lot of heat from new and existing) parody accounts. What were lols for some were wtfs for other. There was a lot of blocking. @VCBrags was particularly merciless.

VCs Congratulating Themselves 👏👏👏 @VCBrags

�👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 https://t.co/cCLigwOayn

let me know how i can be helpful @vcstarterkit

This but for Patagonia vests and venture funds

Patrick Collison @patrickc

So my working theory is that if you assemble enough enterprise software ads, an airport spontaneously forms around them.

Founders congratulating themselves 🙌🙌🙌 @founderbrags

(0/x) 🙌THE FOUNDER BRAG COMPENDIUM 🙌 A non-exhaustive list of brag phenotypes (humble or otherwise) that founders deploy on Twitter. Sometimes through instinct, other times through wit and cunning. Spread the word. A Thread 🧵->

🇺🇸Tech Twitter became Moderate Democrat Twitter

Bernie shared a tax plan that would be disastrous for the startup ecosystem.

Dan Primack @danprimack

New Sanders tax plan would really screw over a lot of startup employees -- would tax options at vest, rather than at exercise. Many employees would be unable to pay -- forcing them either to give up options or take out loans.

wsj.comWSJ News Exclusive | Bernie Sanders Aims New Tax Hike at Executive Retirement PlansBernie Sanders, borrowing from a discarded GOP proposal, seeks new limits on stock options and tax advantages inside executives’ retirement plans.

The Iowa Democratic caucus was a total shitstorm due to a really poorly built voting app. Read @rabble’s tweetstorm on the topic

rabble @rabble

There is no way they could succeed. The problem is structural, the way we’re funding campaign tech is wrong. We need it to be based on open source technology, we need a community of companies, parties, and third party groups funding it. It needs to have funding between cycles.

Bloomberg’s legacy during this election season may have be the ridiculous sums of money he spent on cringe memes about him.

Taylor Lorenz @TaylorLorenz

The Bloomberg campaign is working with Meme 2020, a new company formed by some of the people behind a group of meme accounts with a collective 60 million followers nytimes.com/2020/02/13/sty…

🤢Remote work and Coronavirus thrive

A number of tech companies began cutting back on non-essential business travel and encouraged employees to work from home due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

Elad Gil @eladgil

Some company WFH / related COVID-19 policies: Coinbase: docs.google.com/document/d/1SR… Stripe: stripe.com/au/newsroom/ne… Twitter: https://t.co/1aFd7f06WJ Google:

9to5google.comGoogle Dublin working from home over possible coronavirus - 9to5GoogleLast Friday, it emerged that a Googler in Zurich tested positive for COVID-19. After a possible Google Dublin coronavirus case...

Amro Mousa @amdev

WFH tips for the newly initiated 👇🏽 Get into a routine — wake up, get dressed like you’re going to an office and start work around the same time every day. Try to stop around the same time each day too. Stopping on time can be really hard so try to set boundaries.

Shout out to a16z for being ahead of the curve as usual.

Tim Hwang @timhwang

☣️💰☣️ no handshakes please thank you2

😡Everyone got LambdAngry

Lambda School, education startup and prom queen of the tech industry right now, came under intense scrutiny last week for not living up to the hype particularly for students going through the UX program. Here’s the original article/author:

Quincy Larson @ossia

Lambda School runs tons of ads on Facebook and YouTube. Thousands of people see these ads, sign $30,000 contracts, and quit their jobs to do their online bootcamp. But there's a pattern of dishonesty. And people are getting screwed. Warn your friends.

theverge.comLambda School: the high cost of a free coding bootcampFor students, the lessons were painful.

Then CEO Austen Allred, a typically a loud voice on twitter, emerged from months of silence to make a conveniently timed announcement.

Austen Allred @Austen

I’m thrilled to announce a $100 million investment in Lambda School ISAs, as well as our blueprint for how we keep our incentives fully aligned with our students in ISA financing.

lambdaschool.comAnnouncing Our New ISA Financing Blueprint and $100M in New FinancingA sustainable, incentive-aligned way to make ISAs work long-term.

Paul Graham @paulg

Austen is being diplomatic here. That whole article in NY Magazine was based on a confusion of two different metrics: hired/graduated, which Lambda, like most schools, quotes as its placement rate, and hired/enrolled, which they used in the YC report because enrolled ≈ cost.

Austen Allred @Austen

That number came from the “Risks” section of an investor memo written as a mock exercise for the Y Combinator Growth group and was based on total percent of *enrolled* students that were hired, rather than the total percent of *graduates* hired.

✨Tweeter of the Month

Balaji S. Srinivasan played an outstanding game of wack-a-journalist this month in addition to sharing a lot of interesting info and thoughts relating to the Coronavirus. Thanks for the tweets Balaji! Here are some of the best from this month:

Balaji S. Srinivasan @balajis

Incredible. Last week I called out a journalist who I thought was writing a piece that would be a disservice to public health. Unfortunately, my concerns proved well-founded. Recode’s virus piece ignores WHO & CDC, gets the science wrong…and focuses on handshakes! Thread: 🧵5

Balaji S. Srinivasan @balajis

I've never seen an article like this in the Lancet. It's not a study, it's a cry for help. Chinese medical workers seem to be using academic journals as way to route around censorship and get a message out to the world. thelancet.com/journals/langl…

Balaji S. Srinivasan @balajis

Billionaires exist because they can code apps.

Balaji S. Srinivasan @balajis

Two potential microeconomic effects of the virus crisis: 1) Deflation in sectors like travel or hotels as demand falls and prices plummet 2) Inflation in sectors like healthcare (rising demand) or China-sourced parts (falling supply) That’s before printing & subsidies begin.

😂🤯🤔 Great tweets from last week

Jack Altman @jaltma

Startups really have no hope competing with big tech companies for talent on compensation or scale of impact. But you can easily compete on career trajectory growth, a sense of community, a sense of being on a journey, and your specific purpose/mission. Focus on those.

Sahil Lavingia @shl

On Facebook everyone pretends to be friends. On Twitter everyone pretends to be an expert. On LinkedIn everyone pretends to be professional. On Instagram everyone pretends to be happy. In real life...

Dr James O'Donoghue @physicsJ

Number 1 is Whatsapp! Apple was a close second, but I was so impressed by Whatsapp-Saturn's tilt & rings being so accurate that it was an easy choice: the rings are Saturn's crown jewels! As I said this assumes they're trying to match Saturn, may not be true. Thx for reading!🪐m

Nikhil Srinivasan @nvs

35 years of climate change 🌍 b

Natalie Luu @natluu

At YC, I loved helping founders set themselves up for success and guiding them how to optimize their next fundraise. Some stats on B2B SaaS 👩🏻‍💻 series As: 🧮Core metric: $0.5-5.0M Run Rate ✈️Growth: >300% y-o-y 💰Round Size: $4-15M 📐Dilution: 13-38% 📈Post Money: $15-75M

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Thanks!

I’ll leave you with this horrifying graphic of the spread of Coronavirus compared with other major pandemics.

Have a great week and 🚨STOP TOUCHING YOUR FACE🚨

$RIC 🐚 @ricburton

Viral growth is not fun when it is an actual virus 🦠w

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