👉 What Happened On Tech Twitter Last Week - Mar 1 (via Paul Kasten)

🙅‍♂️ WAKANDA (WFH) FOREVER!, 🔮 The future of Twitter is..., 🚪 Goodbyes!, 🤝 Platform case study: Oculus and more!

Yo! It’s Brett again. I’m really excited to share that this week’s newsletter is guest curated by Paul Kasten. Paul is the co-founder of Blockspring, an a16z startup that was acquired by Coinbase, where Paul now works in product. Here are a few great tweets from Paul recently:

Paul Katsen @pavtalk

I'm surprised AWS hasn't gotten itself into Banking-as-a-Service APIs. Seems like natural step given sector growth and Amazon's history with financial services (eg cbinsights.com/research/repor…).

Paul Katsen @pavtalk

Why @stripe always wins in one very prominent button... "Feedback about this page?"

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Hi, I’m Paul Katsen. You may remember me from such musings as “Redfin SF should launch a reality show”, “Why haven’t I moved to Mexico City yet?”, “Hey - I know we haven’t talked in a while, but can you drop me an upvote on ProductHunt? Thankssss.”

This week Brett is letting me take a celebrity shot at Tech Twitter TLDR. So let’s get started!

🙅‍♂️ WAKANDA (WFH) FOREVER!

Working from home yet? I sure am! This week tech twitter went from writing about the future of #remotework to operationalizing it thanks to the looming threat of Coronavirus. On the flip side, major tech events like YC Demo Day and SXSW have been cancelled or moved online.

Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDing

It’s getting real- Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are telling employees in the Seattle area to work from home — but this is EXACTLY what we need to to slow the epidemic. Unfortunately many low income hourly workers don’t have this luxury. #COVID19

npr.orgAmazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft Tell Seattle Workers To Stay HomeU.S. companies are trying to limit disruption from the coronavirus outbreak by curtailing travel and telling some employees to work from home. Several major tech firms are among the latest to act.

Dare Obasanjo @Carnage4Life

This is a thoughtful move on Microsoft's part and I hope every major tech company in the Seattle area that's asking employees to work from home also takes into account the hourly employees who could be impacted (e.g. cafeteria workers) & makes them whole. blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/…

Paul Graham @paulg

If having most employees working from home makes it harder to have meetings, companies may actually be more productive.

Tobi Lutke 🌳🌲🛒🕹 @tobi

Since we decided to cancel non essential travel last week, we decided to do our internal podcast in VR this week.

𝐟𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚 @noturswamp

so since everyone is wfh.... anyone want to build a town in Figma and hangout Online???

Elon Musk @elonmusk

The coronavirus panic is dumb

🔮 The future of Twitter is...

Lots of glimpses into the future of Twitter this week. Will Jack get ousted? What new features are next?

Amy Siskind 🏳️‍🌈 @Amy_Siskind

This story did not get enough attention last week: Elliot Associates, whose founder is a Trump donor, has taken a huge stake in Twitter stock and is trying to oust Jack Dorsey. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is not allowing false advertising.

cnbc.comStocks making the biggest moves premarket: Twitter, Apple, GE, Verizon, SmileDirectClub & moreTwitter CEO Jack Dorsey is under pressure from activist Elliott Management. Apple gets an upgrade at Oppenheimer.

Kayvon Beykpour @kayvz

Fleets are a way to share fleeting thoughts. Unlike Tweets, Fleets disappear after 24 hours and don’t get Retweets, Likes, or public replies-- people can only react to your Fleets with DMs. Instead of showing up in people’s timelines, Fleets are viewed by tapping on your avatar.

As long as it is still a place that gives great ideas a global microphone, I’ll be happy.

Palli Thordarson @PalliThordarson

1/25 Part 1 - Why does soap work so well on the SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus and indeed most viruses? Because it is a self-assembled nanoparticle in which the weakest link is the lipid (fatty) bilayer. A two part thread about soap, viruses and supramolecular chemistry #COVID19

🚪 Goodbyes!

Mad love and best wishes for Justin Kan and the search for aliens.

Suhail @Suhail

Lots of love to @justinkan today. This shit is so hard. I wish the Atrium team the best & hope they're all able to land safely.

BleepingComputer @BleepinComputer

SETI@home Search for Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 Years - by @LawrenceAbrams

bleepingcomputer.comSETI@home Search for Alien Life Project Shuts Down After 21 YearsSETI@home has announced that they will no longer be distributing new work to clients starting on March 31st as they have enough data and want to focus on completing their back-end analysis of the data.

Robinhood is still around but nearly melted down twice:

Robinhood Help @AskRobinhood

Trading is currently down on Robinhood and we’re investigating the issue. We’re focused on getting back up and running as soon as possible and we’ll update the status page with the latest status.robinhood.com.

status.robinhood.comRobinhood StatusWelcome to Robinhood’s home for real-time and historical data on system performance.

🤝 Platform case study: Oculus

Oculus Quest is an exceptional, high-quality consumer product.

Iceburg 🥶 @Qnztobk

Im so excited!! Finally!! My Oculus Quest VR headset. I have been waiting!! @oculus #OculusQuest

IMO consumer VR platforms will only succeed if they can strike the balance between [1] delivering high quality consumer experiences, and [2] grow an exceptional developer ecosystem. Last week Oculus was a case study in striking this balance:

Mat Chacon @TheVRCEO

Hey @oculus - we submitted @rumiiVR last June to the Quest store. Haven’t heard a peep from you. We’re already approved on the Go store. We’ve got over 7k institutions around the world using us. Over 400% YoY growth since 2016. Would love to be on the Quest store. What’s up?

Diego Martín @diempuntoes

#CrisisVRigade has not been accepted to be a part of the official #Quest store 😢. Oculus Start they say...a

Chris Pruett @c_pruett

🧵Focus on polish & quality for Quest has driven real developer success. We’ve found that honest, actionable feedback requires more than a form letter or a checklist of things to fix—devs are most successful when we have an ongoing relationship over the course of development.

Excited to see how this plays out. Also if you have a Quest, DM me. Let’s play ping pong!

Paul Katsen @pavtalk

100% of people I've shown Racket Fury to on the Quest have wanted to play more or buy a Quest. Don't judge how bad these two are 😜.a

😂🤯🤔 Other Great Tweets

Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele

A message from Steve Wozniak who invented the computer revolution we are still in—with the computer in your pocket. “Everyone wants to be a unicorn and wants to entrap you in to subscribing...this is the tech scene today...it’s not what can I do that’s never been done” Timeless

Kyle Tibbitts @KyleTibbitts

In the age of leverage: Scrappy 100-person startups beat 10,000-person public corporations, YouTube sensations amass larger audiences than CNN, and broke presidential campaigns defeat self-funded billionaires. David taking down Goliath has become the rule, not the exception.

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👋 K byeee

Huge thanks again to Paul for curating this week’s newsletter, and an equivalently large thanks to you readers as always.

This week, I’ll leave you with a video of some “contrarians” that wouldn’t let a silly little pandemic get in the way of their fun. Note - this is 100% real.

AFP news agency @AFP

VIDEO: Thousands gathered in France at the weekend to break the world record for the largest-ever gathering of Smurfs. Around 3500 people set aside fears of the #coronavirus to dress up as the characters, which come from a Belgian comic franchise

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