👉 What Happened on Tech Twitter Last Week - Feb 16th

😡Everyone’s LambdAngry, 💸Longggg FinTech, 🤑Craig’s “$1B ARR with THAT design?” List, and more!

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Here’s the what happened on Tech Twitter last week.

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😡Everyone’s 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.

Tech twitter responded

Louis Gelinas @jlgelinas

But this “I knew Lambda School was a scam all along” self-congratulatory me-tooism can just take a fucking seat. Seriously. There are only two major complaints a dissatisfied Lambda Student could make about their experience: 4/

Louis Gelinas @jlgelinas

1) The opportunity cost of their time (7 to 9 months) was wasted or 2) They “would have succeeded without LS anyway” so Lambda School doesn’t “deserve” to collect on the ISA (since Lambda School only gets to collect IF YOU SUCCEED and are making OVER 50K in the field). 5/

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.

Either way, can we all agree that innovation in education is a good thing?

justin gage @itunpredictable

The thing I understand even less than complete Lambda School fanboys is people who seem to want it to fail. Like, all things equal, yes I'd rather there be reasonably priced life changing education out there

💸Long FinTech

FinTech companies are being bought up left and right with Credit Karma by Intuit for $7B being the latest.

Amy Cheetham @amyecheetham

YTD major fintech acquisitions: 🛄 Morgan Stanley buys E*TRADE for $13B 📈 Intuit buys Credit Karma for $7B #️⃣ Visa buys Plaid for $5.3B 💳 Ally buys Cardworks for $2.65B 🏧 Lending Club buys Radius Bank $185M What am I missing?

Peter Yang @petergyang

A lot of hot takes on Credit Karma today. I'll add my own: Ken, our CEO, went from living on food stamps and listening to family argue about money to building a $7B company over 13 years. Grit and building products to solve real problems pays off.

🤑Craig’s “$1B ARR with THAT design?” List

Andrew Chen shared some wild numbers about Craigslist’s revenue. Yep, the site that looks like it was built by Bill Gates himself somehow will not die and instead rakes in ONE BILLION DOLLARS of revenue a year.

Andrew Chen @andrewchen

TIL that craigslist is generating $1B in annual revenue, employs 50 people, and is wholly owned by two people. Insane. (And yes, it's a for-profit even with the .org domain name) Who would have thought this single website would destroy the economics of the newspaper industry?

Turns out Craiglist was integral for Uber and other marketplace companies’ growth.

Amy ☀️ @amysundae

@andrewchen I’m not surprised at all given how much money we tried to spend on Craigslist posts at Uber and how well the channel converted 😂 In the early days Craigslist was the #1 channel for UberX driver growth. UberX couldn’t have scaled as quickly without it.

Many talk about the unbundling of Craigslist but the same fate is coming other big platforms.

Andrew Chen @andrewchen

dear lazyweb, after the "unbundling craigslist" era over the past 10 years, what do you think is the next big, horizontal platform that will be unbundled in the next decade? Linkedin, youtube, Gsuite are good choices. What else?

😂🤯🤔 Other Funny, Cool and Interesting Tweets

𝗔𝗻𝗶𝗿𝘂𝗱𝗵 𝗣𝗮𝗶 @ani_pai

Ranking the top 10 countries by internet users from 1990-2019. Amazing to see how fast India and China rise up out of nowhere. To put it in perspective, we still have ~2.5 billion people without the internet.

Jason Mayes @jason_mayes

I present to you my latest #prototype. Real-time person removal from complex backgrounds in #JavaScript using #TensorFlowJS in the browser. Tell me what you think! Star on Github + try it yourself right now: github.com/jasonmayes/Rea… #MadeWithTFJS #WebDev #Web #Experiment #JS

Lucas Bagno @chandrakesarr

OH in SF: “I bought 20 Casper matresses to throw a ‘Casper party’ and then plan to return all of them right after just to make fun of the company’s policy.” There are some things you can only hear in this city, and they will keep you up at night.

Taylor Lorenz @TaylorLorenz

Tired: Fully electric 0 emission cars Wired:

Paul Katsen @pavtalk

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

Benedict Evans @benedictevans

There have always been 2 challenges in VR: we needed the hardware to get much better, and we needed something to watch that wasn’t hard core games. The first is well on the way being solved, but the second is not (at least, not demonstrably). 1/

Charles ✌️ @charlespattson

Everyone: Using the same UI mockups Microsoft: Hold my beer

Anna Khan @annarchyy

0/ Lots of founders have asked me to tweet storm my recent Open Source Paper into a quick 10 point hit list on what to look for when building an #opensource company. Here goes:

Dare Obasanjo @Carnage4Life

Another example of Generation X erasure. My 80s & 90s peeps which app did you start your social media life on? 1.) AIM 2.) Yahoo Chat 3.) LiveJournal 4.) Orkut 5.) Friendster 6.) Xanga 7.) Bebo 8.) Blogger/Six Apart/Personal Blog 9.) IRC 10.) USENET 11.) Other

𝗮𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 L @wydsimp

Which app did you start your Social Media life on? 1.) Facebook 2.) Kik 3.) Snapchat 4.) Instagram 5.) Telegram 6.) Twitter 7.) MySpace 8.) None of the above

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