Hello everyone – welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we summarize the most read businesskinda.com stories from the past week. And wow, what a week it was.
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most read
Mass layoffs at Twitter: It was Elon’s first full week as the boss of Twitter after the $44 billion acquisition. Major layoffs would be on the way — and, well, they’ve started. After a painfully impersonal heads-up email went out on Thursday night, entire teams wake up to find their access has suddenly been revoked. With reports suggesting layoffs could affect up to half of the company, Twitter employees have reportedly referred to the whole thing as “the snap” (a la Thanos). A class action lawsuit has already been filed alleging that Twitter is not following proper legal processes here.
Fired everywhere: Meanwhile, the news of layoffs in the tech industry continues to pour in. Lyft cut 13% of its workforce, Stripe cut 14%, Opendoor cut its workforce by 18%, Chime said goodbye to 12% and more. Meanwhile, both Apple and Amazon have reportedly gone into hiring freezes.
Google stops Hangouts: We knew it was coming, but this week Google put the final nail in the Hangouts coffin by shutting down its chat-focused web app (the Hangouts Android/iOS apps were shut down last year) in favor of google chat. Of course, given Google’s history with chat apps, I expect at least two more to be launched and/or closed by the time I wrap up this newsletter.
Falcon Heavy returns to space: This week, SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time since 2019, finally moving forward on a mission that had been delayed since late 2020 (“due to payload readiness issues”).
Amazon is expanding its music service“The company said it will now offer Prime subscribers a full music catalog of 100 million songs, rather than the previously limited selection of just 2 million songs,” Sarah writes, “and most of the best podcasts available on its service. will argue without ads.”
audio overview
What’s happening in TC podcastland this week? Here are some of the highlights:
- The Share crew talked about the ever-evolving role of the venture capitalist, and our friend Melia Russell from Business Insider stopped by to tell us about her recent story of how “investors are rewriting the playbooks when it comes to maternity leave policies at their companies.”
- Amanda joined Darrell on the TC Podcast to discuss Elon’s “dubious plans” to change the way identity verification works on Twitter
- The chain reaction team delves into the growing list of issues that have developed for Bitcoin miners in recent months.
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Pilot’s CEO Takes Down Their $60 Million Series C Deck: Released early 2021, it exploded this week for some reason! Just a few weeks after raising a big Series C, Pilot CEO Waseem Daher sat down with Lucas Matney to discuss what was working on their pitch deck.
The most common mistakes in pitch decks: Speaking of pitch decks, Haje Jan Kamps, TC’s regular pitch expert, has a list of mistakes he’s tired of seeing in decks, after reviewing thousands theirs.
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