At a party this weekend, a friend lamented having to turn off the motion smoothing on his parents’ TV because everything looked like it had been soaked in Vaseline. The scourge of motion smoothing is still with us. Be prepared!
Keith Berman, who claimed he wasn’t taking compensation in his role as CEO, actually splashed out a bunch of company money on himself. Also, he claimed that he could test for covid in 15 seconds. Also also, my guy used a “fake persona to repeat false and misleading statements to investors on internet message boards.”
[www.justice.gov]
Bloomberg takes a look at the enterprise software-maker that bought Slack:
Earlier this year, Salesforce’s top 100 sellers were sipping Champagne in a luxury hotel on the Adriatic coast booked by the company. It was the annual celebration for top performers, with Millham as the keynote speaker. But everyone was seeing text messages and LinkedIn posts from colleagues who’d been let go. “It was a little awkward,” one attendee recalls.
Salesforce is, in some ways, the microcosm of the tech economy, the story suggests — and its growth mirrored that of the tech ecosystem, too.
We talked earlier this year about what the change in the interest rate environment meant for VC-funded tech companies. Now The New York Times is taking stock of the carnage:
Carta, a company that provides financial services for many Silicon Valley start-ups, said 87 of the start-ups on its platform that raised at least $10 million had shut down this year as of October, twice the number for all of 2022.
[The New York Times]
Helen Toner, one of the board members who fired Sam Altman and then ousted herself when Altman returned, has given an interview to The Wall Street Journal. She is unable to give a specific reason for Altman’s firing beyond “Our goal in firing Sam was to strengthen OpenAI and make it more able to achieve its mission.”
Listen, babe, I am fully happy to hear you out, but if being full of shit is a firing offense for CEOs, everyone in the Fortune 500 would be looking for a new job.
Netflix has released a trailer for its new crypto documentary, Bitconned, about the rise and fall of Centra Tech, a scam that was part of the wave of initial coin offerings in 2017. The blowback from the scheme caught DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather, who had promoted it — they were fined by the SEC. Ray Trapani, one of the co-founders, appears to be a key narrator of the Netflix documentary.
Here’s a fun profile of Gary Gensler, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, with a lot of details on his approach to enforcement (“Though you might think otherwise, I don’t spend the majority of my time on crypto,” he says). Don’t worry, there’s even an explanation of his genuinely weird social media antics.
I am theoretically on vacation (🌴) but this was too good not to share. Please enjoy!
[petition.substack.com]