2023 tech recap, and onto 2024
Only 12 months between posts. I'm nothing if not consistent.
Well, hello again.
As a reminder, I’m Chris Bakke, a Twitterer X-er (?) I write about hiring, careers, investing, finance, web5, and tech.
It’s been a while since our last issue, (forgot my password to this tbh), but I hope you’re all good.
I’m shipping a Monday night newsletter? No rules, folks.
Since we last spoke, I sold a company, had another kid (she’s so cute, thank you for asking), moved across town, resumed angel investing (I literally said “let me know how I can be helpful” this weekend), and started advising companies on founder-led-sales and growth strategies. Book time with me so you can grow revenue or learn sh*tposting 101. People actually book times with me on this, and like your favorite Uber driver, I’ve got 5 stars. Has been fun meeting several of you IRL.
Okay, let’s recap what happened in the past year.
2023 recap
Sam Altman tech CEO speedrun - Everyone made unfunny AI poems thanks to ChatGPT. Come on, you know you did too. Altman was so good at making money that the anti-business board un-CEO’d him, he briefly got a job at Microsoft as a senior product director, the board realized they messed up, and begged him to come back? My Super Bowl.
Silicon Valley Bank collapses - The largest bank serving tech companies collapsed early last year. Many prominent VCs, being famously anti-big-government,
sat back and watched it happen as it’s a founding libertarian principle thatactually, I read that wrong, they begged Biden for a bailout? Weird.The government saves us from progress - Whew, that was a close one. Adobe almost bought Figma, but thankfully the government stepped in to save us from having to pay for creative cloud. They also banned TikTok as it’s a security risk. Wait, no, they just made Microsoft buy it. Hmm, that didn’t happen either. Whatever happened to that?
Bitcoin is back. Sort of. Check in on your local crypto bro - they’ve moved from McDonald’s to browsing the Toyota dealer’s certified pre-owned section. No more Ferraris, but at least it’s an upgrade.
Stripe still hasn’t IPO’d. The Collison brothers are not quite ready to show up to Congressional hearings for the rest of their lives like other public tech CEOs.
Well, we made it. 2024. Onward.
Let’s dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly from the past few days. As always, we’ll flip it so we don’t end the newsletter on a bad note.
The ugly:
Google’s generative AI changes history. By rewriting it. Gemini (formerly Bard, soon to be renamed something else) has a bit of a diversity problem when it comes to generating images. Check out Larry Pang and Sergey Bing:
The two worst credit cards join forces. Big news for your friend with bad credit. Capital One wants to buy Discover to merge the bottom of two barrels into one. Since the government blocked Amazon’s acquisition of Roomba, Adobe’s acquisition of Figma, and Visa’s acquisition of Plaid, we’re expecting this one to fly right through the approval process.
The bad:
Reddit aims to IPO. The internet’s smelliest users were in a tough spot last year. LLMs like ChatGPT trained on Reddit's posts, and Reddit didn’t see a penny of it. You know what they say about AI: if you can’t beat them, sell user data to them.
The New York Times debuts generative AI for ads. The tool will help their advertisers better target their readers and their interests. “Tech-hating media empire decides to embrace tech because they realized they could make more money.” The storyline of Succession writes itself.
The good:
$NVDA to the MOON. Our savior, our Chad, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Market bears in shambles. Triple-digit growth in sales AND earnings. The biggest tracking stock for AI does it again. It’s great news, because I had a completely different paragraph prepared if they missed earnings, and it wasn’t pretty. We’re safe for another quarter.
Neuralink…actually works? The first human patient to get the Neuralink chip has “fully recovered” with “no ill effects.” This is all becoming a bit much. I figure I’ve got about 5 or 6 more of these little newsletters in me before AI + Neuralink just takes over our lives, so I’ll enjoy it while I can.
Okay, that’s all.
(PS - If you’re a founder, CEO, CMO, VP Sales, VP Marketing, head of growth, or are just looking for ideas to grow inbound leads from content + social marketing, kindly fill this out. I’m looking for 6-8 people to help me test a new idea in March).