Dude, Where's My (Apple) Car?
Slootman out, Google hires more project managers, AI is replacing jobs
Hello again.
I’m Chris Bakke, a Twitterer X-er, and I write about hiring, careers, investing, finance, web5, and tech.
They said it couldn’t be done. Back-to-back late-Monday newsletters? Unstoppable.
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:
Slootman leaves Snowflake. Like Brady leaving the Patriots, the GOAT of creating B2B shareholder value put in his two-weeks. Slootman took not one, not two, but three separate companies to IPO. Snowflake’s valuation dropped $15B on the news. If I were him, I’d make a screenshot of that stock dip my Zoom background.
Google employees are in warm-ish water. Remember last week when Google rewrote history to be more diverse? CEO Sundar Pichai called this “completely unacceptable” in a leaked internal memo. He said that responsible teams have been working “around the clock” to fix the issue. Rest assured, Google’s deploying its rock-solid crisis mitigation plan: set up a recurring meeting, assign 15 project managers, and force everyone to go through more diversity training.
The bad:
Microsoft cheats on OpenAI. The Altman/Nadella honeymoon phase just took a devastating blow; Microsoft announced a 15 million Euro (I believe that’s about $19.43 USD) investment into Mistral, a French AI startup. Mistral makes large language models like OpenAI’s, so this is a bit awkward. Losing to the French, even more so.
The good:
Klarna’s AI agents are…working. The #1 company for millennial and Gen Z debt is using AI to handle customer service interactions. One agent is doing the equivalent work of 700 people. Sadly, the AI agent worked too hard, got promoted to Director, then took a cushy job as a VP for Apple’s car program, where they subsequently got laid off. Welcome to the real world, Klarna AI.
Apple car project canceled. The world’s second-most valuable company couldn’t finish a side project. Apple’s car was rumored to launch in
2015 2017 2019 2020 2022 2023 20252026. But now, it’ll never be. Why is this good? It’s one less thing for Apple fanboys to act smug about. (Sent from my iPhone 15 Pro)
Okay, that’s all.
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