Jobs are down, rents are up, Costco is king
Job cuts, moving to the metaverse, and the last thread holding the economy together
Hello again.
As a reminder, I’m Chris Bakke, a Twitterer, and the CEO of Laskie - the best hiring platform for tech talent. I enjoy writing about hiring, careers, investing, finance, web5, and tech.
Let’s dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly from this week. As always, we’ll flip it so we don’t end the newsletter on a bad note.
The ugly:
More job cuts this week. Big names like Microsoft, OpenSea, Hopin, Gopuff, Tonal, and Butler laid off over 6,000 people this week. Airlift (Pakistan’s most funded startup) shut down.
Inflation is 9.1%. Thanks for the raise, boss!
The bad:
The average rents in Manhattan are now over $5,000/mo. Thousands of fashionable millennials and GenZers blew their chance to live in the Big Apple by spending all their money on $9 oat milk lattes and will have to pack it up and move into a $300/mo apartment in the metaverse like the rest of us.
Imagine a politician pushing a bill to give $50B+ to large domestic chip makers over the last two years, and that same politician personally buying $5M of Nvidia stock this week. Sounds shady, but here we are. Remember: if your portfolio is down 75% this year, you need a 300% return to breakeven. If your portfolio is down 50% this year, you need a 100% return to breakeven. If your portfolio is up 25% this year, you are a politician.
Job openings are down from Q1 (from 11.9M jobs posted in March 2022, to 11.3M posted today), but the overall job market still seems quite strong. Didn’t have enough time to update the chart below with a line for my crypto hedge fund friends: “Unemployed, and on the run from authorities” but will add that in moving forward.
The good:
Costco is carrying the entire economy on its back. A Costco hot dog combo is still $1.50, but if that combo kept up with inflation, it would be $4.13 today. I personally plan to initiate a short position on the company and order 20 dogs this weekend. Robbing them blind of tens of dollars. I call this activist investment strategy the “Carl Icahn’t-possibly-eat-another-hot-dog.” Wow.
It’s still a wonderful time to raise money or start a company (just much less wonderful than it was in 2021). VCs are sitting on $290B in dry powder. None of them are inviting me on their private jets anymore, so presumably that means they’re saving up money to invest in you.
Okay, that’s all.
If you’re enjoying this newsletter, share it on Twitter or Linkedin (the Devil’s Twitter), DM me to let me know you shared it, and I’ll Venmo you $1.50 for a Costco hot dog combo. You might not get a better deal than this all year. I am serious. I’ll do it.
See you next week.
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