The weekend edition
Tanks in banks, Amazon owns our health records, and your car company hates crypto
Hello again. Happy Saturday.
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:
Tech hiring continues to slow, with Microsoft and Google announcing new hiring freezes this week. Over a long enough timeline, we’ll all work for Amazon.
Tanks were deployed in China to prevent people from taking money out of their bank accounts. If you tried that in America, you’d be applauded for your growth hack, get promoted to the CMO role at a web3 DeFi company, and a16z would wire you a $45M seed round.
The bad:
Snapchat missed earnings, was down almost 40% yesterday, and isn’t providing Q3 guidance because “forward-looking visibility remains incredibly challenging.” Any time you don’t have the answer to something, just say that “forward looking visibility remains incredibly challenging.” Don’t want to take out the trash? “Forward looking trash collection remains incredibly challenging.”
Amazon is buying One Medical for $3.9B. From the creators of “shipping you a Chinese knockoff item with fake reviews that arrives two weeks late” comes…cancer diagnosis!
The good:
A product manager at Coinbase was charged with insider trading. This is the first time the Department of Justice has prosecuted an insider trading case involving cryptocurrency. The former employee profited $1.5M off of the scheme. This seems bad, but then again, my 14 year old cousin made $2M from crypto in the same time period without insider information.
Tesla announced they sold almost $1B in Bitcoin. Why is this under good news? Because it’s a car company. Who cares? Is this the end of crypto as we know it? No. Things will continue to improve until we hear news that Red Lobster has liquidated their entire Solana position. Then we enter the real crypto winter.
Okay, that’s all.
If you’re enjoying this newsletter, share it on Linkedin or Twitter (Linkedin, for people who want to get fired), DM me to let me know you shared it, and I’ll Venmo you $1.49. Why $1.49? Because last week I offered $1.50 and it worked. Price goes down every week.
See you soon.
—
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