GM Grapeviners,
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 144 super short seconds.
🔐 Hijacking Facebook Zuckerberg’s Meta has fired or disciplined around 25 employees and contractors for taking over user accounts, in some situations for bribes. It raises a lot of questions around security at the social media giant.
😃🤖 Who’s Face is Real? Checkout this cool game which shows you a real face and an AI generated one and asks you to choose the real one. Spoiler alert, it’s hard. Play here.
❌ Writing Better Error Messages! If you’re in the product space, you’ll know that error messages are the most forgotten about piece of UX. Want to learn how to approach this in a better way? Check out this incredible blog from Wix here. Shoutout to Alfredo on the MoonPay team who forwarded us this.
✍️ Notion Poetry? The workplace docs startup has released a product that uses AI to automatically write blog posts, job descriptions, tweets and even poems. There are a few competing products here, but none have quite cracked it. Read more and join the waitlist here.
💰 Twitters Ad Problem? Vox have written an interesting opinion piece claiming that Musk will permanently damage Twitter’s ability to attract advertisers. It also questions his ability to turn the social media giant around saying Twitter is a ‘different animal’ to SpaceX, Tesla and Paypal. Read the piece here.
🏠 Stay With The CEO? Brian Chesky, the Airbnb CEO, has put his own house up on Airbnb for bookings. The best part? He’ll be there too. We took a look and it is booked for years. Take a peak here.
🏦 SoftBankrupt The founder and CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, personally owes the bank about $5bn due to losses in their tech fund. Famous for his backing of Adam Neumann and WeWork, he’ll need a few lucky bets to save this one. The news comes as he announced he’ll be stepping back from day-to-day operations.
🐦 End of Twitter?! Between FTX and Twitter, it’s been a hell of a week. In the latest turn of events for Musk’s new project, it’s been reported that hundreds of employees have chosen to leave Twitter after his ultimatum. The latest? Twitter has shut its office tomorrow, likely to regroup and figure out how they’re going to operate until they’re able to find replacements.
💥 FTX’s Downfall As for FTX, the new CEO (who has replaced SBF) has detailed the ‘unprecedented’ mess he’s found the company in. He spoke of the complete lack of controls, lack of a board, cash management failures, the use of corporate funds to purchase homes and much more.
📄 Coach Behind The Greats Matt Mochary is the unknown person in Silicon Valley’s shadows. He has been a coach to founders and investors across Coinbase, Reddit, Sequoia amongst others. In an unheard of move, he has open-sourced his entire program, templates and general advice. It’s unbelievably good.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis