Unicorn social app IRL to shut down after admitting 95% of its users were fake
techcrunch.com> In a note to employees, obtained by TechCrunch, former CEO and founder Abraham Shafi encouraged employees to “adapt” and “be disciplined,” citing that WhatsApp grew to 450 million users with a team of just 55.
> “Becoming one of these iconic, impactful companies is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics. In fact, probably more challenging,” Shafi wrote in the memo, which was full of similarly outlandish analogies. “Like the Olympics, we know most people don’t want to be Olympians. In the same way, not everyone will want to walk the path we are walking. But for those that want to push their limits and find out what they are capable of, this culture is for you.”
With every day that passes I become more convinced that Silicon Valley was a documentary.
> But for those that want to push their limits and find out what they are capable of, this culture is for you.
Its really unclear to me why a startup would expect their employees to be game for this in 2023. Once upon a time, the equity grants could be worth something. For an average exit, an early employee could easily see a life changing amount of money - for a late employee, they'd still get a down payment or something meaningful.
If I'm at a company that capped the upside of my equity, that created an equity pool which is only meaningful on surprise upside, that is not doing well... why would I suddenly be game for increasing my workload by 20-30%?
It screams of a mindset that says "I think my employees are idiots who deserve to be exploited if can convince them to be." No way in hell would that CEO ever be convinced of his own argument if he were in his employees' shoes.
I can see why it works, though. There are people who are motivated by the belief that they're more hardworking/better/etc than other people, and if you offer them a metric that could make them feel "better" than someone else, they'll try to meet it even if its to their own detriment. Hustle culture depends on these types existing.
Softbank truly appears to have whatever is the opposite of the Midas touch. I'm quite impressed, actually.
a Mirdas touch, if you will.
They did have some successful exits though right?
A Mierdas touch, you mean? ;)
Sí
My hat to their growth hacker, they managed to raise 200 millions.
was it users or dollars?
dollars of course, users are just a number in a python script somewhere..
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
I’ll just leave this here.
Why we keep creating and gravitating towards the wrong jobs?
I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I miss when you could be fairly confident something was written by a human or bot online.
Although it's going to be a very interesting shift with AI developing so fast.
Will face to face be the only true way to verify you're talking to a human soon?
> Will face to face be the only true way to verify you're talking to a human soon?
I suspect the short answer is yes, and part of me wonders if this will actually be a good thing in the long run. It seems we’ve gotten pretty far from our social origins, arguably with some ill effects.
I’m more worried that this will usher in an era of draconian online verification out of apparent necessity.
Ephemeral platforms seem like they'd be less attractive targets to the bot shill farms than a place where you might be able to stick a top comment in a thread and get all the eyeballs on it forever.
I’m fine letting this play out as is.
Some scifi imagines a world with a useless internet that is avoided in favor of local intranets or in person only
But also with AI running their own businesses, shout out to Delamain!
The human AI distinction wont be that important, but also in person favored.
I am worried that you are a bot.