Rapid Coverage of a World Gone Full Cyberpunk
The inaugural post of this blog was a review of Dan Lyon’s “Disrupted”, which put a point to the unicorn economy, where money losing companies crowd out real businesses by sucking up all the oxygen in the space.
That bubble hasn’t popped …yet, although it may this year. In the meantime, here is another personal account of life within some VC-darling branding darling, this time up here in Canada.
As per Bloomberg: WeWork desperately scrambles to salvage an IPO being spurned by the investing public by floating a “governance shakeup” although any reforms would still leave Neumann with total control over what happens because of the share structure. Also, the article opines that nobody is sure what governance changes remain to be made, given that “The company already has taken some steps, such as adding a woman to its board and having Neumann return…
CNBC reported Friday that Tesla will be laying off up to half of it’s sales and delivery staff, this comes on the heels of other layoffs reported earlier in the week. Salaried employees are looking at pay cuts of 10% to 30%. In other news, Elon’s brother Kimball appears to have pulled a switcheroo on his employees “emergency fund” for his Nextdoor Restaurant chain, pulling the plug on the fund right before he laid off…
Motif trading platform, which claimed to use data driven methodologies to enable the creation of thematic and “next-wave” portfolios (translation: they grep 10Q’s for keywords) has rather abruptly shut down. Their own advisors heard about it via Twitter. Yes, it did come with %FIRSTNANE%, who cares I guess… pic.twitter.com/3IuwpuBJQG — Hylland Capital (@HyllandCapital) April 18, 2020 They also had developed some “next generation thematic ETFs” like “human evolution reimagined” (SPTX), which were launched by Goldman…