🦄 SVN: Ordering Coffee Via... Zoom Cashier?

Welcome back to Silly Valley News, ya filthy animals! Hope you all paid your taxes yesterday. Nothing like watching your precious sales commission go right back to the fed amiright..? Anywho, let’s do this!

This week’s pipin’ 🔥 ⛺ (hot conTENT) features:

• Ordering coffee from a cashier who is literally in another country

• Y Combinator going Death Row Records

• Getting Sentenced to Death for Banking Fraud in Vietnam

• And more nuggets of gold to grow your 🧠 …

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The Silly Valley

• ⛷️Netflix Founder Reid Hastings Takes Disruption to the Slopes. Hastings recently purchased Powder Mountain Ski Resort in Utah which was $100M in debt. His plan is to make part of the mountain only accessible to people who own homes there and pay a $30,000 to $100,000 annual membership fee. The rest of the ski area would remain open to the public, underwritten by the private operation. Unclear whether you’ll be able to ski using your parent’s account.

• 🤖 How long will the AI funding craze last? In the past couple weeks, Amazon invested $2.75B in OpenAI’s rival Anthropic, Celestial AI and Observe each raised over $100M in funding, and rumors are swirling that Scale AI and Cohere are going to be secure rounds in the ballpark of $500M in coming weeks. AI models and the data centers that run them are not cheap, but there’s also probably a little bit of overheating going on in the market as well so if you’re an AI company, now’s the time to raise money. And if you’re not an AI company, just get an OpenAI subscription and call yourself one.

•  🤳 Y Combinator President, Garry Tan, tweets “F*ck (SF politicians) as a label and a motherf*cking crew.” Tech tycoon Tan was admittedly in the booze business when he fired off an aggressive 2Pac reference and later apologized for the inappropriate tone. Tan became more involved in local SF politics during the pandemic, calling for better policing, schools, and more housing for all income levels. Seems like reasonable asks, but this is San Francisco where building houses for all income levels, grading schoolchildren, and policing actual crime are signs that you’re a bootlicking fascist conservative, so Tan’s got an uphill battle here.

Sales Tip of the Week

Outside the Bubble

• ☕️ Restaurant in NYC Offshores Cashier Job to the Philippines so you Can Order Coffee Via Zoom. The remote workers are paid $3/hr while minimum wage in NYC is $16. The company, Happy Cashier, was founded by Chi Zhang who owned a restaurant in Brooklyn that closed during the pandemic. He started Happy Cashier as a way to help other restaurants squeezed by high rent and inflation. It currently operates in 5 different restaurants in NYC and the $3 that he pays to employees in the Philippines is roughly double an average salary over there. Is this an ingenious way for small businesses to survive or a sign that we’re living in a modern dystopia? I’m gonna go with both.

• ⚾️ Even If You Don’t Give An F About Baseball, The Shohei Ohtani Betting Scandal Gets Even Juicier! It was initially reported that Ippei Mizuhara, the interpreter and former-BFFL of baseball megastar Shohei Ohtani, stole $5M from Shohei. Now, the FBI says he actually stole $16M! Ippei used the money to make 19,000 bets between December 2021 to January 2024 - an impressive 25 bets a day ranging from $160,000 to… $10. On top of the $16M that he stole from Shohei, Ippei owed an additional $24M in credit to his bookie totaling $40M in losses. On Nov. 14, 2022, Ippei texted his bookie, "I'm terrible at this sport betting thing huh? Lol . . . Any chance u can bump me again?? As you know, you don't have to worry about me not paying!!" The FBI says Shohei is a victim who had no idea $16M was missing from his accounts, but is that really plausible? Was the 10 year/$700M contract that will only pay him $20M total over the first 10 years, intentionally structured this way to prevent him from blowing it all on gambling? Or was Ippei a real life Talented Mr. Ripley?

• 🗡️ Vietnamese Real Estate Tycoon Sentenced To Death In $12.5B Fraud Case. Vietnam’s corruption crackdown, dubbed “Blazing Furnace,” has seen hundreds of senior state officials and high-profile business executives prosecuted or forced to step down, but Truong My Lan is the first to be sentenced to death. While it might seem a little drastic to murder someone for fraud charges, corruption in the country is so widespread that in some provinces people are forced to pay bribes just to obtain medical services in public hospitals. My Lan, the chairwoman of real estate developer Van Thinh Phat Holdings Group, was found guilty of embezzlement, bribery, and violations of banking rules. Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried is gets to do yoga in white collar prison.

Last Week’s ‘Tent

Don’t hate the salesperson, hate the sales game:

corporate.bro

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In this week’s Demoted podcast episode, Natalie & Corp discuss the differences of working for startups vs. gigantic corporations and Ross “Corpsplains the various stages of VC funded companies. Also, how toxic would the company culture be at Natalie & Corp’s startup and why will future scientists consider Ross a god of our time?

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