🦄 SVN: Zuck's 💧, Parker Conrad's Back, Is Coachella 💀?

Greetings Earthlings! Just an FYI I’m headed on vacation. A little jaunt to Portugal. First time I’m putting an OOO message in over 5 years! Yippee! Don’t worry though, SVN chugs on regardless of where in the world I am. See you in May. Obrigado.

This Week’s Piping 🔥⛺️ (Hot ‘Tent)

• One Tech Founder Goes to Jail, Another Inflates Value

• Parker Conrad is a Unicorn Machine

• Coachella Wishes it was 1995, But it’s sooo 2024

• Why The Internet Is Broken (And Broke Our Brains)

The Silly Valley

• 👮‍♀️ Headspin Founder Manish Lachwani Fined $1M and Sentenced to Prison. Headspin, a company that “optimizes end users’ digital experiences with data science capabilities,” deceived investors by inflating HeadSpin’s revenue nearly fourfold, making false claims about its customers and creating fake invoices to cover it up. Lachwani’s scheme allowed him to value his startup at $1.1B and raise $117M from top investment firms. In front of the judge, Lachwani broke down in tears several times because that’s what happens when you get caught. Meanwhile, Headspin is hosting an “Open Source GenAI tools for Test Automation” webinar in May which will indubitably drive many fuego leads for the sales team.

• 💸 Parker Conrad is Back Like He Never Imploded His Last Startup! After Zenefits - the fastest growing unicorn in history - collapsed in large part to partying too damn hard (and federal investigations that showed the business model was basically illegal), Parker Conrad is back. But this time HR tech is not enough for the ambitious entrepreneur. His new company, Rippling, is tackling the whole back office (HR, Finance & IT). Rippling is in talks to raise nearly $1B on a $13.4B valuation. I’m just happy that a Silly Valley legend is getting a well-deserved second chance after so many learnings from his first rocket ship.

• 💧 Meta Releases a New Version of Meta AI, but more Importantly, Zuck Is A Chain Guy Now. If you wanna know more about the state-of-the-art Llama 3 AI model, go here. But if you’re a regular human who can only focus on Zuck’s chain, you may instead be asking existential questions like “Is the Zuck cooler than me now?!” “Will the metaverse improve my rizz game?” “Why do I have a sudden a carnal urge to smoke meats?” Brb, scheduling an emergency sesh with therapist Kyle.

  

  Zuck Dripping. Photo credit: Zuck’s IG

• Stability AI Lays off 20% of Staff after Controversial CEO Exit. The company behind the popular Stable Diffusion text-to-image model announced 40 of its 200 employees were being let go. This comes after its Founder-CEO Emad Mostaque left the company for lying about earning a degree from Oxford and securing a strategic partnership with Amazon, which turned out to be a simple cloud computing leasing contract…

Sales Tip/Fact of The Week

Outside the Bubble

• 🌴 Is Coachella Dead? This is the second year in a row that Coachella hasn’t sold out. In the mid-2010s, it sold out in an hour before the lineup was even announced. Somehow, "Coachella remains the most attended and highest-grossing annual festival in North America," but the continued decentralization of music and headliners that aren’t Beyonce or TSwift combined with an influencer-hellscape image problem is making it harder to stay relevant. Is this dip thanks to inflation or are Coachella’s best days in the rearview?

• 🤳 Why The Internet Is Broken (And Broke Our Brains). In an episode of the Plain English podcast, host Derek Thompson interviews Professor of Psychology and neuroscience at NYU, Jay Van Bavel. Van Bavel explains the “four bad laws that drive internet and social media engagement” are 1) Negativity 2) Extremism 3) Out-group animosity 4) Moral, emotional language. Now excuse me while I incorporate these principles into all future content to make humanity worse and win the algorithm.

• 🎬 CEO David Zaslav Receives 26% Pay Raise While Warner Bros Loses $3B. Zaslav’s pay rose to $50M despite the stock dropping from $24 two years ago to $8 today and revenue falling 4% YOY. That’s because his pay is tied to free cash flow and the company only lost $3B last year compared to $7B in 2022. But that rise in cash flow was mainly due to Hollywood strikes that shut down production costs. For an industry that is crying poverty and reducing investment in new projects, CEO pay continues to be astronomical. “We said no sacred cows,” said Zaslav when asked to explain why they’ve shelved so many projects. Luckily for Zaslav, he’s just a regular cow.

Catch Up on Last Week’s Tent

In last week’s episode of Demoted, Natalie regales tales of a vicious, horny monkey forest in Japan and we dive into a scandalous Dear Demoted submission about a coworker sending inappropriate messages to a client’s husband. I also go in depth on my love for bidets (No Diddy).

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