The Pulse #70: A Quiet, Heroic Turnaround at Meta
Also: the surprise collapse of Convoy, a well-funded freight tech company, and advice on standing out in a crowd of inbound applications from former Substack EM, Kamil Tuszino
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today's topics are:
Industry pulse. A roundup of recent events, with commentary. Half of Australia’s internet cut off, Apple slowing down OS feature development to focus on stability, OpenAI woos Google’s top researchers, and a note about everyone at NVIDIA voluntarily coming to the office.
Well-funded tech company Convoy collapses. Freight tech company Convoy raised $826M over the years, had a product-market fit, generated more than $300M revenue – and still collapsed overnight. It’s the biggest sudden crash of its kind in a long time.
A heroic turnaround at Meta almost nobody talks about. At the end of 2021, Apple’s app tracking transparency (ATT) changes severely corroded Meta’s ad-targeting capabilities, and cost the social media giant at least $10B in missed revenue. Against the odds, Meta delivered a series of small and incremental wins to undo the damage.
Standing out when applying for a full-remote position. Kamil Tuszino was until recently an engineering manager at Substack, hiring for full-remote roles within the US and Canada. Each role saw around 200 applications in the first week! Kamil shares his advice; the most important being that nothing beats a warm referral.