The Pulse #80: Meta’s Remarkable Turnaround
15 months ago, Meta was valued at a 7-year low, and embarked on laying off 25% of staff. Today, the company is valued more than it’s ever been before, and will hand out higher bonuses than ever.
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, we cover:
Industry pulse. Struggles at Snap; inside Google’s all-hands, Uber’s somewhat surprising turnaround, GitHub suspending their cofounder’s account; a successful startup sale, and more.
Meta’s remarkable turnaround. 15 months ago, Meta was valued at a 7-year low, and embarked on laying off 25% of staff. Today, the company is valued more than it’s ever been before, and will hand out higher bonuses than ever. What’s changed is profitability; dividends; and stock market investors changing their minds on the company.
More pressure to speed up moving off IPv4. Amazon Web Services will start to charge around $44 per IPv4 address – and other cloud services and hosting providers could well follow. Migrating to IPv6 is complicated, as a recent GitHub outage because of this showed.
The Vesuvius challenge: GenAI helps to read the past. A volcanic eruption buried scrolls 2,000 years ago. They cannot be opened without severely damaging them, and it looked like they could never be read. But scanning these scrolls with CT, and using Trasformer-inspired machine learning models lead to a breakthrough.
A stark difference between tech and the US economy. The broader economy is doing well, thank you very much – which offers more hope for tech as well.