The Scoop #43: Is Lyft in Trouble?
The Scoop #43: Is Lyft in Trouble?
Also: works councils at tech companies in Europe, disappointing equity refreshers at Twitter and GitHub firing its engineering team in India.
The Scoop is a bonus series covering insights, patterns, and trends I observe and hear about within Big Tech and at high growth startups. Have a scoop to share? Send me a message! I treat all such messages as anonymous.
Today's topics:
Lyft in trouble. 2022’s end-of-year financials paint a worrying picture of the US’s #2 ridesharing company. The founders have just stepped down and a former Amazon executive is the new CEO. What does this major change mean? Analysis.
A trend of more works councils at tech companies. Tech companies in Europe have not been big on Works Councils – bodies which represent employees – but this seems to be changing fast. Councils are now present in almost a dozen tech companies in Germany and the Netherlands. I share details on why this is happening now. Exclusive.
Why did GitHub fire its engineering team in India? In a somewhat unexpected move, GitHub has let go all of its software engineers in India. Why, and what will this mean for its products? I’ve talked with affected devs for details. Exclusive.
Twitter’s disappointing equity refreshers. Software engineers who stayed at Twitter despite its increasingly hostile workplace were promised equity awards, based on performance. But employees I’ve talked with are disappointed with what they got. What could these lackluster awards mean for Twitter’s future? Exclusive.
A thriving bootstrapped company. Challenges at Big Tech companies and venture-funded startups dominate the news. For a change, I contacted the founder of HR Partner, a small, bootstrapped company whose founder wrote its Ruby / JavaScript application for the first 4 years. After a slow start, the company has nearly doubled its team the past few months. Why don’t we hear more stories like this? Exclusive.
Disclaimer: I worked at Uber, Lyft's US competitor, between 2016-2020. As always, I aim to remain independent in my analysis: I hold no positions in any of the companies mentioned in this article, and have not been paid to write about any of the companies. See my ethics policy on more details on how I aim to stay fully independent.