The Scoop #45: The state of startup funding in Q1 2023
Also: Stripe’s massive monorepos, Amazon’s ChatGPT guidance, and has Twitter fired too many people?
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:
The state of startup funding. I’ve crunched data from a variety of sources for a sense of how startup funding is trending. So far, it’s downwards. What does this mean for tech? Analysis.
Did Twitter fire too many people? Laying off 50% of staff 6 months ago – and more since – is starting to have a visible impact. Twitter’s firing spree looks like it was too fast and very expensive in several countries. Exclusive.
An update on Amazon’s return to office (RTO) plan. The company rejected a petition signed by more than 30,000 workers against returning to the office on 1 May. Could this controversy be an opening for smaller companies to poach Big Tech engineers? Exclusive details and analysis.
Stripe’s impressive Ruby codebase. In its annual letter, Stripe mentioned it has more than 50 million lines of code. I was interested in how this translates to the number of services, and talked with engineers to learn more about it and the codebase. Exclusive.
Is diversity spending taking a hit at tech companies? A software engineer at a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) vendor reports business is poor. What can vendors perceived as ‘cost centers’ do to reduce customer churn during challenging times like now? Exclusive.
Amazon’s ChatGPT guidance. Access ChatGPT or Bard from an Amazon computer and you’re greeted with a screen of guidelines about how to use – and not use – these AI tools. Exclusive.
The Scoop sometimes delivers first hand, original reporting. I’m adding an ‘Exclusive’ label to news that features original reporting direct from my sources, as distinct from analysis, opinion, and reaction to events. Of course, I also analyze what’s happening in the tech industry, citing other media sources and quoting them as I dive into trends I observe. These sections do not carry the ‘Exclusive’ mark.