Week in Review - Amazon layoffs begin, Ticketmaster can't handle Taylor Swift, and much of Twitter HQ quits

Saturday, November 19, 2022

Hello again! Time for another edition of Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap the week’s most read TechCrunch stories in one quick and easy-to-skim blast.

(There won’t be a newsletter next Saturday because I’ll be off being thankful/eating leftovers/being thankful for leftovers, but we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming the weekend after.)

If you read last week’s edition, you’ll notice some echoes here: more layoffs, more FTX drama, and more absurdity at Elon’s Twitter. Let’s dive in!

—Greg

Image Credits: Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images

Mass resignations at Twitter: After laying off thousands of Twitter employees over the past few weeks, Elon presented something of an ultimatum to those remaining: commit to being “extremely hardcore” as “part of the new Twitter” or leave with three months severance…and, well, a lot of people took door number 2. It’s unclear at this point (even to Twitter, it seems) how many declined the ultimatum, but all indications are that it was hundreds/thousands.

SBF DMs: For some reason the founder of FTX — the once massive crypto exchange that imploded last week — decided to have an impromptu interview with a Vox reporter by way of DM. Seemingly without any agreement that any of it was off the record, said DMs were, of course, quickly published. His biggest regret in all this? Weirdly, filing for bankruptcy.

Evernote gets bought: Evernote was once something of an App Store darling — an early go-to example of design, quality, and company leadership. Then after a series of pricing/privacy/design changes pissed off the user base, it just sort of…faded away. This week the company was acquired by Italian app developer Bending Spoons, in what Kyle Wiggers calls “the end of an era.”

Amazon layoffs: Rumors suggested layoffs were on the way at Amazon, with some estimates suggesting upward of 10,000 would be let go. This week the layoffs began, with CEO Andy Jassy writing in a memo that the layoffs will continue into next year.

Ticketmaster face-plants: Tickets for Taylor Swift’s first tour in years went on presale this week, and Ticketmaster, the website that no one on earth is happy to use, couldn’t keep up with the Swifties. Things went so awry with the gated presale that the scheduled public sale was outright canceled. You know your site outage is bad when it relights the political fire to break up your company’s overwhelming dominance.

audio roundup

Podcasts! We’ve got them! People seem to like them! Or a lot of people are just downloading/subscribing for the sake of inflating our collective ego. That’s okay too. Here’s what’s up in TC podcasts lately:

Live from our TechCrunch Sessions: Crypto event during one of crypto’s wildest weeks in ages, the Chain Reaction crew “tore up the script” and talked all about Sam Bankman-Fried’s “surreal, absurd” DM conversation with Vox.
What does a corporate comms team do? The Equity team sat down with a pair of deeply experienced comms people to learn how all that behind-the-scenes machinery works.

TechCrunch+

Two states received 80% of venture funds raised: “Through the third quarter of 2022, U.S. venture firms raised $150.9 billion across 593 funds,” writes Rebecca Szkutak. Where did it all go? Rebecca breaks down the stats.

A look at Sateliot’s Series A deck: 90% of the planet has no cell connectivity. What if you need an IoT device to phone home from, say, the middle of the ocean? That’s the idea behind Sateliot, which raised an $11.4 million Series A earlier this year. The company shared the pitch deck it used to raise with our resident pitch expert Haje Jan Kamps, who explored “the good and the bad of this high-flying space deck.”