Heya,

It's been a weird week with me questioning my child-rearing skills. I sat down to breakfast with my son and he pointed at Darth Vadar on my shirt saying, slowly, carefully and with great certainty "I want to be him". My wife and I are now sleeping shifts.

This week:

🎧 The Joe Rogan Experience becomes Spotify presents: The Joe Rogan Experience.
📹 The trippy experience of watching 3 seconds from thousands on unviewed videos on YouTube.
🧑🏿‍🤝‍🧑🏿 How the big apps got their first 1,000 users.

Enjoy,

Chris.

Bizarro Devs  

Profit from a thousand cuts: Uber slashes more jobs.

Second round cuts: Uber announced they will layoff 3,000 workers and close 45 offices this week. This follows the 3,700 layoffs they announced earlier in the month.

Business declines: As you know, Uber is in the Point A to Point B business which has declined by 80% YoY due to the lockdowns in effect around the world.

The goal: Uber lost $1.1 billion-ish in Q1. The layoffs should help them save $1 billion dollars.

The outlay: They will pay $110 million to $140 million in severance and incur $65 million to $80 million shutting down offices.

Uber Eats doesn't put food on the table: Uber Eats will be leaner after deciding to cease operations in eight smaller markets. In other places, Uber Eats has helped build a bump, but it "doesn't come close to covering our expenses" according to CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. Things don't look to pick up soon either with their acquisition of Grubhub taking some time to deliver..

arstechnica.com  

The Joe Rogan Experience will be a Spotify-only experience soon. 🎧

By the numbers

• 100 million: Dollars Spotify paid for Rogan's back catalogue and exclusivity.
• 190 million: Monthly downloads of the Joe Rogan Experience.
• 370: Days the podcast has been in the top 10 North American podcasts (currently lodged at #2).
• 8.4 million: The number of Rogan subscribers on YouTube.
• 8.9 million: The number of YouTube views he's had in the last week.
• 8%: The rise in Spotify's share price after the news broke.

Separating the weed from the chaff: Rogan entertains an...eclectic range of guests on his show. He's had everyone from Bernie Sanders to Alex Jones in the hot seat and famously enjoyed a toke with Elon Musk. He's also not a hugely popular figure with left. How Spotify and Rogan come together to abide by Spotify's content policies should be interesting.

Taking a bite out of the Apple: It's been a little more than a year since Spotify started grabbing the high-hanging fruit from the orchard. Rogan joins Gimlet, Parcast, and The Ringer as Spotify's big podcast acquisitions. With podcasts from the Obamas' production company, Amy Schumer, and Joe Budden agreed to, the podcast wars are far from over.

techcrunch.com  

1. Astronaut plays a few seconds of clips from YouTube which have close to zero views. There are gems aplenty. The singers from Argentina were the best thing I saw this week.
2. Build it, and a community, and leverage influencers, and invite your friends, and print flyers, and they will come. How big consumer apps got their first 1,000 users.
3. I'm not a huge basketball fan, but this drinking game has interested me in The Last Dance.
4. A cool example of variable fonts on hover.
5. Find the invisible cow in a game of hot or cold.
6. I had some fun with Human Benchmark even if it revealed that my typing speed is slow, my reaction speed questionable, and my visual memory forgettable. Good times.
7. If Stanley Kubrick had ever made his portfolio site, then this is how it would look. This is a great read and incredible view with transforms and animations that will make you weep.
8. An old but entertaining collection of photos of animals who look like they're about to release an album.
9. I've never been good at making networking work for me. But, after the pandemic I am going to get better at it. This is where I started my reading.
10. Wholegrain Digital's sustainable starter theme, Granola is now even better.

Bizarro Devs  

That's it for the week.

If you have a link for me, then my emails are always open. Simply hit reply to this email to land in my inbox.

If this is the first time you're seeing this email, and you'd like to get more, then sign up here.

Have a great week,

Chris.

Bizarro Devs