Your careers page is bad and you should feel bad. It's wasting your team's 🕑+💸 by hurting your recruiting.

We looked at 100 top startups sites and found 7 easy ways to improve your careers page -- even if you're in a hiring freeze 😬... 1. Ditch your headshots and geeky "class photo" of your whole team. Invest in great photography of your founders, product, and office life. You'll end up using them everywhere

Nerdy fact: I wrote my master’s thesis about memes.

I argued that remixable memes like LolCats would lower the bar to creativity.

Here’s how they exploit our narcissistic desire for attention to make us share more… Most people aren’t that creative. They want to color…but within the lines. That’s why remixable memes are so powerful.

They lay out a template:

Cute cat + Poor grammar caption = LolCats wholesome fun

People chillin -> Beat drops -> Dance like crazy = Harlem Shake’s absurdity

The WSJ's "Facebook Files" is the biggest scoop in the company's history. Internal documents prove:
-Facebook knew its algorithm incentivized outrage
-Instagram knew it hurt teen girls
-Facebook has been shielding VIPs from moderation

Here are the shocking revelations... 🧵 Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018, promote friends & family content to "improve well-being"

In actuality, it was an attempt to stop a multi-year decline in Likes and Sharing

You can’t stop sex, you just make it less safe.

The OnlyFans ban could put creators in danger by pushing them back towards in-person sex work.

In interviewed some OnlyFans stars & experts to get real talk on the ban 🧵 1/7 OnlyFans isn’t banning porn, but is betting it can thrive as softcore-only with fewer headaches, even if it hurts creators.

It’s quietly been pushing the most graphic content off already. 2/7

Startup fundraising legal-ese is absurdly confusing. Here are the key terms and how to understand them... 1/ Liquidity Preference: Who gets paid out first at exit. 2X or 3X means a VC gets multiple times their $ back before founders get any! If there's none left, sucks for everyone else. Keep pref at 1X or the team & other investors might get nothing unless the company becomes huge. 2/

Flymachine just launched the future of livestreamed concerts:

-Broadcast in the best angles from top venues
-Overlaid video chat with friends
-Started by the TicketFly & Bonnaroo founders

Here's why it's a win for artists, venues, and fans where others failed 🧵 Concert streaming was asocial, boring, and unsustainable.

Music lovers deserve more than sitting by themselves watching single-camera streams from the basement of an artist who's not getting paid

Streams felt nothing like an IRL show 2/

I've made my first lead investment since becoming a VC!

Spore.build is the free, all-in-one tool for creators to build websites to truly own, grow, & monetize their relationship with fans.

Here's why creators deserve help escaping the algorithms & app store taxes 🧵 The top two trends in the creator economy beget the top two problems:
-Creators want to move top fans off misaligned social networks, but lack their own home on the web
-Creators need a ton of software to build a community, but are overwhelmed by fragmented, expensive tools

History lesson: Why did the creator economy suddenly blow up?

Because the social giants refused to help creators monetize...since none of their competitors did either.

Until... 🧵1/ Creators got sick of YouTube’s ad revenue share as the only option. Fb/Insta treated art like information that was free

Then In 2011/2013, @shl started Gumroad & @jackconte started Patreon, offering a taste of direct fan monetization. Creators began to realize their worth... 2/

"You can make a living from nearly any niche"

35 takeaways from #PRESSCLUBhouse on the future of newsletters w/

-Substack's @cjgbest
-Stratechery's @benthompson
-The Hustle's @theSamParr
-Information's @Jessicalessin
-Axios' @danprimack
+@lennysan @polina_marinova @nbashaw. 1/ Why are newsletters blowing up now?

-Ownership of audience instead of renting from social platforms
-Direct connection between writers & readers
-Rise of Substack & lower barriers to creation
-Attention economy Darwinism: content must evolve to come to you.
#PRESSCLUBhouse 2/

"Focus might have been good advice for startups a decade ago because there was such a green field. But in 2021, the SAAS point solution space has been picked over. Combining products into 'Compound Startups' unlocks opportunities" -Rippling CEO @parkerconrad on #PressClubhouse @parkerconrad The biggest companies aren't single-purpose tools. They're multi-product solutions that fix complex products. Here's Rippling CEO @parkerconrad's "Compound Startup" theory

What's your favorite startup/tech-related newsletter and what's it about? I'll start...

Trying to build a list of the best by vertical for social, fintech, enterprise, AI, security, ecommerce, venture, crypto, marketing, health, AR/VR, the creator economy, and strategy My favorite social newsletters:

-@CaseyNewton's Platformer on social tech + (vs?) democracy platformer.news

-@HipCityReg's artful musings on emergent culture hipcityreg.substack.com

-@gaby_goldberg's theories about social app trends gabygoldberg.medium.com

Why Clubhouse is special & deserves its $1B valuation:

It’s a new social graph, the talk graph, where you follow different people than on Twitter or Insta. It’s a more personal, unscripted way to get to know public figures and peers you care about.

Off-camera = intimacy. 1/ Clubhouse’s huge session times for some users signal a sticky and satisfying experience that could grow into a mainstream behavior.

There are emergent cultures and native celebrities forming, from talk shows to musicals to open mics to business pitch practice to games shows. 2/

Bernie Sitting feels like a step change moment for memes that could lastingly increase mainstream participation.

Why’s this little mitten man everywhere?

1. Everyone has context: The source was a national event on TV

2. It’s uncomplicated: He’s out of place. Minimal explaining 3. The Bernie meme is wholesome & relatable: “everyone else dressed up, I wore what was comfy.”

4. It has a backstory & updates driving media coverage: school teacher made the mittens, Bernie sells meme merch for charity

I asked 6 moderation experts to debate the tradeoffs of deplatforming Trump.

The conclusion? Banishing him to fringe apps makes his extremist followers tougher to track

But the bigger threat is on Fb & Twitter, he could radicalize mainstream users.

Here’s a🧵of takeaways. 1/ Global content policies are made in Silicon Valley without nuance...

...then enforced by moderators overseas without context. We need a better system. 2/

All the lonely people... yet none of our social apps tell us who wants to hang out right now.

We're always 'online' but that doesn't mean we're available.

Here's a thread on why we need something new because the Green Dot is a lie. You can always call or text your best friends

But it feels desperate or awkward getting left on *read* by acquaintances...so we stop reaching out.

We need a way to see what's up with people without a harsh sense of rejection, otherwise the walls grow ever taller.

TechCrunch chose the top 20 startups out of 200 from Y Combinator Demo Day. My picks?
1. Somatic - an autonomous bathroom cleaning robot. No way humans do this dirty job forever. My #2 favorite startup from YC Demo Day?
Homestead - Converts your garage into an apartment for free and then splits the rental revenue with you. Lots of need for passive revenue streams in the coming recession

Here's my line-by-line rebuttal of Jack Dorsey's subtweeted reasons he should still be CEO.
1. Twitter still doesn't label misinformation 3yrs after Fb started to
techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/its… 2. Twitter's ads still feel totally skippable. Dorsey claims it's making a big push for mobile app install ads...7yrs after Facebook did that 🤦‍♂️Share price still down from 5yrs ago

Instagram now lets you clean up your feed by revealing who you see most & interact with least Instagram's unfollow suggestions make sure you don't clog your feed with courtesy or pity follows, or oversharers tcrn.ch/3bhIhxR

Facebook shares plummet because profits grew just 7% in 2019 compared to 61% in 2018 techcrunch.com/2020/01/29/fac… Facebook's 2019 expenses grew $47B, up 51% vs 2018. Content moderation & safety costs are strangling the golden goose

Takeaways from Zuckerberg's testimony:
-Fb will announce its News section this week
-He argued for Libra approval because China's digital Renminbi is coming soon
-Libra partners left because "it's a risky project and there's been a lot of scrutiny."
techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/zuc… Zuckerberg says it would be reasonable for regulators to mandate that Libra be majority-backed by US dollars, not foreign currencies

Takeaways from my #TCDisrupt talk with Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel:
1. On Instagram Threads’ icon vs Snap Spectacles. “Haha. Nice logo” Spiegel says it will be 10 years until there are popular AR glasses, and Snap could beat Apple by starting on phones. (Sounds like a decade of risky spending). 2/