Annie Rauwerda
RIP Good Times | On the Future of Big Tech
Annie Rauwerda, Ben Tarnoff, David Adler, David Ethan Jones-Krause, Jane Chung, Jeannette Estruth, Jordan Coley, JS Tan, Lora Kelley, Sophie Haigney, Tarpley Hitt
The trouble in Silicon Valley goes far beyond the tumult at Twitter and the implosion of FTX; in the sixteen months since Facebook rebranded as Meta, the company has shed thousands of employees, including 11,000 in a single round of layoffs, and has extended its hiring freeze. Across DoorDash, Stripe, Lyft, Salesforce, and other companies, more than 150,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2022 alone, and stocks have taken...
A Volatile Internet Landscape
Annie Rauwerda
As a kid in Huntsville, Alabama, Jimmy Wales would eagerly plaster his family’s World Book Encyclopedia set with stickers made by the company containing updated information. Some twenty years later, in 1996, he was a PhD dropout building a fledgling company called Bomis, which created web portals linking to sites about laddish topics like cars, philosophy, and sports. The site didn’t find success, however, until it started focusing on porn,...
