November ‘23 recap
Articles:
OpenAI formalizes Sam Altman's return, gives Microsoft non-voting board seat | Axios
In just a couple days, OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman, 95% of OpenAI employee’s threatened to quit, OpenAI hired an interim CEO, and Microsoft announced they were hiring Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman.
Then, OpenAI announced they reinstated Altman and Brockman, replaced the old board, and gave Microsoft a non-voting seat.
If you missed it all, you didn’t miss much net change. Check out the full timeline here: https://www.axios.com/2023/11/22/openai-microsoft-sam-altman-ceo-chaos-timeline
LLMs for dummies | Rex Woodbury
Simplifying LLMs. Send this version to the non tech people in your life who want to understand LLMs
The single best interview question you can ask
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
It’s easy to copy things that have been done before, this is horizontal progress. It’s a lot harder to do new things, coined vertical progress. The most important, and hardest progress, is vertical progress.
Live Coverage of the Fed's November Meeting
There was no rate hike, and the fed funds target rate is staying, at least for now, at 5.25-5.50%
The Federal Reserve and Critical Moments in U.S. Monetary Policy | Chamath Palihapitiya
A brief history of the FED
WeWork raised over $16B in equity and debt, and is still burning $300M a quarter in cash today
Adam Neumann was able to raise a bunch of money at tech valuations, when WeWork was never more than a real estate company.
The business was really this: They signed 10-20 year office leases, spent $ to revamp the spaces, and subleased the spaces at higher rates to smaller tenants. Unfortunately for WeWork, they signed most of their leases between 2018-2019, just before the pandemic when rents were sky high.
In early 2019, WeWork was valued at $49B. In October 2021, they IPO’d through a SPAC
Despite closing underperforming locations, WeWork still only had 72% occupancy, down from 86% pre-pandemic.
Now, filing for bankruptcy, WeWork probably will get out of a lot of their leases without paying landlords.
The New Headache for Bosses: Employees Aren’t Quitting | Wall Street Journal
People aren’t quitting as much as companies expect them to. This article talks about the stark difference between the Great Resignation, and where we are today, where not enough employees are quitting their jobs.
My takeaway from this article was that the quits rate is still higher than the historical average over the last 20 years. Companies must have over-adjusted their models based on Great Resignation data.
I plotted the Quits rate (percentage of people who quit their job) and the S&P 500 over the same period of time. No surprise that they are correlated, but I was surprised just how correlated they are:
Quits rate
S&P 500
Podcasts:
Morgan Housel on the Tim Ferris Podcast
Housel just published a new book, Same as Ever, and came on the Tim Ferris pod to talk about the book and a lot more.
Books:
Smart Brevity: Writing is an important skill for everyone, regardless of your job. Most people’s writing is confused, overly complicated, and indirect. Smart Brevity, gives tips on how to write better.
