Michael and Johnny look at tech companies hurt most during this pandemic crisis and discuss the impacts of job losses and the long term health of the industry at large.
In the News of the Week, Disney furloughs 100,000 employees, but reopened up it's Shanghai park for the first time after the Covid-19 crisis swept through China.
Recorded Date: Sunday, May 10, 2020
Ideas of the Week:
- Make it super easy to create Airbnb clones, market it everywhere, making it very easy for hosts to one-click upload their details across the board
- Great idea to create a cleaning company and partner with Airbnb
Time Stamps
- @00:02:04: Disney During COVID-19
- @00:08:17: Tech Losers of COVID-19
- @00:18:13: What will happen to Airbnb?
- @00:29:18: Is the gig model to blame?
- @00:39:00: Johnny invents a novel face detection algorithm
- @00:40:24: Is this going to accelerate automation?
- @00:47:25: Is a new bubble going to form?
- @00:55:55: Is there rich and poor tech?
- @00:59:21: Ideas of the week
Highlights
- Disney with ~93.5M streaming users is a little under half of Netflix's 182M subscribers (Disney+ (54.5M) + Hulu (31.1M) + ESPN+ (7.9M))
- Disney has furloughed 100,000 employees - more than double the number of employees let go by startups (~45,000 at time of recording)
- Lyft & Uber have not graduated to the Earnings Per Share Group
- If you say you managed to stabilize, your stock went up post-earnings call
- ~9000 people were laid off between Uber, Lyft & Airbnb -> how many more people are actually impacted that aren't accounted for in these numbers? Could it be more than 10X, >90,000 people?
- If you're going to get laid off, Airbnb is the company to be laid off from
- Why didn't Airbnb hosts post their places on multiple platforms?
- Gig economy companies put people to work for money. The nature of their business requires interaction with people.
- In comparison to what Uber does, Amazon looks like a bastion for worker rights
- Uber has an opportunity to lead by proactively providing PPE to their drivers without leaving it to work at each state level
- Will a new industry like biotech rise up during this time?
- The Age of the Unicorns was spurred on by cheap money that low interest rates enabled. This led to the rise of unprofitable businesses. Will this cycle continue again over the next 5 - 10 years?
- No one is taking on the big tech companies at their core businesses.
- If the government isn't going to protect workers, it isn't going to go after these companies
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