Episode · 2026-05-16
Meta Morale is Low??
Meta Morale is Low?? | HOT JOBS | Ashwinn Krishnaswamy x Matt Wan
Rundown
Chris and Colin cover hot ecommerce/marketing jobs, a Thrive Capital investment into Shopify, and reporting on cratering morale and layoffs at Meta, before interviewing Ashwinn Krishnaswamy about VCs courting creators and his CBD-cigarette startup, and Matt Wan about launching his supplement brand SET using lessons from his prior company Momentous.
Takes from this episode
Marketers skilled in creator/clipping strategies will increasingly find outsized opportunities working for non-traditional clients like politicians.Prediction
there's a lot of opportunity for talent to go to these other spaces and like yield outside results ... I think we're going to see that especially with some of these younger guys
Reformulating a CBD product into a cigarette form factor to target nicotine smokers, rather than the existing marijuana-alternative spliff market, was the key differentiating product decision.
what if you put this in a cigarette form factor and then go after the nicotine consumer, right? ... one-to-one kind of like replacement alternative for cigarette smokers
VC firms need a genuine 'coolness factor' and deliberate branding choices to win access to sought-after founders, since capital alone is fungible.
coolness factor is a real thing. And you kind of need some you need a little little coolness ... a lot of branding choices to be made. Who do I want to associate myself with if I can get the same bag from every every corner.
Installing activity-tracking software on employee laptops to train AI is a dystopian practice that is worsening already-low morale at Meta.
How good would you feel if your boss put that on your laptop to train the AI knowing that probably training AI to replace you? ... Very dystopian.
Claude's new design tool is a bigger competitive threat to Canva than to Figma, despite the initial assumption.
Hot take, bigger threat to Canva, but for different reasons than people think.
Shifting ad spend to Axon by AppLovin rescued new-customer acquisition when Meta performance collapsed in Q4.
We moved spend over to Axon by AppLovin and Axon resurrected and saved the quarter for acquiring new customers.