🍪 Apple's got new tricks and Coinbase gets into hot water

Good morning, friends! This is Bite Sized Beta - we tell you what’s going on in tech in <5 minutes, so you can spend the rest of your day figuring out who closes the bus door when the bus driver gets out.

It's a short one today, so let’s get to it.

In the oven this week:

• 🔥 Freshly baked: Coinbase gets into hot water

• 🍪 Cookie crumbs: 5 bite sized treats

• ☝🏼 One big pizookie: Apple teaches your phone new tricks

• 😂 Snickerdoodles: memes that slap harder than Will Smith at the Oscars

FRESHLY BAKED

Raise your hand if you signed a job offer from Coinbase on a visa but then got it rescinded a few weeks before your start date due to a hiring freeze, even though they sent you an email PROMISING it wouldn't be rescinded and now you’re jobless but urgently need to find a job to stay in the country. Just this guy?? Ok.

(Seriously though, someone please reach out and do him a solid if you’re hiring.)

Ok, backing up - what happened?

Coinbase recently announced a hiring freeze along with the rest of big tech. But unlike the rest of big tech, they also rescinded a bunch of already signed offers this week in a brutal mass email.

What’s worse, it turns out Coinbase HR had previously sent out emails reassuring people that they wouldn’t rescind any offers that were already extended or signed.

They did offer 2 months severance pay and a talent database to help folks get hired elsewhere, but man, it’s a bad look.

Sorry Coinbase, you dug your own grave .. now ya gotta lay in it.

COOKIE CRUMBS

• Bill Gates released his 5-book summer reading list. Spoiler alert, here they are:

  • 1. The Power, by Naomi Alderman (gender roles/equality)

  • 2. Why We’re Polarized, by Ezra Klein (American politics, psychology)

  • 3. The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles (fictional, growing up in the 1950's)

  • 4. The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (climate change)

  • 5. How the World Really Works, by Vaclav Smil (societal systems)

• Elon gets access to Twitter metrics to help him figure out what % of users are bots. He wants to assess whether his $44 billion purchase will turn out to be a flaming pile of garbage. The argument: if you agree to buy a house and the seller says the house is <5% termites, but you find out later that the house is actually 90% termites, it's not the same house. Twitter is saying that <5% of accounts are fake/bots, but Musk believes it could be 10x that number, and he says he’s gonna ditch the deal if so.

• BuzzFeed’s stock saw a sudden crash of more than 40% this week. Apparently, the pre-IPO lockup agreement, which prevents company insiders from selling right after the IPO, expired this week. Not a good sign when execs, employees and investors aren’t so bullish on their own company 🫠

• OpenSea's head of product was charged with money laundering & wire fraud: knowing which NFTs would soon be featured on OpenSea's front page, the guy bought and quickly flipped them for a quick buck. Now he's facing up to 40 years in prison.. and he only profited 19 ETH (aka $34K in today's prices). Womp womp..

• The optimal range for cognitive and work performance is 71.6°F - 75.2°F (22°C - 24°C) according to a study from The International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health. Can we all agree to kill the aggressive air conditioning in the office now??

THE BIG PIZOOKIE

This week was the Coachella of tech, aka WWDC, Apple’s annual conference for big product announcements. We watched all the talks, so let me save you a few hours. Here are the 5 best things you’ll be able to actually do:

1. Customize your iPhone lock screen fonts and widgets with the new iOS 16 update

2. Mark texts as unread, or edit/unsend them. (Ok Tim, you can stop the keynote now, I've heard all I need to.)

3. Buy something with Apple Pay and pay for it in up to 4 installments over 6 weeks with 0 interest. Time is money after all…

4. Buy a new Macbook Air/Pro that’s better, lighter, faster, more expensive, yadda yadda

5. Mount your iPhone to your Macbook so you can use the camera for video calls with the new MacOS update

One other kinda cool but random detail from the keynotes: all the presenters wore Apple Watches that were set to 10:09.

Why 10:09? It’s a marketing tradition in the watchmaking industry to make sure the dials don’t cover the brand logo or any details usually positioned around the 3, 6, and 9.

Plus, having them all show the same time prevents any viewing distractions since these keynotes were all pre-filmed at different times.

Gotta respect the attention to detail.

SNICKERDOODLES

How'd we do on today's email?

• 🍪🍪🍪 Top notch!

• 🍪🍪 Meh... could use more milk

• 🍪 Undercooked, do better