🍪 Tesla's 5 rules for productivity

Happy Thursday, friends. This is Bite Sized Beta. We’re like the marshmallows in your Lucky Charms - fun, magically delicious, and always leavin’ ya wishing you had more.

Hope you're having a better week than our bank accounts after Black Friday...

Let’s get to the good stuff.

In the oven this week:

  • 🤮 SBF speaks

  • 🍪 Cookie crumbs: bite sized headlines

  • 📊 Poll of the week: when should kids get their first phones?

  • Tesla's 5 principles for productivity

  • 🍫 Chocolate chips: 5 of our favorite finds this week

  • 😂 Snickerdoodles: Thursday memes

FRESHLY BAKED

SBF'S PRESS TOUR

Back in 2008, Bernie Madoff was arrested within 24 hours of his fraud’s reveal. Well, it’s 2022 now and Sam Bankman-Fried is out here attending the DealBook Summit, hosting Twitter Spaces with youtubers, and making TV appearances. 🤦🏻

Guess even SBF’s gotta pay the bills. Apparently, the guy only has $100K left in his bank account and one working credit card. His lawyers are begging him to stop talking, but he just can't quit.

So what’d he say on his press tour this week? Welllll, let’s just say these interviews don’t make him look any better….

Here’s what went down:

  • He says he’s “deeply sorry” and maintains that he didn't try to commit fraud. Uh huh, just like how I wasn’t trying to eat that last slice of pizza last night…

  • He claims he had no knowledge of underlying issues with FTX, but waffled between acknowledging he'd seen the balance sheets and positioning himself as unaware

  • As for the $650M hack of FTX, SBF says he doesn't know who did it, but thinks it was probably an FTX employee 

  • When Andrew Ross Sorkin asks him about criminal liability, he gets visibly nervous and clearly doesn’t know what to say. Eventually, he mumbles that he isn’t thinking about it

  • When Sorkin called SBF’s staff “a bunch of kids who were on Adderall having a sleepover party” in the Bahamas, SBF insists that he’s only has “roughly half a glass of alcohol a year” and that “parties” were just dinners, board games, and only quarter-full beers which were only consumed by 20% of attendees. LOL.

Any PR reps doing pro bono work? Seems like SBF could use some help.

A MESSAGE FROM WTFINTECH?

DIVERSITY MEETS THE FINTECH INDUSTRY

The fintech industry isn’t exactly known for its diversity. WTF is up with that?

Nicole Casperson is a reporter-turned-creator who’s quickly becoming one of the most important new voices in fintech. Each week, Nicole writes the WTFintech? newsletter with informative stories on startups, new technologies, and emerging female leaders.

Be the change you want to see. Subscribe to WTFintech? today.

COOKIE CRUMBS

BITE SIZED TREATS

The popular club E11even went from processing more than $500k of crypto transactions/month in 2021, to less than $3k/mo in 2022. Talk about being in a bear market.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday broke all time spending records this year. Turns out, the deals were better than most years, with retailers heavily discounting an oversupply of inventory (25% off on average for electronics, vs 8% the year before).

Bob Iger said he’d never return to Disney, but now he’s back and shedding some light on his plans for the company in his first town hall as reinstated CEO. TLDR: streaming needs to get more profitable, the org structure needs to be more decentralized, he’s got no plans to stop the hiring freeze, and apparently his wife had him return as CEO so that he wouldn’t run for US president.

Bill Gurley (a VC legend) published a blog post about company red flags in light of the FTX scandal. Generally a helpful guide for investors, but also kinda like yelling “fire!!!” after the building has already burned down...

Elon shared his plans for Twitter 2.0 and so far, the roadmap looks… ok. What he's pushing: advertising as entertainment, more video, longform tweets, encrypted DMs, a relaunched Twitter Blue subscription, and payments. Nothing too groundbreaking. Where are all the 420 references, Elon???

BeReal won “App of the Year” in Apple’s annual app store awards this year. Now all they gotta do is find a way to make some money.

A study by Stanford Medicine followed 250 kids for 5 years during which they got their first cell phones. Guess what? There's no linkage between the age at which you get a cell phone and your general well being as measured by grades, sleep habits, or depression symptoms. Take that, Mom and Dad. Give the tweens what they want!

What's the right age for a kid to get their first phone?

Let's hear it 👇🏽

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Check out the average age kids ACTUALLY get their phones at the bottom of this email.

THE BIG PIZOOKIE

TESLA’S 5 RULES FOR PRODUCTIVITY

Lately, we’ve been so wrapped up in all the Elon Twitter drama that sometimes we forget Elon has a few other jobs… like being CEO of Tesla.

This week, he sent Tesla employees a memo about how to improve company execution, and we gotta say, it was pretty solid. Here were his 5 principles:

  1. Big meetings are a drain and always get worse over time, so get rid of them unless you know they're providing value to all attendees. Frequent meetings are also useless unless you're dealing with something urgent. Meeting frequency should drop after you've resolved the urgent issue at hand.

  2. Leave a meeting if you’re not adding value. It's not rude to leave, it's rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

  3. Forget the chain of command and communicate via the shortest path necessary to get the job done. Info should be able to flow freely between all levels and departments.

  4. Don’t use acronyms and communicate clearly.

  5. Don't follow company rules blindly. Always pick common sense as your guide.

CHOCOLATE CHIPS

OUR FAVORITE FINDS

  • Paul Graham on why reading matters.

  • If you've ever wondered what the current world population (and counting) looks like on a page, this is it.

  • New year's resolutions are coming up. You’re tryna make the 6 pack happen. Let's all pretend we're really gonna do it this year and sign up for Health Squeeze. Free health tips, nutrition news and research, and recipes to help you stay fit.

  • A handy tool to get behind most news paywalls. A good one to bookmark in your browser since it works pretty well for mainstream news sources like WSJ, NYT, etc.

  • Griff is an Integral Coach offering virtual support to leaders & creatives. He makes it nearly impossible to fail to deepen your impact & achieve your ambitious dreams. Learn more.*

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SNICKERDOODLES

THURSDAY MEMES

😂 That's all we got for ya this week, folks. See ya next Thursday!

POLL

11.6 is the average age at which kids get their first phone. TBH, we thought it'd be younger.

What'd you think about this email?