Yesterday Stripe announced layoffs. The news came via a really well-written note from the company leadership. I bag on tech bros, finance bros and marketing people for not being able to write clearly and concisely, but this email is a pitch-perfect example of how to write. I admire whoever put it together.
Why? The note showed compassion, admitted fault, and laid out a plan to (I think) fairly compensate those affected. Read it and let me know what you think. In my mind, it really raised the bar in corporate communication.
And then there’s Elon Musk.
The New York Times reported that Twitter sent staff home yesterday and told them not to come into the office because layoffs would be coming. Employees would be notified if they still had their jobs today (Friday). It’s like the Squid Game school of management and it show’s how much Elon has lost control of the situation, and the narrative. Morale in the trash right next to any deft communication techniques. Twitter is looking more and more like the biggest high buy in history.
Slow TV
I’ve been obsessed with Martijn Doolaard’s YouTube channel for about a year now. He built his channel riding his bike around the world and making videos about it, but I found out about him when he bought an old stone house in the mountains in Italy and set about restoring it. His operation is fully powered with solar panels and it’s been addictive to see him take on this giant project. Each week he uploads a new episode that’s about 20-30 minutes long. This is SLOW TV. Long cuts. Little music. No drama. It’s kind of the perfect anecdote to the constant dopamine-hit experience of watching phone videos.
Black and Blues
My current Louis Armstrong kick has been going strong for the last few months, but I’ve been listening for years. I regularly dip deep into his catalog for needed mood boosting, but I honestly didn’t know a lot about his story, and certainly not that he had a passion for recording himself and his friends in conversation. This is the material that plays a major part in a new documentary about him and digs into all the complications surrounding being a famous and pioneering black musician during the 20th century. It’s enlighting to hear about the experience in his own (colorful) words.
There is a weird moment in the film when the focus moves to his regular use of laxatives, which was…odd and left me thinking there must be so much more to this guy than is even in the film. Maybe it’s just the bar that’s been set by Let It Be, but I want to see an even longer version of this film. There must be so much left of his life to explore.
AI Comes to Video
Ever since writing about AI a few weeks back, I’ve become a lot more aware of the tech for content creators. Funny how that works. Here are a couple of links that tease AI video technology. It’s pretty mindblowing. More coherent thoughts later, but check these links out.
Phenaki: A model for generating videos from text, with prompts that can change over time, and videos that can be as long as multiple minutes.
There’s So Much More to the Banjo
Just a great video about one of my favorite instruments and its rich history.
That’s it!
JP