Gm. On Monday, we put out a call for you all to become LPs in our $10 million venture fund, House Capital.

But we messed up and included the wrong link. We’re blaming it on the sun getting in our eyes as we copy and pasted.

So today we’re rocking sunglasses in order to bring you the correct link.

If you’re an accredited investor who wants to get involved, head here.

FRESH POWDER

Looking at three funds that recently topped up their coffers.

TECH

Snap axes thousands

Turns out that Snap’s pandemic hiring spree was as short-lived the photos on its platform—according to a report published yesterday by The Verge, the struggling social media company is planning to lay off 20% of its workforce equating to over 1,000 people.

It got a little ahead of itself: Like everyone else in the tech community, Snap went ham on hiring during the pandemic. It began March of 2020 with roughly 3,427 full-time employees, and ended last quarter with 6,446, a hefty 38% increase.

Its workforce was due for a trim

Snap had been limping along ever since Apple changed its rules on ad tracking across iOS apps. The switch up, coupled with a semi-recession, meant Snap’s ad business badly underperformed in Q2. Its stock is even more battered down 80% since the beginning of the year.

But that’s just the beginning of its problems. Snap has always dominated the intimate and authentic peer-to-peer social interactions, but now the rise of BeReal has it looking over its shoulder

• In response, Snap rolled out a BeReal-style dual camera feature on Monday.

Snap does still has some breathing room on the daily users front: 347 million to BeReal’s 10 million. But while BeReal encroaches on its territory, Snap has made some ill-advised bets to expand theirs. It splashed out $500 million to buy WaveOptics, an AR company that makes the tech for its latest Snap spectacles which have yet to hit the mass market.

Zoom out: Snap has reached its “Meta” stage where it’s looking for what’s next. So far it's hung its hat AR with some hardware plays sprinkled in. And while it's the market leader in some AR categories like virtual try ons, it whiffed on the hardware front, sunsetting its Pixy drone project and targeting its hardware division with some of the deepest cuts from the layoffs.

LEADERSHIP

Tan’s master plan

Garry Tan is coming home. Years after the famous venture capitalist went through Y Combinator himself, he’s back, this time as CEO and President. Tan’s chief goal once he takes the reigns?

Go even bigger

The 2008 YC alum dismissed the popular criticism that YC’s batches have grown too large, instead driving home that “the more number of nodes there are, the more interconnected and valuable a network is.” It’s a valid argument, but one that loses bite if the network is too homogenous.

• And YC is homogenous: Its last cohort featured 90% male founders, up from 88% in the prior batch. Tan's Initialized Capital is one of the more diverse VC firms in the world, told TechCrunch that supercharging diversity is a top priority.

Tan is also firmly in the “SF is not dead” camp and plans to refocus YC’s commitment to the region. “YC is a magnet,” Tan told TechCrunch, and SF still “has a big role to play in the future of technology.”

Bottom line: Tan has experience with big funds and lots of founders— his old firm Initialized Capital just raised $700 million across two funds and works with over 200 active portfolio companies. YC, however, is a different beast. It’s funded more than 3,000 companies with a combined valuation nearing $1 trillion.

QUICK HITS

Seed Round

Stat: A recent report from Jigger, an anti-bot protection platform for web3, found that for more than 60 prominent web3 games, nearly 40% of users are bots. Everyone knows that web3 has a bot problem but seeing just how bad it is for many of the top play-to-earn games in the space is eye-opening. “Now do Twitter,” said Elon (probably).

Story we’re watching: Last year, the TikTok knock-off Triller announced a $14 million grant program to pay 300 black creators $4,000 per month. The announcement was met with broad praise, except for one tiny detail—Triller never followed through on that promise. Now Sony Music, along with Timbaland and Swizz Beatz, is suing Triller over its missing payments. Triller has taken the bold approach of sticking its head in the sand and pretending like it doesn’t have half the music industry mad at them. It’s been ghosting all of the lawsuits leveled against them and yesterday, announced it has completed a $300 million round of debt financing to fuel its plans to go public later this year.

Rabbit hole: Why is WebMD so awful? (Substack)

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Gopuff is negotiating a credit line of up to $300 million from SoftBank after delaying its IPO.

• Elon Musk added the claims made by whistleblower Peiter Zatko to his stated list of reasons for not wanting to go ahead with his deal to acquire Twitter.

• Facebook is shutting down its mobile gaming app this October.

• Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, FTX, and KuCoin all received letters from The House Committee on Oversight and Reform inquiring about safeguarding users from scammers.

THREE LIES AND A HEADLINE

How’s your BS sensor? Let’s put it to the test. Three of the headlines are satirical ones written by The Onion, while one is actually real. Can you tell fact from fiction?

A. “NASA delays Artemis launch after rocket gets scared.”

B. “Casting director can tell that child actor doesn’t have the abusive parents it takes to make it in entertainment.”

C. “New Google privacy settings allows users to choose if Sundar Pichai can sleep under bed.”

D. “Papa Johns is getting roasted for its crustless Papa Bowls: ‘bonesless pizza.’”

LAYOFFS TRACKER

Notable layoffs this week:

54gene: 95 people (30%)

Meesho: 300 people

FOUNDERS CORNER

The best resources we came across that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.

💸 How to get side gigs as a developer

🔙 How to use “VC backchanneling” to your advantage as a founder

🧠 Psychology of Marketing is a weekly newsletter focused on how customers and brands make decisions.

THREE HEADLINES ANSWER

It’s D. What’s even more shocking is Papa John’s used the word “innovation” to describe that monstrosity.