Gm. 🎶 Insane in the brain, inside in the membrane, insane in the brain, insane in the membrane. 🎶

FRESH POWDER

Looking at three funds that recently topped up their coffers.

TWITTER

Verifiably Insane

Following election day on Tuesday, Twitter launched verification badges for Twitter Blue subscribers. Yes, that's right, your boy is verified.

Well, so are accounts impersonating George Bush, Dave Chapelle, and OJ Simpson. While this is troublesome in a world full of misinformation, I'm not gonna lie and say some of these impersonators' tweets aren't hilarious.

At fear of losing my job, I'm not gonna link them, but you can go DYOR. While recent verifications have led to mass hysteria, this is all part of Elon's plan to filter out power users from spammers and bots — to assure that Twitter's top users are prioritized by the algorithm (and pay Twitter a $8 attention tax every month).

Response from the Chief Twit

Elon might be the one and only customer service agent for Twitter. Here's what the one-man customer service team is saying:

• Elon "In days to come, we’ll add granularity to verified badge, such as organizational affiliation & ID verification" (8:22 PM Nov 9)

• "Rollout of new verified Blue is intentionally limited just to iOS in a few countries with very little promotion. As we iron out issues, we will expand worldwide on all platforms." (9:37 PM Nov 9)

• "Far too many corrupt legacy Blue "verification” checkmarks exist, so no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months" (12:24 PM Nov 10)

Doing Dumb Things

This might be my favorite tweet from Elon ever.

It sums up the fact that when creating a valuable product, it takes doing a lot of dumb things and making mistakes. "It isn’t 10,000 hours that creates outliers, it’s 10,000 iterations," wrote AngelList founder Naval Ravikant.

Cheers to 10,000 iterations ladies and gents. It's time for Twitter to become the most valuable social media platform in the world.

CRYPTO

FTX Investors Get Rekt-ish

Crypto exchange FTX has been nuked to oblivion.

There's nothing to blame except gross mismanagement from SBF and the iron fist of Binance's CZ. The result is that former kingpin SBF has gone from future Warren Buffet to billions of dollars in the hole and a possible one-way ticket to prison.

However, SBF is not the only person to lose massive amounts of money in this disaster, as FTX’s investors appear to have lost their entire investments in the now disgraced exchange.

Chief among them is the legendary VC firm Sequoia Capital.

The Power Law

Sequoia had fully drank the SBF Kool-Aid.

Besides investing $213.5 million, Sequoia also wrote articles (deleted) on SBF that sounded more like the love letters I wrote my ex in high school.

And why shouldn’t they have loved SBF? When Sequoia invested in FTX in 2021, it was valued at $18 billion. By January this year, it was valued at $32 billion, with $1 billion in revenue in 2021 alone.

It was a fantastic investment.

Until it wasn’t.

As Sequoia told their partners, their FTX investment is being marked down to zero. Everyone was mocking Sequoia for the L, but that's the name of the VC game.

That same Sequoia fund made gains of $7.5 billion. Oh, the beauty of the power law. The few 100x wins make up for the large amount of losses.

Future of Crypto VC

Sequoia was far from the only investment firm to lose money in FTX:

• Paradigm

• Blackrock

• Tiger Global

• Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board

• Tom Fricking Brady

It’s fair to wonder how investors will treat crypto companies after being burned so badly, both with FTX and previously with Celsius, 3AC, and Terra Luna.

For a space already reeling from a bear market, a decrease in investments is the last thing we want. But the courageous will continue to invest at a discount while the halfhearted will run away and have nightmares about Sam Bankman-Fried for years to come.

QUICK HITS

Seed Round

Stat: 11,000: amount of people that Meta just laid off. Insane to think that's only 13% of the staff.

Story we’re watching: With mental health treatment now more accepted than ever, self-therapy startups are booming. No jokes, this is just pretty dope.

Rabbit hole: Product Zeitgeist Fit (a16z)

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Elon has officially ended remote work at Twitter. The birds have been caged.

• Inflation finally eased up a bit in October, although it is still at 7.7%.

• Canva is incorporating Stable Diffusion’s text-to-image technology into its platform. AI SZN continues.

• Twittter has officially filed paperwork to process payments, alluding to Elon's plan to add peer-to-peer payments to the platform.

GUESSTIMATE

How much did Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen’s art collection sell for at auction?

FUNDRAISING FRIDAY

A solid reminder to founders from Hustle Fund's Will Bricker that VCs are just normal people screwing around on Notion too:

LAYOFFS TRACKER

Coinbase: 60 people

Gen Digital: 1,100 people (25%)

Meta: 11,000 people (13%)

FOUNDERS CORNER

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

🚀 InVision founder Ben Nadel explains why you should only solve one problem at a time.

📖 One of our readers created a cool app called Reclists that sends you a weekly email with the best things your favorite thought leaders read that week.

✏️ I've got 5 invites to AI writing app Lex. May the odds be ever in your favor.

GUESSTIMATE ANSWER

$1.506 billion. Sheeeesh.