Newsletter

Salaries in 2023, size doesn’t matter, and going async

Raz TirboacaRaz Tirboaca
Salaries in 2023, size doesn’t matter, and going async

Happy new year everyone 🎉

2023 is the first real new normal after the pandemic. It’s clearly not a walk in the park giving the current economical challenges, but let’s keep the focus. I believe it will be the best year for makers, it will be about doing more with less, results over process, and personal growth for a generation that meets a recession for the first time.

Let’s dive in!

TOOLS

💶 How much are tech companies paying for talent? This website tracks and publishes salary ranges in job posts from tech companies in CA and NYC thanks to the new transparency laws that went into effect starting this year.

🤖 Google and DeepMind just launched MedPaLM, a large language model aligned to the medical domain. It is meant to generate safe and helpful answers in the medical field combining HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions sought online, with six existing open-question answering datasets covering professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries.

🤖 Microsoft is reportedly integrating ChatGPT’s technology into Bing. A source familiar with Bing’s systems told that Microsoft could use the technology to present search results as full sentence answers with the source for the information. If Bing suggests related queries to the original one, GPT could explain their relevance in a meaningful manner. The technology could help Bing suggest better keywords or key phrases to users, as well.

👨‍💻 Jared Toporek explains why the number input is the worst input and what to use instead.

TEAM

💥 Size doesn’t matter 💥 When it comes to making a big impact, it’s not the size of the team that matters, it’s the quality of the work and the value it brings. Check out these examples of small teams that made a big impact:

  • Instagram had only 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook for a whopping $1 billion. At the time, the platform had already gained a user base of 30 million people.
  • Mojang, the company behind the wildly popular game Minecraft, had a relatively small team of 37 employees when it was acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. Despite its small size, the company was generating annual revenue of around $290 million and profits of over $100 million.
  • WhatsApp, another tech giant, had only 55 employees when it was acquired by Facebook for a staggering $19 billion.
  • Notion, a productivity and organization platform, has raised a significant amount of money at a valuation of $2 billion, despite having a relatively small team of under 50 employees.
  • BuiltWith, a technology company, generates a impressive $14 million in annual revenue with just a single employee.
  • The Gartman Letter, a financial publication, is rumored to bring in $25 million a year with a single employee running the show.
  • Kylie Jenner, a well-known entrepreneur and celebrity, sold a 51% stake in her cosmetics company, Kylie Cosmetics, for $600 million with a small team of just seven full-time and five part-time employees.
  • Craigslist, a popular online classifieds platform, generates a staggering $1 billion in annual revenue with a team of only 50 employees.
  • Plenty of Fish, a dating website, was sold for a hefty $575 million with a team of 75 employees.
  • Liberty Media, a media and entertainment company, had a small team of just 16 employees yet was worth billions in the 90s.
  • Joe Rogan, a popular podcaster and comedian, is making an impressive salary of between $30-$50 million a year with a small team of employees helping him run the show.

From Steve Pulec’s list inspired by Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe.

MARKET

🤝 Shopify is eliminating all recurring meetings involving more than two people effective immediately. No meetings on Wednesdays and meetings involving more than 50 people will only be held on Thursdays between 11 am and 5 pm Eastern time. Big meetings are limited to one per week.

😹 There are pets that earn more than most people. Are you ready? They’re making cash from brand endorsements, appearances, merch, and sponsored social media content. Taylor Swift’s cat is apparently worth $97M.

Thanks for reading! See you next week 🫶