Tesla layoffs hit high performers, some departments slashed, sources say 'I lost 20% of my team, some really good players too'Tesla management told employees Monday that the recent layoffs — which gutted some departments by 20% and even hit high performers — were largely due to poor financial performance, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
High performers also cutMany of the laid-off employees were high performers, according to two sources who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity.
Some departments saw layoffs beyond the 10% outlined in the companywide email, according to sources.
In 2022, he told employees that he wanted a “clean robotaxi” with no steering wheel or pedals.
Patel told TechCrunch he decided Sunday evening to leave Tesla because of “[b]ig overall changes” at the company.
Tesla layoffs hit high performers, some departments slashed, sources say 'I lost 20% of my team, some really good players too'Tesla management told employees Monday that the recent layoffs — which gutted some departments by 20% and even hit high performers — were largely due to poor financial performance, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Its margins, however, took a hit after Tesla repeatedly slashed prices in a bid to drum up sales and undercut the competition.
High performers also cutMany of the laid-off employees were high performers, according to two sources who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity.
In 2022, he told employees that he wanted a “clean robotaxi” with no steering wheel or pedals.
Patel told TechCrunch he decided Sunday evening to leave Tesla because of “[b]ig overall changes” at the company.
Monday’s announcement arrives on the heels of Meta prompting Quest users to confirm their age so it can provide teens and preteens with appropriate experiences.
Meta said it will launch it first in the 20 markets where it already supports Quest for Business, Meta’s workplace-focused $14.99/month subscription.
It’s not clear how ubiquitous VR use is in schools: one provider, ClassVR, claims that 40,000 classrooms worldwide are using its products.
And another big question mark will relate to the cost of buying headsets — Quest 3’s, the latest headsets, start at around $500 apiece for basic models — buying apps and then subsequently supporting all of that infrastructure.
Meta said that it has already donated Quest headsets to 15 universities in the U.S., but it’s not clear how far it will go to subsidise growth longer-term.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech!
This week, we’re looking at how two fintech companies serving the underserved are faring, and more!
The big storyPayJoy is an example of a company with positive unit economics and a mission to help the underserved.
It last raised a $50 million Series C funding round in 2021.
And with fintech funding on the decline, this could perhaps partly explain YC’s lack of LatAm interest.
It’s a flexible way to share photos with your favorite people and create visual records of whatever matters in your life.
Retro’s main feature is a way to share your most important photos of the past week with your favorite people.
Retro’s answer to this use-case is journals: A new flexible way to share photos as a group.
You can also have a journal with your partner to share important moments you’ve spent together without spamming all your friends on Retro.
Building a social consumer app involves many experimentations — and journals are one of those experimentations.
Century Health is a new startup also getting in on the action.
“One of the biggest issues around innovation for new treatments is efficient access to good patient data.
That data sat around for decades because it takes manual effort to normalize and extract insight from it.”That’s when he teamed up with friend Sanjay Hariharan, a data scientist and applied AI engineer, to form Century Health.
For us, that also means as affordably as possible with access to good real-world data.”Now with $2 million pre-seed funding, Century Health will run three to five pilots over the next several months.
In addition to the validated technology, another milestone will be to secure early revenue from the pilots, which Century Health can leverage to go after another round of venture capital.
The big cloud vendors have all already lined up with other chatbot partners: Microsoft with OpenAI, Google and Amazon with Anthropic; Cohere picking up assorted others like Oracle and Salesforce.
If and when Inflection ever perfected Pi on its enormous AI infrastructure, the race looked to be already lost.
Despite close ties with OpenAI, Microsoft also has many reasons to be needing a backup for it’s all-important AI gambit.
There are so many red flags with OpenAI that Microsoft is wise to wean its dependence.
Then again, just like Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, we wonder if regulators will also have something to say about this deal.
They founded Poseidona, a Barcelona-based developer of sustainable food technology, which uses that invasive seaweed and algal side-streams — the waste that agricultural producers generate — to make proteins.
In this case, it’s a soy protein alternative.
They’re looking for nutritional factors and an overall good functionality of the protein, Hurtado said.
Poseidona is not the only one using side-streams to make food.
“We’ll ultimately be able to be in cost parity with soy protein.”
The future of recycling is here, and of course, it involves robots and artificial intelligence.
Rebecca Hu, the co-founder of the robotics company Glacier, creates robots that help recycling plants separate and, well, recycle material.
Before, sorting recyclable materials was a manual job that took hours for someone to do.
Today, Glacier has been using AI cameras so that robots can better identify recyclable materials.
Hu said training the robots to spot materials was akin to teaching a toddler how to tell two things apart.
The category has seen success and has accordingly gone from one or two competitors to around a dozen.
Shure, on the other hand, makes some of the most beloved microphones across multiple industries.
The category has been hit or miss lately, so I’m excited to see what Shure has on offer here.
The mics pair to a phone without needing the receiver.
Also, one key thing the DJI unit has that these don’t is the ability to plug a wired lav mic directly into the clip-on, making it more camera-ready.
