Meta could start laying off a large number of employees
No Women, No Virtual World, Minus 10B and counting
That moment when you realize allowing the head of the largest women's advocacy group for virtual reality in Silicon Valley/San Francisco to be forced into sex slavery, tortured, assaulted, stolen from and her life obliterated, then no consequences for her predators, means no women will ever want to play with you again.
No women, no virtual world.
In 2014, I began working in spatial technology, augmented and virtual reality. At all related meetups for this tech in San Francisco, 98% of the crowds present were men. This didn’t make sense to me. First, I enjoy working with diverse teams, and also, from a business perspective, I profoundly understand the way to create a “sticky” product means to build with the actual users of the product. As a forward thinking solution to this problem, I created ARVR Women and Allies to bring in a more diverse set of creators early in the lifecycle of the industry, involve them with established leaders in the field, and train them to build.
Growth Strategy: I started a meetup, and using cross-marketing and influencer, it began with a bang. We held monthly educational/networking meetings. We used Meetup to highlight the many thrilled members. I used all my speaking engagements to talk about what we were doing. We founded a Facebook page where we encouraged free talk and amplification. We had funders meet with our entrepreneurs and product creators. We founded a free school for women. We held the first spatial computing job fair in the city. We started a lunch series. We had celeb speakers. We partnered with businesses throughout the area.
Our motto was “50/50 in 5” or gender parity in the industry in five years.
We had experienced founders, including myself, mentor many of the female entrepreneurs in our groups. We started a scholarship for underrepresented minority creators.
Outcome: Eventually, misogyny in tech, and some horrific sociopathic elements, retaliated against me and other leaders of our group. We all left in terror. The result for the spatial computing industry, skipping forward to now, to this.
Stupid, short-sighted, cheating, predatory men.
What happened to me cost you 10B..and that's just the short term.
Meta’s virtual reality arm lost $3.7 billion this past quarter and a total of $9.4 billion this year, while the company’s stock is trading at its lowest price since 2016.
"Meta could start laying off a large number of employees starting Wednesday.
By EMMA ROTH
From The Verge
Meta’s planning major job cuts that could affect “thousands” of workers, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Sources familiar with the situation told the WSJ that the layoffs could begin as soon as Wednesday.The Facebook and Instagram parent company reported over 87,000 employees at the end of September, but these “large-scale” layoffs are expected to slash a significant portion of staff members. According to the WSJ, the layoffs could hit Meta even harder than the mass job cuts at Twitter, which affected about half of the company’s 7,500-employee workforce.In June, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox warned employees of “serious times,” noting that employees must “execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth.” Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg started to turn up the heat on employees around the same time, saying in an internal Q&A session obtained by The Verge’s Alex Heath that “there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.” Zuckerberg later implemented a hiring freeze in September and warned that the company could downsize in the near future.Meta declined to comment on the situation but pointed The Verge to Zuckerberg’s statement during the company’s earnings call last month. “In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” Zuckerberg said. “So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”Although Zuckerberg says Facebook has more active users than ever before, investors are still concerned about the company’s pricey bet on the metaverse. Meta’s virtual reality arm lost $3.7 billion this past quarter and a total of $9.4 billion this year, while the company’s stock is trading at its lowest price since 2016."