
Former Snapchat Employees Move to Genies Engineering Team
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
Virtual avatar company Genies wants to be the go-to option for online personas and it's targeting the wealth of talent and seasoned executives from the area's biggest tech firm, Snap Inc., to help make that goal a reality.
Genies' latest hire from the Venice-based social camera company is George "YJ" Tu, a former senior engineer who worked on its Snapchat app and Spectacles camera glasses. Prior to working at Snap, Tu worked for three and a half years as a senior engineer at Facebook and specialized in developing the company's mobile infrastructure.
Tu joins Genies as its director of engineering. Genies CEO and founder Akash Nigam told dot.LA Tu's main mandate is hiring engineers to continue developing its avatar creation platform and digital marketplace, where users can buy and sell digital collectibles and wearable items for their virtual selves.
Tu is the first engineering executive the company's hired since its launch in 2017, but it plans to devote a big chunk of its recent $65 million Series B raise to attracting new talent.
"I think we've landed quite a few Snap employees for a few reasons," Nigam said. "Genies and Snap are probably the two biggest social companies on the Westside in LA, so I think that's an attraction for people that are already local."
The company already has some big celebrity names using its tech to make and share avatars -- including Justin Bieber, Rihanna and hip-hop tycoons Migos -- and the next step is to bring in more users.
George "YJ" Tu is Genies' new director of engineering.
Nigam said the company's hired close to 30 new employees in the last three months, with about 80% of those hires being engineers. He added that roughly 90 people work at Genies, and estimated that 10% of them are ex-Snap employees.
"I think from a product perspective, we share a lot of philosophies and we're very similar in the way that we scheme and we game plan. Snap always is kind of shooting a few years in advance specifically within the social category."
Matt Sibka, Genies' vice president of recruiting, spent three and a half years at Snap creating a team for its CEO Evan Spiegel and was hired to do the same at Genies earlier this year. Genies competes with Snap's Bitmoji avatars, which got a 3D upgrade this July.
"Eighty percent of new spend after our fundraise, and anything moving forward for the next two years, is all going to be on engineering to become an engineering powerhouse," Nigam said. Genies has raised $110 million to date and Nigam previously told dot.LA the company wants to make "Ninety nine point nine percent of its revenue from selling digital goods.
Nigam said that the synergy between Genies and Snap wasn't a conscious choice, but noted that both companies have a similar vision – to advance augmented reality and encourage people to adopt virtual avatars that they can increasingly use as an extension of how they express themselves online.
Nigam's plan is to integrate Genies avatars into as many applications as possible. Currently the company has a deal with Facebook's Giphy that will let users bring their avatar with them to platforms where Giphy is integrated, like Facebook, TikTok or Snapchat – but Nigam said it wants to bring its avatars to popular games like "Roblox" too.
"That's the first API partnership, but we want to have hundreds of those," Nigam said. "So all of a sudden if you get ported into 'Roblox,' you can get any avatar."
Genies' next big goal is getting Generation Z to buy into the NFT hype by creating unique items for their avatars and then trading them. Genies is working with Dapper Labs, which operates NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties, two of the most popular NFT exchanges, to create its own blockchain-based system for creating, verifying and selling digital goods.
Genies plans to make the marketplace available by the end of this year. Right now it's only accessible to celebrities, but Nigam said it'll open a beta version to customers by year's end.
"It almost becomes like a login authentication button, where you can port your Genie and your digital goods associated with it from one environment to the next, and in that case, we're kind of creating a new digital identity layer," Nigam said.
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Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
Creandum’s Carl Fritjofsson on the Differences Between the Startup Ecosystem in Europe and the U.S.
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Creandum General Partner Carl Fritjofsson talks about his venture journey, why Generative-AI represents an opportunity to rethink products from the ground up, and why Q4 2023 and Q1 2024 could be "pretty bloody" for startups.
Creandum is a European VC firm that invests in early stage startups — typically at the “late Seed to Series A” stage. The firm’s investments are focused across six major buckets: fintech, health, climate, SaaS, infrastructure and consumer internet.
Some of Creandum’s most prominent investments include Spotify, Klarna, and Trade Republic.
“We started to build our own confidence that what we were doing was actually pretty good,” Fritjoffson said. “I think we've come now to a position where we've seen enough high quality companies throughout the years, we know what good looks like and we've also seen the best of the best firms have invested in some of our companies and we've sat along boards with them, so we come to learn from them as well.”
Working in the VC industry for the last decade, Fritjofsson has developed a unique approach to identifying opportunities for startups. His approach starts with recognizing that there are only so many types of large software categories that exist in the world (CRM, ERP, and Cloud Computing, to name a few)
“Each one of them are, to some extent, reinvented every X number of years. The reason why they are being reinvented is because the underlying core infrastructure has innovated” and the “winners of the last cohort…do not innovate as fast as the market expects” he said.
Fritjofsson thus spends a majority of his time waiting for significant inflection points- those moments when new technology comes along that fundamentally changes an individual’s experience interacting with a software product or service.
Take Generative AI for example. Fritjofsson believes that recent innovations represent a “horizontal wave” that impacts each of the six investment buckets mentioned above. He further believes that AI changes how we “engage and interface with software”, which necessitates fundamentally rethinking the way companies service a market
As Fritjofsson puts it, “I actually think that more or less every software category can be rewritten with a Generative AI-first approach. Now the question is, of course…how much better does that experience become?...I'm not necessarily convinced that it'll…disrupt every software category in the world, but I can at least build excitement around the potential.” Where there’s an inflection point, there’s opportunity.
Despite the present opportunity with AI, Fritjofsson described a bleaker outlook for the cohort of startups that raised their last round of financing in 2021.
Fritjofsson believes that “Q4, Q1 is gonna be pretty bloody.” He reasons that many startups cut costs in Q1’23 and Q2’23 to avoid coming to market when investor sentiment was negative. While these startups may have prolonged their runway, they likely did so at the expense of growth, which new investors will not like. As Fritjofsson puts it, Q4 ‘23 and Q1’24 will “be the moment of truth…where there's gonna be a lot of bodies in the wake because a lot of firms have slowed down.”
Given his experience as a founder and now a VC, Fritjofsson advises younger folks to veer away from entering the world of venture too early.
“I think there's a really dangerous path when you get stuck in venture too early in your career,” he said. “Because it's very hard to climb the ranks in a venture firm. Most venture firms are small and it's not a super clear path on how you become a partner.”
While he’s content in his own role, he cautions others who view a junior role at a VC firm as a stepping stone to an operating role inside an organization. The skill set, while valuable, is not necessarily transferable.
Finally, Fritjofsson shared the similarity he sees between the startup ecosystems in Europe and Los Angeles.
Homegrown success stories like Spotify helped Europe, as a startup ecosystem, “build confidence and trust their own intuition.”
In Fritjofsson’s view, LA is similar in that respect. It is significantly smaller than Silicon Valley, which simultaneously creates “a little bit of…insecurity” but also a willingness to “prove ourselves.”
While Creandum and the team are constantly evolving, Fritjofsson has experienced various instances where the team won competitive deals by “thinking outside the box.”
One example he points to was a time when Creandum was looking to win over Better Stack, a company in the observability space and said the firm was up against big names in the U.S. and Europe.
One of their products is a monitoring solution. Fritjofsson said Creandum created a sub page on the firm’s website, which looked like they were using the company’s product.
“We were building our conviction for the company,” he said. “Obviously the founder loved this. No one else did this. This was unique to him and he will remember it for the rest of his life, and we ended up winning the deal. I'm not sure if we won it because of that, but it definitely played to our advantage.”
dot.LA Reporter Decerry Donato contributed to this post.
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
This podcast is produced by L.A. Venture. The views and opinions expressed in the show are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of dot.LA or its newsroom.
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Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
College Grads Are Turning Their Backs on the Tech Industry
A new report in Bloomberg suggests that younger workers and college graduates are moving away from tech as the preferred industry in which to embark on their careers. While big tech companies and startups once promised skilled young workers not just the opportunity to develop cutting-edge, exciting products, but also perks and – for the most talented and ambitious newcomers – a relatively reliable path to wealth. (Who could forget the tales of overnight Facebook millionaires that fueled the previous dot com explosion? There were even movies about it!)
But aside from the intensity and hype around employment-eradicating AI apps, the big tech story of 2023 has been downscaling, belt-tightening, and massive layoffs. So far this year, tech companies have laid off thousands of workers, while cutting back on compensation packages, fringe benefits, and some of the other amenities and perks that made these jobs so sought after in the first place.
According to data compiled by Bloomberg, tech has shed nearly 200,000 jobs just since October, more than twice the number of layoffs that have hit the financial sector. Additionally, data on industry pay from Levels.fyi suggests that overall compensation packages within the industry have dipped as much as 25% in the past year. The rate at which these layoffs are happening also doesn’t seem to be slowing down very much, and may still even be increasing month-over-month.
Layoffs aren’t just bad PR that make current employees nervous and potential new hires dubious. They also mean there are simply fewer hands on deck at these companies to collaborate on important jobs; major rounds of layoffs also mean more work for the employees who got to keep their gigs. Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Twitter have all massively reduced the size of their workforce, including teams that deal with important time-sensitive tasks, such as fact-checking or community moderation. Those jobs don’t stop needing to be done because the people doing them got laid off; it’s just now more work for fewer staffers.
Many tech companies also rely on the promise of lucrative stock options when recruiting top graduates with significantly in-demand skills. But with tech stocks slumping in 2022, and bouncing back this year mainly on the backs of the AI craze, embarking on a new career with a brand like Meta or Amazon suddenly seems less appealing than it did just a few years ago.
According to Insider, anecdotal evidence from job forums like Blind and other communities such as Reddit also indicate that the “rise-and-grand” hustle mindset so prevalent in the industry – which became synonymous with tech culture during the last startup wave – has led to widespread stress, discontent, and burnout among employees, many of whom are purposefully seeking jobs outside the industry now that the big paydays are also drying up. The Washington Post reported that disaffected Amazon employees in Seattle – fed up with layoffs, return-to-office mandates, and some of the company’s other practices – are currently attempting to organize a mass walkout.
Within the tech industry, the massive hype around AI has been something of a reprieve from this torrent of bad news. But from the perspective of young people considering careers in tech, the industry’s love affair with thinking machines may also be triggering some concerns about the future.
In late April, Dropbox announced it would lay off 500 employees – around 16% of its total workforce – and use the savings to build out an AI division instead. CEO Drew Houston explained that “I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era.” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna echoed a similar sentiment in May, suggesting that his company will pause hiring for roles that could potentially be replaced with AI in the near future. He suggested, over the next five years, IBM will likely replace 30% of its employees – around 7,800 people – with apps.
It shouldn’t be that terribly surprising when young people develop cold feet about entering an industry that’s already decided they’re irrelevant, with CEOs simply biding their time before they can fire everyone working on the floors below them. But even beyond the personal stakes, it’s also possible that young people are turning their backs on technology due to a reputational downgrade.
That said, some tech firms dominate both the top and bottom of Axios Harris’ annual “brand reputation survey,” which investigates how American adults feel about various companies. IN particuar, tech companies that produce tangible products or offer vital services continued to perform very well on the survey, with Samsung, Amazon, Apple, and Sony receiving positive appraisals from about 80% of surveyed adults. Conversely, social media and related internet companies – including Google, TikTok, Meta, and Twitter – found themselves near the bottom of the list, with reputation scores around the 60% line. That’s around the same level as bankrupted crypto exchange FTX.
Anecdotally too, it appears that many recent grads who would otherwise be pursuing careers in tech are moving over to the banking industry instead. As one global talent partner told Bloomberg, while tech course-corrects by dropping tens of thousands of workers, “on Wall Street, you work really hard and you make a lot of money. That’s the deal.”
In light of this moment, JPMorgan Chase, in particular, has ratcheted up its recruiting. The company’s workforce jumped 8% in the first quarter of 2023 vs. one year ago. All other factors aside, many of the top college grads are simply going to follow the money. Right now, that’s clearly leading them to the financial sector.
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