Hi! We have 3 charts for you today:
The adult in the room
Sheryl Sandberg, the long-time Chief Operating Officer of Meta, is stepping down after 14 years at the company.
When she joined in 2008 she was often described as the "adult in the room", working alongside founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was just 24 at the time. During her tenure Facebook went from $153m in annual revenue, with a team of a few hundred, to the $100bn+ advertising behemoth that it is today with more than 77,000 employees.
As Facebook's number two, Sandberg had ultimate responsibility for building out much of the advertising infrastructure that now powers the Meta machine. That infrastructure has turned eyeballs into revenue, arguably better than any company has managed in history, but it's also attracted controversy such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018, which saw Facebook fined $5bn for violating users' privacy. More recently concerns have been raised about the impact of social media on young people, and the spread of misinformation on Facebook and Instagram.
Moving onto the metaverse
Sandberg has reportedly felt "burned out" and hasn't been closely involved with the company's high-profile pursuit of building out a metaverse — a series of interconnected spaces in virtual reality — which Zuckerberg sees as the future of the company.
That future vision is ambitious, and Zuckerberg is putting Meta's money where its mouth is. The company's latest financial quarter reveals revenue of just $695m for the hardware-and-metaverse-focused Reality Labs division, with operating costs of almost $3.7bn. That means that Zuckerberg's metaverse vision is currently burning around $3bn a quarter or $1bn a month, a large bill for a product suite that Zuckerberg believes could take a decade to build.
Leaning In
Sandberg's leadership experience at Meta, where 31% of employees indirectly reported to her last year, led her to write the 2013 book Lean In which encouraged women to assert themselves more in the workplace and at home. Currently just 25% of leadership roles at large tech companies are held by women according to Deloitte.
Stranger Things
Kate Bush's song Running Up That Hill (Make a Deal with God) soared to the top of the streaming charts this week after featuring in the latest series of Stranger Things, Netflix's hit show about a group of teenagers who stumble across the supernatural.
After the show dropped on May 27th, it took only a day for the song to break into the Spotify Top 200 in the US, and by yesterday it had hit 2.3 million streams, good enough to dislodge As It Was by Harry Styles at the top of the charts. Last week the song was racking up just ~20,000 plays a day.
In the global charts, Running Up That Hill was at second place on Spotify's Top 200, clocking up more than 8 million streams (just on Spotify, which we found data for).
1) Think inflation is bad in the US? Turkey's inflation rate just hit 73%.
2) Elon Musk has emailed Tesla executives telling them to cut its workforce by around 10%, citing a "bad feeling" about the economy. The news comes just a few days after Musk announced an end to remote work at the company.
3) The Russia-Ukraine war by the numbers, as the conflict reaches its 100th day of violence.
4) Queen Elizabeth II is celebrating 70 years on the throne (photos here), putting her third on the list of all-time longest reigning monarchs.
5) The data upload cheat code: 96% of companies surveyed by Flatfile have said they've run into problems with data onboarding. If your business is one of the 96%, try Flatfile's data onboarding platform.**
6) Great short documentary about what happens after a song on TikTok goes viral.
7) Interesting analysis of police data from earlier this year, showing that murder solve rates have hit 50% in the US — a historic low.
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