E-commerce company Thrasio gets throttledio

The headline: Thrasio Takes Steps to Strengthen Financial Position

The sub-headline: Initiates Pre-Arranged Chapter 11 Process with Support from Lenders to Significantly Reduce Debt and Facilitate Comprehensive Balance Sheet Restructuring

The dirty details: this company burned through more than 3.4 billion buying up smaller e-commerce players and selling their inventory on Amazon.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/thrasio-takes-steps-to-strengthen-financial-position-302073706.html

Internal memo from CEO Sundar about Google’s Gemini

From: Sundar Pichai

To: Google

“Hi everyone I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias — to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.

Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We’re already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No Al is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.

Our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We’ve always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That’s why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging Al products.

We’ll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.

Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we’ve made in Al over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.

We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise we have an incredible springboard for the Al wave. Let’s focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users’ trust.

-Sundar”

It’s a “Bold New Chapter” at Macy’s (read: they’re laying off employees and closing 150 stores)

Following last month’s announcement that it was showing 2,350 employees the door, the struggling company today announced that it will close 50 “underperforming” stores this year, and 100 in 2025.

They are calling it “A Bold New Chapter” in a press release that features all of the typical corporate speak: unlocking shareholder value, challenges status quo, strong call to action.

Last month, the company received and rejected an unsolicited $6 billion offer from Arkhouse Management. Maybe they shouldn’t have been so hasty at rejecting challenges to the status quo…

Sony laying off 900 PlayStation employees

~8% of their workforce and closing the entire London studio.

Here is the internal memo from Sony Interactive’s President & CEO:

From: Jim Ryan
Subject: Important Update Regarding Organizational Restructuring

Team,

It is important to provide you with updates about the business as often as possible. Today, I am writing with sad news. Through discussions over the past few months about the evolving economic landscape, changes in the way we develop, distribute, and launch products, and ensuring our organization is future ready in this rapidly changing industry, we have concluded that tough decisions have become inevitable. The leadership team and I made the incredibly difficult decision to restructure operations, which regrettably includes a reduction in our workforce impacting very talented individuals who have contributed to our success.

After careful consideration and many leadership discussions over several months, it has become clear changes need to be made to continue to grow the business and develop the company. We had to step back, look at our business holistically, and move forward focusing on the long-term sustainability of the company and delivering the best experiences possible for our community. The goal is to streamline our resources to ensure our continued success and ability to deliver experiences gamers and creators have come to expect from us.

I want to be as transparent as possible with you, our partners, and our community about what this means:

We envision reducing our headcount by about 900 people, or about 8% of our current workforce 
There will be impact for employees across all SIE regions – Americas, EMEA, Japan, and APAC  
Several PlayStation Studios are affected 

I know that receiving this news will be hard and unsettling and you are wondering what this means for you. Timelines and procedures for how we approach this will vary based on your location due to local laws and regulations.

For those of you in the US, all impacted employees will be notified today.  
In the UK, it is proposed:  
    That PlayStation Studios’ London Studio will close in its entirety;
    That there will be reductions in Firesprite studio;  
    And that there will be reductions in various functions across SIE in the UK.

The proposed changes mean that we will enter a period of collective consultation before any final decisions are taken. All employees who are part of the collective consultation will be made aware of the next steps today.

In Japan, we will implement a next career support program. Details will be communicated separately.  
In other countries, we will begin conversations with those who are potentially at risk or impacted as a result of this proposed course of action.  

For those who will be leaving SIE: You are leaving this company with our deepest respect and appreciation for all your efforts during your tenure.

For those who will be staying at SIE: We will be saying goodbye to friends and colleagues that we cherish during this process, and this will be painful. Your resilience, sensitivity, and adaptiveness will be critical in the weeks and months to come.

This will not be easy, and I am aware of the impact it will have on wellbeing. Affected employees will receive support, including severance benefits. While these are challenging times, it is not indicative of a lack of strength of our company, our brand, or our industry. Our goal is to remain agile and adaptable and to continue to focus on delivering the best gaming experiences possible now and in the future.

Thank you for your understanding during this difficult period. Please be kind to yourselves and to each other.

Jim

Expedia books itself a new CEO and slashes 1,500 jobs

The travel booking site is cutting jobs as part of “an organizational and technological transformation.”

This transformation represents 9% of its total headcount.

<https://finance.yahoo.com/news/expedia-cut-1-500-jobs-222833758.html>

Fiat luxe

Hopefully this is the most pretentious title that will ever appear on the website, but since it’s the very beginning, it’s appropriate.

And what is beginning, exactly? A business site. One that is free of the doublespeak and the press releases that litters the financial news press.

It’s too soon to lay out a comprehensive mission statement or vision – those are still being formed. Because of this, I’m calling this a “soft launch.” I’m going to take some time to build things up and go from there.