Jason S.’s Post

BlackRock just spent $3B+ to acquire Preqin to boost the firm's data and analytics capabilities. But... Despite overall headcount growth, Preqin has been shedding data, research, and engineering talent for the last six months. This year, 20+ key employees have left to join competitors including PEI, MSCI, S&P Global, and Acuity Knowledge Partners. This outflow of human capital raises several questions about BlackRock's acquisition and Preqin's impressive growth (20% per year for three years): 1) Did BlackRock know top talent was leaving for competitors? 2) Were these exits voluntary? Or, were these employees victims of Preqin prepping for the acquisition? 3) How much of Preqin's growth was fueled by sales team hiring versus product improvements and innovation? 4) Will other money management firms look to acquire Preqin's competitors that have attracted former Preqin talent? Explore more details on Preqin's human capital and the team that BlackRock just acquihired here: https://lnkd.in/gEHRC4_t #acquisition #blackrock #data #humancapital

Amazon is building a ChatGPT rival but... who is building it? In the last 18 months, Amazon has suffered serious AI/ML talent brain drain. Since the start of 2023, Amazon lost 445+ key AI/ML employees to other Big Tech companies and top AI startups while only recruiting ~320 new AI/ML employees. Amazon's brain drain (as a percent of total AI/ML talent) is the worst of the Big Tech companies. In fact, they are the only Big Tech company that continues to see a net outflow of AI/ML talent. But, Amazon isn't the only Big Tech company that has faced AI/ML brain drain since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 as top talent has been whisked away to start or join the latest and greatest AI startups. For major media coverage of the AI/ML talent wars, see my analysis in The Economist's piece (link in the comments). To follow AI/ML job changes at the Big Tech companies, follow the five companies free here: https://lnkd.in/gGhuGyHf #amazon #AI #artificialintelligence #talent

OpenAI's M&A spree isn't just for the tech. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. If you can't recruit 'em, buy 'em. While there are certainly tech-centric reasons for these acquisitions, OpenAI just made a massive investment in people, acqui-hiring 70+ employees from Rockset (data analytics) and Multi (remote collaboration). Who will be picking up their OpenAI badges once the dust settles? 💾 or 🧑💻 Is OpenAI buying tech or tech talent? Unsurprisingly, the majority of the new acqui-hires are technical with 61% of employees working in an engineering, IT, or product role at the time of acquisition. 🏢 Where did the Rockset and Multi teams come from? - 20% of Rockset and Multi employees previously worked at Meta - 12% previously worked at Google - 23% have a research background We are still in the early days of AI M&A and talent wars. Who will be the next company acquired by a major AI company? What talent will be taken along for the ride? #acquisition #startup #AI #OpenAI

Will #NVIDIA become a victim of its own success? The Twitter world is having a field day with rumors that NVIDIA can't hold on to its top engineers who are retiring now that their stock options are worth $10M+. In the days after NVIDIA became the world's highest-valued company, NVIDIA insiders have sold upwards of $400M worth of stock and purchased $0. For those who aren't retiring, where are people who leave NVIDIA going? Follow job changes at NVIDIA here: https://lnkd.in/gGhuGyHf #stocks #retirement #jobchanges

An early look at YCombinator's S24 batch... 47 companies are already announced on YC's site. Here are 10 more that YC hasn't announced yet: ➤ Substrate (Inderpal S.) ➤ Spur.dev (Anushka Nijhawan & Sneha Sivakumar) ➤ Sorcerer (Alessandro Vecchi) ➤ Sentify (Dimitrios Ilias) ➤ PlyHealth (David Zhang & Samantha Wu) ➤ mdhub (Dominik Middelmann) ➤ Comfy Deploy (Benny Kok & Nick Kao) ➤ CodeViz (Liam Prevelige & Will McCall) ➤ Beyond Presence (Awais Shafique) ➤ actionbase (Sam Crombie) How many other companies have "let slip" that they are part of YC S24? 👀 #jobchanges #YC #startups #VC

OpenAI is beating *almost* everyone in the war for talent. Plus, more on why there isn't more poaching between/from startups. Great to join. Excited to be back on the SVIC Podcast for the next round of insights in July! #openai #podcast #startups #ai #artificialintelligence

Fisker filed for bankruptcy and... Top talent knew the "writing was on the wall" for months. Through the end of 2023, Fisker was on a recruiting tear. The company grew 64% in 2023, poaching top engineering talent from nearly every major EV and automaker. But, in January, top talent started leaving in droves with the company losing at least 14% of its employees. Unsurprisingly, the top engineers were the first to leave, joining upstart EV companies like VW-backed Scout Motors and Slate, and behemoths like Ford and Hyundai. When a company that has been growing headcount and poaching talent from competitors starts shedding talent, this should be a massive signal that all is not well. Which other companies are losing human capital? Track up to five for free here: https://lnkd.in/gGhuGyHf #fisker #EV #bankruptcy #talent

Ten Movers, Shakers, & Money Makers from the 157K+ job changes we saw last week. Here’s who moved and why it matters… Ryan Goggins: Google ➤ Mineflow (YC S24), Founder A teaser of this summer’s YC class. Noah MacCallum: Eureka ➤ OpenAI, Applied AI Noah spent the last 5+ years building health tech. Is OpenAI about to disrupt the space? Molly Jackman: Instacart ➤ OpenAI, Head of Data Science and Analytics, GTM *Asks ChatGPT what to make for dinner* Oz Wasserman: None ➤ Stealth, Co-Founder A career cybersecurity pro trying to evade detection. Janine Ege: Celonis ➤ Sage, VP Marketing Transformation Can Salesforce’s former Head of Global Marketing transform a competitor’s marketing? Suren Kumar: Amazon ➤ Samsung Research America, Director, AI Research Amazon’s AI brain drain continues… Kipp Graham, MBA: Wiley Edge ➤ General Assembly, Director of Delivery Talent solutions delivered… some assembly required. Federico Troiani: Bulletproof 360 ➤ Ritual, Chief Commerical Officer Will Federico trade his Bulletproof coffee for a new morning Ritual? Rahshiene Taha: Live Nation Entertainment ➤ Obama Foundation, CMO The new mastermind behind Obama’s 2024 summer playlist? Alex Rajangam: Self-employed ➤ Oath, Inc., Chief Innovation Officer - Biotechnology I solemnly swear to innovate. #jobchanges #hiring #peoplemoves P.S. With two of this week's highlighted moves being to OpenAI, it's a good plug to tune into the SVIC Podcast today at 11:30am where I'm joining Jordan Thibodeau to talk all things OpenAI job changes.

What do job changes signal ahead of earnings reports? I've been exploring several relationships between a company's human capital and stock performance – including Salesforce's jump in senior departures prior to a 20% stock drop and Crowdstrike's growing sales team that is driving the stock price up and to the right. Now, we're launching Live Data Earnings Signals to share the latest data for the most interesting equities announcing earnings each week. This week we're covering (in order of expected release date): Lennar (LEN) SunPower (SPWR) Accenture (ACN) CarMax (KMX) FactSet (FDS) Explore the signals here: https://lnkd.in/gUGYZUZP We are starting with select signals including headcount and churn and will add more signals over the coming weeks. These signals are not prescriptive, rather they are a snapshot of the sentiment of the management and employees. Which signals would you follow? Which other equities announcing this week would you want data on? #humancapital #earnings #stocks #investing