Valley

There is a Spaniard at the top of Silicon Valley. His name is Enrique Lores and he has just become CEO of PayPal

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The Spanish manager Enrique Lores has become the new CEO of PayPal. The company has announced it in his digital press room indicating that he will take office on March 1. This is a unique appointment that consolidates Lores’ career and places him in that select group of CEOs of large technology companies. And that is precisely its mission: to make PayPal really great again. At PayPal they knew him well. In the announcement, PayPal officials highlight that Lores had already been on the board of directors for five years, which makes it clear that the appointment is not entirely a surprise. The Spanish manager replaces Alex Chriss in the position, and for the adaptation stage the company’s current CFO, Jamie Miller, will act as interim CEO. The reason. From PayPal they explain that the signing comes from an evaluation of the business and how the company is in relation to its competition. “While some progress has been made in several areas over the past two years, the pace of change and execution has not lived up to the Board’s expectations. The Board is confident that the appointment of Lores, an executive with more than three decades of experience in technology and commerce, will provide the leadership necessary to lead PayPal into its next stage.” A life at HP. Lores had been CEO of HP Inc. for more than six years, where he led a series of strategic projects. During his tenure the firm has gone beyond PC and printers to expand its services and subscriptions business, in addition to starting the commitment to integration of AI in various business areas in the signature. He was also the main leader of the split between HP and HPE. Lores has spent much of his professional life at HP, where he achieved a leading role as vice president of the imaging and printing division for EMEA in 2001. Since then he has not stopped rising positions, but his time at HP ends now. There he will be replaced as CEO by Bruce Broussard, a member of the board since 2021. Remembering the ‘PayPal mafia’. The story of the founding and early years of PayPal is fascinating and an example of disruption. Among its founders are Elon Musk and Peter Thielbut in that team there were people who have ended up being the germ of a good part of the “internet 2.0”. He famous ‘PayPal Mafia’ phenomenon tells how after the purchase by eBay several members of the original team left the company to create their own projects. And among those projects are YouTube, LinkedIn or Yelp. PayPal continued to grow, without a doubt, but for today’s Internet what happened to it before the eBay purchase was more relevant than what happened after. difficult times. After separating from eBay in July 2015, PayPal carried out some strategic operations such as (the controversy) Honey in 2020. The pandemic caused e-commerce to skyrocket, which benefited it, and in October 2020 the company took a historic turn by allowing the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies. The end of confinement and the rise in rates caused a stagnation and then a fall in its assets, and competition from Apple Pay or Shopify eroded its market share in the traditional payment button market. An increasingly fragmented market. Apple and Google have managed to impose their payment solutions thanks to their competitive advantage, but PayPal has also been overtaken by Strupe, which won over developers with a cleaner and more flexible API. In Spain, for example, the use of Bizum has cannibalized that of PayPal (the same with Mercado Pago in Latin America) for payments between individuals, and PayPal’s commission structure is complex and does not help to earn money and recover the relevance of the past. Quite a challenge for Enrique Lores. Thus, the Spanish manager faces a truly formidable challenge. PayPal is still a big tech company, but its current market capitalization (39,830 million dollars), even though it is greater than that of HP (17,750) is very far from the true “Big Tech”. In fact it is the company number 620 by market capitalization according to CompaniesMarketCap. It will be interesting to see what measures Lores takes to boost the business of one of Silicon Valley’s legendary companies. In Xataka | The highest paid Spanish manager in the world does not work in a large technology company: he sells “sugar water”

While Silicon Valley dreams of servers in orbit, Russia prepares a nuclear reactor on lunar soil

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Until recently, the space race was about seeing who could get there first. Today, the question is different: who will be able to turn on the light on the Moon? While companies like Google or Nvidia imagine satellites loaded with computers for their Artificial Intelligence, Russia has hit the table with a much more earthly (or lunar) plan: installing a small nuclear power plant on the surface of our satellite. A reactor by 2036. The Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, has signed a state contract with the aerospace company NPO Lavochkin to develop a lunar nuclear power plant. According to Reutersthe deadline marked in the contract is 2036. However, the political times are much more aggressive: Yury Borisov, head of Roscosmos, has placed the real operational window between 2033 and 2035. Although official statements sometimes avoid the word “nuclear” directly, project participants dispel any doubts, the Kurchatov Institute (a leader in nuclear research in Russia) and Rosatom (the state atomic flagship company) are in charge. As the Interfax media points outthe objective is to power the infrastructure of the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a joint project with China that seeks to move from “round trip” missions to a permanent human presence. But why what nuclear? A colony on the Moon faces nights that last 14 Earth days. During that time, the frigid temperatures and lack of light make the solar panels useless to keep astronauts alive or power life support systems. Mikhail Kovalchuk, head of the Kurchatov Institute, he explained in an interview with the Russian agency TASS that Russia must “run forward.” According to this medium, the country seeks to consolidate its leadership through the “Atomic Project 2.0”, which includes new generation reactors and closed cycle systems. It’s not just about science; Russia admits that partners like China and India have learned a lot from them and are now direct competitors. Eyes in the sky: preparing the ground. For the Russian reactor to reach the Moon, Moscow is already preparing the logistics. According to another TASS statementRussia plans to launch 52 satellites from the Vostochny cosmodrome. Among them, the Aist-2T stands out, capable of creating 3D models of the lunar terrain and monitoring emergency situations. It is the necessary infrastructure so that the “lunar atom” does not suffer the same fate as the failed Luna-25 probe in 2023. The Moscow-Beijing axis: a long-range alliance. This deployment is not a solitary effort. As Interfax detailsRussia and China formalized their ambition in May 2024 with a memorandum of cooperation for the joint construction of this nuclear plant. They are not starting from scratch: both countries presented a roadmap in 2021 that includes five joint missions to deploy modules in lunar orbit and surface. While Russia brings its historical advantage in space nuclear facilities, China provides the scientific capacity and resources for the ILRS Station to be permanently inhabited from 2030. The board of the new Cold War. Washington has not stood idly by in the face of the Russian-Chinese alliance. NASA has received a clear directive from the current administration, in which they state that They need a reactor on the Moon by 2030. “We are in a race with China,” said Sean Duffy, Secretary of Transportation and who has led this directive. The background of this urgency is not only prestige, but the control of strategic resources. The Moon is the great deposit of Helium-3, an extremely rare isotope that is emerging as the “fuel of the future” for nuclear fusion. The White House’s fear is that if the alliance between Russia and China comes sooner, they will be able to declare “exclusion zones,” blocking access to this isotope and other essential metals for the technology industry. Faced with this threat, the US has increased the power of its nuclear project from the original 40 kW to a minimum power of 100 kW. Infrastructure over prestige. The space race of the 21st century has ceased to be a question of prestige and has become a question of infrastructure. While Big Tech tries to solve its energy limits with promises of servers in orbitRussia and China have opted for the pragmatism of the reactor on solid, but lunar, soil. Image| freepik Xataka | The race to bring data centers to space promises a lot. Physics says otherwise

Silicon Valley doesn’t know what to do with so many unemployed engineers. Spain does not know where to get what it needs

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The global technology sector has been facing a kind of roller coaster very conditioned by AIin which while in some corners of the planet there is a commitment to destroying employment in this sector, in other countries it is created at a frenetic pace and even a scenario of staff shortage skilled. Since mid-2022, Silicon Valley has not stopped destroy technological jobs. On the other hand, in Spain the trend is just the opposite, and this sector has not stopped growing at a notable rate, being the exception among advanced economies. Global downward trends. A recent analysis by economist Brendon Bernard for the employment platform Indeed in Canada confirms that job offers in technology have slowed down in countries like the US and Canada. This change occurs after a crisis caused mainly by the pandemic and the collapse of the metaverse, which caused rounds of massive layoffs in large technology companies and drastic cuts between 2022 and mid-2023. The appearance of ChatGPT and the AI ​​fever managed to stop the downward trend in the sector’s offers, but the initial boost that AI seemed to give has stalled and technological employment in the world has not recovered its 2022 levels. Spain follows its own path. As and how they stand out in The Economistamong all this downward trend in technological employment in advanced economies, one stands out that marks a totally opposite path: Spain. Bernard’s study highlights that, while large advanced economies such as the United States (-34%), the United Kingdom (-41%), France (-38%) and Germany (-29%) reduce the number of technological job offers compared to their pre-pandemic levels, countries such as Singapore, Spain and Australia draw a graph in the opposite direction, creating new job offers at a double-digit rate. Technological employment in Spain. In Spain, technological employment is growing rapidly. According to data According to the Cotec Foundation for Innovation, 494,000 new positions have been created in technological activities since 2013, of which approximately half (about 240,000) have been generated after 2020. The weight of technological employment over total employment is especially high in communities such as Madrid (10.5%), Navarra (10%) and Catalonia (9%). On the other hand, regions such as the Balearic Islands (2.7%) or the Canary Islands (2.2%) have a lower concentration of technological job offers. Lots of supply, but much more demand. In fact, the rebound in the Spanish technology sector faces a serious challenge: staff shortages. According to the report HR Trends 2024‘ prepared by Randstad, more than 30% of companies reported difficulties in finding qualified talent in digital areas, which causes certain positions to take months to fill. This generates tensions in the technological labor market and increases competition by the professionals available. The Cotec Foundation report indicates that the growth in technological employment is based largely on programming, consulting and computing, which account for nearly 80% of the employment generated since 2020. To give a concrete example, Randstad data indicates that, during the third quarter of 2024, employment among programmers in Spain registered an increase of 16.4%. Demand reaches universities. According to the report’The Future of Talent in Artificial Intelligence and Data in Spain‘ prepared by INDESIA, in 2023 5,000 job offers in AI and data science were left unfilled per lack of trained candidates. The education system can only train about 6,000 new professionals annually in these areas, while demand is increasing. Núria Ávalos, general director of INDESIA, explained to The Country that “many grades are now emerging, but until these people are in a position to take on positions such as a data architect there are a few years left”, which exacerbates the gap between supply and demand. In response, companies and universities are exploring joint training models, where companies themselves become training centers to urgently cover this need for qualified talent. What AI gives you, AI takes away. Despite the good figures for technological employment in Spain, it is inevitable to observe the United States labor market as a canary in the mine that reveals where the trends in the futureand has already begun to give the first signs. While it is true that the arrival of AI stopped the decline in employment, as AI gains skills in programming and basic tasks, it is also promoting job automationwhich reduces the number of necessary technological employees, especially among those who just begin their working career. We are seeing a clear example in the latest layoffs from large technology companies, where not only are “accessory” positions for an approach whose objective is the development of AI, but engineers who until now are being fired they were developing that AI. In Xataka | Big Tech doesn’t stop firing its engineers. At the same time, they have stepped on the accelerator in hiring Image | Unsplash (Fatemeh Rezvani)

Hangzhou is the city of DeepSeek, Alibaba and Unitree without any of the typical Silicon Valley ingredients. His secret is another

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Hangzhou, a city of 12 million inhabitants 180 km south of Shanghai, is home to a striking number of powerful technology companies: Seven reference technologies (the six ‘little dragons’ plus the giant Alibaba) in a city that does not have any of the elements considered essential in Silicon Valley: Abundant venture capital. Leading universities. Links between university and industry. And a robust industrial structure. How could you then Hangzhou emerge well? The facts. Venture capital is plummeting in China. Funds in yuan have fallen from 88.42 billion dollars in 2022 to 5.38 billion in 2024. Funds in dollars, from 17.32 billion to 750 million. Hangzhou has not been a major recipient of investment until last year, when its province –Zheijang– stood out with 41 new corporate venture capital funds. But it was only after Unitree or Game Science had gained national attention. Missing. Hangzhou has only one elite university – Zhejiang – compared to 26 in Beijing, 11 in Jiangsu or 10 in Shanghai. The admission rate at Tsinghua and Beijing Universities for students from the capital (0.85%) is almost ten times that of students from Zhejiang (0.09%). None of the founders of “the six little dragons” or Alibaba created their company directly from university. Liang Wenfeng founded High-Flyer, the hedge fund after DeepSeekeight years after graduating. Jack Ma was rejected for 30 jobs after finishing his studies. Yes, but. The city has innovated by doing away with those ingredients. The explanation offered by Zilan Qian, a researcher at the Oxford China Policy Lab, points out ChinaTalk to “flexible governance”: a model where officials adopt “waiters” and “babysitters” mentality that facilitate rather than control. The context. Hangzhou does not have the political, financial or industrial importance of first-tier cities, which has given it greater local autonomy to shape its technology sector. Zhejiang province was a pioneer since the 1980s in promoting private enterprise during the early phases of Chinese economic reforms. Jack Ma He tried to establish Alibaba’s headquarters in Beijing or Shanghai, but failed due to the cost of rent and bureaucratic barriers. In 2015, Ma explained her decision: “Beijing favors state-owned enterprises, Shanghai favors foreign companies, and Alibaba was nothing in their eyes. If we return to Hangzhou, we become the local only child who receives all the attention and support.” Hangzhou is part of the sometimes called “chinese technology triangle“(sometimes also”golden triangle“) along with Shanghai and Shenzhen. More than a geometric reality, the functional metaphor describes the complementarity of three cities: Shenzhen provides industrial capacity and hardware. Shanghai concentrates finances and internationalization Hangzhou stands out in the internet, AI and an ecosystem favorable to private companies. Each vertex of the triangle has different strengths that, combined, generate an ecosystem where geographical proximity facilitates collaboration and flow of talent between the three poles. Between the lines. The model is described as “market-oriented” but maintains a level of centralized governance. The Hangzhou government sees quality of life as a strategy to attract businesses and talent, but positions itself as an enabler, not a controller. The absence of state-backed research institutes and a strong industrial base contributes to the government’s humble attitude. If Hangzhou were more strategic or more industrial, DeepSeek might not have had the creative space to emerge and provoke the earthquake that caused in January. The narrative of “self-made industry” and “entrepreneurial bureaucracy” admits conflicting readings. What some interpret as facilitation, others read as a euphemism for “dirigiste intervention by the State”, with a very defined plan of action and long-term objectives. “Flexible governance” can be both real local autonomy… and dirigisme disguised as pragmatism. At least it is no longer “a city south of Shanghai” but “Alibaba City” or “DeepSeek City”. In Xataka | China is selling us a future full of humanoid robots. We have (many) doubts Featured image | JinHui CHEN in Unsplash

There is an Italian technology giant that is enriched buying the corpses of Silicon Valley at the price of bargain and then relive them

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Vimeo He has just announced Its acquisition by the Italian conglomerate Bending Spoons, which will pay $ 1,380 million for it. A priori the operation seems totally normal, but it is not at all: it is the last of the acquisitions of a company that has become a unique “technological vulture”. One that, yes, seems to be managing to reimprorate the businesses you acquire. The numbers. Vimeo investors will receive $ 7.85 per share, which represents a price of 91% higher than the average value of the share in the last 60 days. The purchase process will be completed in the fourth quarter of 2025 and the payment of these amounts will be made completely in cash. They already tried. As they point out in Bloomberg, Bending Spoon has been raising an acquisition of Vimeo since March 2024. The Italian conglomerate, which he received A financing round That raised its valuation to 2.6 billion dollars, since then sought new acquisitions, and Vimeo was a clear objective. Evolution of the value of Vimeo’s actions in Nasdaq. Source: Google Finance YouTube was too youtube. Vimeo created in 2004, tried to stand out as a Premium video platform, but after several innovation and focus change milestones became a B2B service company for video. During pandemia He added 30 million new membersand that ended up in 2021 to go over. Profitability problems caused personnel cuts, and stock assessment ended up falling drastically. Vimeo has been living a difficult situation for the last years and without getting up. And that is just what blessing spoons has taken advantage of … because it is what it usually does. The Evernote case. What happened with Vimeo happened before with Evernote. The one that in the early last decade It was the notes and productivity app par excellence He ended up falling little by little for oblivion and losing ground in front of competitors such as Notion, Onenote or Obsidian. In November 2022 Evernote It was acquired by Bending Spoons And then what happened happened. After the purchase, layoffs and price uploads of the service. After the acquisition, Bending Spoons He fired most of the original team and transferred the headquarters to Europe. Then a strong price increase was implemented, and the personal plan rose 63% prices while the free version imposed more restrictive limits to use the platform. Source: Bloomberg But also, business resurrection and service. Although many left the platform, Evernote returned to profitability and revenues became 162 million dollars in 2022 to 700 million dollars in 2023. The rhythm of improvements and updates also He has revivedand the company seems to have lived a unique rebirth. Wetransfer, another exampleSimilar some also occurred with Wetransfer, which after being founded in 2009 was positioned as a simple transfer leader of large files. After a failed attempt to go over in 2022, Bending Spoons acquired Wetransfer In July 2024 and applied the same formula as with Evernote: dismissed 75% of the template to try to be more efficient. A few months ago the service suffered a great controversy for using user data To train their AI modelsalthough it ended Reculting. The service was relatively healthy before acquisition, and it seems that the operation is also being successful for the platform and, of course, for Bending Spoans. Diversifying successfully. In Bending Spoons they already applied that same strategy with previous acquisitions such as Filmic – of which He fired his entire template– Or Meetup —which too transferred its headquarters to Europe-. One of its most remarkable success is that of Reminia photo editing platform with AI that the Italian conglomerate acquired in 2021 and that it has managed to become a reference in this market, even surpassing in the most unloaded Apps lists from China to Douyin, its rival of Tiktok. In Xataka | An Italian winery installed solar panels on its vineyards and discovered something unexpected: they improve the quality of wine

With only two electric cars, Xiaomi is getting out of the “Valley of Death.” Others cost more than a decade

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The Xiaomi Su7 has surprised the entire industry And he has led the company to do such rare things as telling its customers in a hurry that buy cars from competition. The play hides a strategy, but it is a great example of how good it goes to the company with its second car and bets on luxury, The Yu7. While they hope to make the leap to Europe in 2027, he has achieved kneel. Lost 800 million In his first year he sold cars. Great news that already pointed to what was coming later: the Break Even When losing $ 500 per car sold is good news. Xiaomi has presented the Financial Results of the Second Fiscal Quarterwith great news for your car section. The Auto Division has commercialized 81,302 vehicles in the period and lost 41 million dollars. It is a loss of $ 507 for each car sold. It is very good news for the speed at which the company is approaching profitability. The photo. In the last quarters, Xiaomi comes from losing, on average, 1,376, 905 and 507 dollars respectively, after coming from losses of 5,250 in the third quarter of 2024. That is, it now loses a tenth of what I lost until November. And it is not the only positive figure that the results bring along with sales growth: the gross margin has grown from 15.4% of the second quarter of 2024 to 26.4% of this year. This contributes to having launched the Su7 ultrawhose launch has helped the average sale price up 10% in one year. With him they wanted to eat Porsche in his field, And they got it. According to its financial results, Xiaomi is very close to starting to earn money with its car section. Why it is important. Tesla is the only pure manufacturers of electric cars that He has managed to get out of the “Death Valley” the initial period in which Startups They burn money to espuertas without hardly generating money. Brands such as Rivian, Lucid, or Ford (in their electric division) have accumulated losses exceeding 22,200, 11,000 and 10,500 million dollars respectively. That Xiaomi only loses 41 million dollars per quarter with such competitive prices speaks of the balance that has its commitment just over a year after having launched. How are they getting it. Not all companies have The support that Xiaomi has had In his car crossing. In this sense, according to Bill Russo, CEO and founder of Automobility, a determining factor of Xiaomi’s success has to do with its production agility, which has benefited widely from producing with Beijing Auto, a state company that already had a huge production scale before the arrival of Xiaomi. The company was able to access a production chain already components of high quality already available in the market thanks to investments made by the matrix and its founder for years in companies such as companies such as Momenta. Another of the keys, according to John Helveston, a professor specialized in the Chinese electric vehicles industry: it is an achievement to manufacture an electric in such a short time, but attention must be paid to evolution. “The car industry is hard and success is measured in years of resistance, not in the speed of the first launch,” he told us. Xiaomi has passed in a year of being present in 30 cities with 87 stores to be in 92 with 335 stores. Image: Xiaomi. Xiaomi had a long way carved. Yes, even being new in the electric car sector. On the one hand, although you can buy online cars, by its already extensive distribution network In China: 335 sales centers in 92 cities, and growing at a dizzying pace. It is no longer the company we met for selling extremely cheap technology. Although it maintains a part of that bet, in recent years too He has focused on the premium with the support of luxury brands such as Leica. It is much more path of of some brands when arriving in Spain. The challenge. Among such good news, Xiaomi faces a problem: long waiting times and limited calendar. This explains that in China, the Su7 be the king of resalecosting more than new and with up to 10 months of waiting. To a limited production they also faced for years fAbricante as Teslaand Xiaomi has the best example of how to grow. In 2024 he achieved sell 4 million vehicles (In front of the 350,000 that Xiaomi hopes to sell this year). Xiaomi has a plan factor growth for his future cars and be able to face international expansion. It will be a crucial moment, for example companies like Novo Nordisk knows well: the problems for Ozempic in the United States began When they could not deal with demand. Cover image | Xiaomi In Xataka | Intel is closer than ever to be chopped. A giant is interested in buying its chips factories

Silicon Valley prefers to buy herself rather than invest in the future

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Great American technology They swim in money in cash but to a large extent they are preferring to spend it repurchase their own actions rather than invest. How the mechanism works. A shares is simple: the company uses its cash to buy its own market shares and withdraws them. If a company has 1,000 million shares and repurchase 100 million, there are 900 million. The trick is in arithmetic. If the benefits are the same but there are fewer actions, the benefit per action Go up. A company that earned 10,000 million with 1,000 million shares showed 10 dollars of benefit per share. With 900 million shows $ 11.11. The metric goes up even if the company has not improved at all. Executives charge on actions on actions. Your compensation increases. The funds see the value of their portfolios without waiting for years to mature real investments. The company avoids the risk of investing in projects that can fail .. It is capitalism without capitalism: financial returns without real value creation. Why is it important. The further reason towards the tendency to an increasing repurchase of actions can be inferred: fear. The American political climate has become especially complex for large industrial investments. Bureaucracy, regulations. It is safer to return money to shareholders than to risk building something real. Meta tried to expand his campus in Menlo Park next to a plan to create affordable homes and He crashed into years of bureaucracy. The project has been in pause for some time. Amazon He left his plan to open a second headquarters in New York for the strong political protests that unleashed his announcement. Intel has been trying to open factories. And seeing how China ends them in a couple of years. The financial refuge. Act repurchases have become the bunker where technological ones hide their cash. In 2025 They will exceed the billion dollarshistorical record. Warren Buffett himself, nothing suspicious of anti -capitalist, has once said that Many repurchases are “stupid”. Explained that they benefit more than paid executives in Stock Options (Actions options) than long -term shareholders. The context. The repurchases They were illegal in the United States until 1982when under the presidency of Ronald Reagan they were authorized. Until then they considered a form of market manipulation. They are now the main way to give back shareholders. They exceed traditional dividends. A Study of the Roosevelt Institute of 2018 He showed that S&P 500 companies then spent 94% of their benefits on repurchases and dividends, leaving barely margin for productive investment. And now what. In the United States, some Democratic senators proposed a couple of years ago a 4% tax on repurchase programs to discourage them. What came from the hand of Biden It was 1% that has not had a great effect. For Europe, which depends technologically on the United States, this trend is worrying. If Silicon Valley prefers financial engineering to real, vulnerability against Chinese advance increases. In Xataka | The agreement with the US seemed to pave the way to Nvidia in China. Now is the Asian giant who begins to close the door Outstanding image | Roberto Júnior

Something is happening in Silicon Valley. More and more startups are going to the day ‘996’ of China

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“If you want to leave at 5 you are not at the right work.” Lucy Guo said it, Founder of the Startup Scale AI. And it is not the only one. More and more Silicon Valley startups, especially those dedicated to AI, which are betting on this “extreme commitment” model that reminds us of the endless 996 Conference that were so controversial in China. What is happening? New culture. The culture of ultra-productivity defended by figures like Elon Musk It has been installed in Silicon Valley. In statements a WiredAdrian Kinnersley, CEO of a hiring company, says that “it is becoming very common. We have several clients who have as a prerequisite when selecting candidates who are willing to work on days 996”. Hysteria. In California, labor legislation is very favorable for workers and Kinnersley is surprised that many companies are “breastfeeding it.” It is one of the consequences of the AI career. Not only is there a great competition between China and the United StatesSilicon Valley has become the battlefield where small startups fight for being number one in his. The price: squeeze your workers. What was given was over. Not long ago, working in Silicon Valley was a dream for many. Companies like Google were known for offering gyms, coffee shops and even masseuses. All kinds of comfort for that employees felt at home. That is over. With the return to the offices after the pandemic, The dream began to fade. The tortilla has turned around. Today it is common for any startup to ask its employees to make marathon days and even work on weekends. Extreme commitment. It is another way of saying that you will not go through home much. We recently talked about the young CEO of Greptile and his controversial statements. “We do not offer conciliation”he said in Your X profile. The CEO says it directly in the work interviews: they work from 9 in the morning until late at night and, often, also on Saturdays. It looks a lot like China 996: from nine to nine, six days a week. The excuse: be competitive. In an interview, this CEO said that “nobody cares about the third best company, not even the second best, in any software category. If you are going to strive 95%, it is the equivalent of striving to 0%.” There are arranged people. In Spain we have attended the opposite in the hospitality sector: The waiters rebelled against the 12 -hour days, to the point that there was no labor. In Silicon Valley it seems that there are enough people willing to work 996. In Rilla, another AI startup, they say that 80% of their employees are working 72 hours a week. Even They put it in their job offers And they are not having problems hiring. His CEO says that there is “a very strong and growing subculture, especially in my generation (the Gene z), who grew up listening to stories by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, entrepreneurs who dedicated their lives to create companies that changed the world. ” 996 in China. The 996 day became popular in China among Chinese technology last decade. This model was the growth engine of companies such as Alibaba or JD.com for years, but there came a point where The workers were fed up and The protests began demanding better working conditions. The Chinese government ended up prohibiting The endless days and went from 996 to 1065 (from 10 in the morning to 6 in the afternoon, five days a week). Temporary and only for those who want. There are startups that defend a slightly more moderate hyper-productive culture. The CEO of Sotiraa startup that applies AI solutions to the logistics sector, sees it as something temporary: “During the first two years of your startup, you have to work in the 996 style.” He also states that these days are for the leaders of the companies and does not believe that the entire employee base must be imposed. This vision creates a kind of structure on two levels, where only a part of the company meets these schedules. It is what the CEO of the “Telesalud” Fella & Delilah company proposed to its employees in a Publication in your LinkedIn. Employees who adhere to this schedule will receive a 25% increase in their salary. Image |Ron Lach, Pexels In Xataka | Work tired, stress and generates burnout. There is a way to reduce all that impact: the four -day week

The ‘Sohamgate’ has highlighted the recruitment of Silicon Valley

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Silicon Valley may seem like an ecosystem of companies in which, more or less, everyone knows each other, and engineers They jump from company in company as in an exchange of chromos. However, a simple message in X has uncovered the case of Soham Parekh, an Indian engineer who, according to several startup founders, would have been working on several startups dedicated to AI. Ok, Rubén, what is that strange? Many engineers do. The nuance is that he has done it at all at once cheating its employers and leaving a trail of doubts about whether I really had those skills. A message raised the hare. It all started when Suhail Doshi, co -founder and former CEO of Mixpanel, published A message in x warning about this case: “There is a man named Soham Parekh (in India) who works simultaneously in three or four startups. He has been taking advantage of companies of and combinator and others. Be careful,” wrote the founder. Doshi explained that Parekh had been working briefly in his company, Playground AI, but was fired in his first week after his deception was discovered. The surprise is that, following that publication, at least five CEOs and founders of other startups have confirmed that they had also hired Parekh during that time. “It has been doing this for years and works in more than four startups at the same time,” confirmed Nicolai Ouporov, CEO of Fleet AI. Soham Parekh’s method. Beyond being an example of how to overcome selection processes and have Success in work interviewshe modus operandi from Parekh took advantage of the remote job offers of the startups to sign for them. The problem is that he signed for all at once and did not stop presenting all the New offers They were dating. Thus, when a company discovered and said goodbye, it began in a new one. In other words, Parekh’s main job was not to work for the startups that hired him, but to do the interviews for which they were going to hire him. Far from subtracting merits, thanks to his technical and communication skills, Parekh achieved impress recruiters In online interviews. “The guy was so intelligent when I interviewed him that it was crazy. Something did not square, so luckily I didn’t hire him, but fuck …” I wrote Justin Harvey, co -founder of Aivideo. Another founder, Adish Jain, founder of the AI ​​agents company for Mosaic video editing, He joined To the wave of confirmations: “I confirm it. This guy made us waste time for a month. He did very well in the interviews, but he is a liar.” Touch the image to go to the original message An impeccable curriculum … to be false. Parekh’s curriculum shows that he had worked for companies such as Dynamo AI, Union AI, Synthesia and Alan AI, in addition to having a degree at the University of Mumbai and a master’s degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology. However, after a more detailed examination, Doshi says that “90 % of its curriculum seems false and most of the links no longer work,” public attaching a capture of the Parekh curriculum. Some of the founders who claimed to have hired Parekh They started publishing the emails that the engineer had sent them as a presentation letter. To anyone’s surprise, they all followed the same employer and only changed the name of the company or the person to whom it was directed. Parekh seams. Despite the curious of the phenomenon #sohamgate that has already become viral, what has really exposed are the seams of some ineffective recruitment processes and even negligent for not checking the curriculum or references of the candidate. “They should pay you to expose their failed contracting processes,” I wrote A software engineer. In this case, in Parekh’s deception has been discovered because a good part of the startups in which “worked” belonged to the environment of And combinatorthe startup incubator that for years Sam Altman directed. But it would have been unnoticed if it had not focused on an environment as close as this business accelerator. The ethical dilemma. Another issue that Sohamgate has put on the table is articulated on the ethics of working in two companies at the same time when both jobs develop remotely. It is not a new theme, since the teleworking became common, they have given themselves hundreds of cases in which workers took advantage of this model to distribute their time between the two jobs. Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Researcher at Standfordassured that his research team has access to a private database of more than 100,000 engineers who work for more than 1,000 companies. That represents 0.5% of developers around the world. “Within this ‘little’ shows, we usually find engineers who work in 2 or more jobs”, I wrote In X. According to Denisov-Blanch calculations, more than 5% of the engineers would have More than a remote job. In Xataka | Pluriempleo in Spain: 15% of workers need more than one job to cover their basic needs Image | Unspash (Mohammad Rahmani)

His salaries already exceed 2 million dollars in Silicon Valley

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There is a whole fierce battle in the giants tech by take to the best talents to innovate in the field of artificial intelligence. And given the high competition that is being lived, the salary scale in the technological sector is more rising than ever. The salaries of scientists and engineers of AI They have reached stratospheric figureswith salary incentives ranging from 3 to 7 million dollars annually for senior profiles. An unprecedented escalation that is turning these professionals In authentic financial assets. What’s happening. Great technological ones such as Meta and OpenAi are starring a war of talent without barracks. The salaries of your Top researchers have risen 50% since 2022reaching 10 million annually in exceptional cases. To put it in perspective: a traditional software engineer in a large company charges between 180,000 and 220,000 base salary dollars in the United States, while an AI scientist can reach 2 million. According to the Specialized Salary Portal LevelsMeta is one of the companies that are paying the most to its AI engineers, climbing from 186,000 dollars to 3.2 million. Until recently, it was not usual in Tech companies for positions that were not managers or investors. The trigger. Mark Zuckerberg has been the great catalyst of this escalation. According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Goal is offering bonds of up to 100 million dollars to the most prominent engineers in the sector. The strategy responds to The disappointing flame reception 4which has not finished meeting expectations in Benchmarks of reasoning and programming. Eleven of the fourteen researchers of the flame team They have abandoned goalseveral course to the French Mistral. Openai’s response. The company responsible for Chatgpt has not remained still. Its research director, Mark Chen, sent an internal memo Comparing personnel exits with “as if someone had broken into our home and had stolen something.” Openai gave his workforce to “rest and recharge energy”, while Chen and Altman work “24 hours” to retain talent and “recalibrate” salary packages. Beyond money. Paradoxically, the sector’s torses say that many researchers prioritize the reputation of the equipment and the quality of work above astronomical figures. “There is always a risk: if you finish in the finish line, you may not do the level of work you would do in Deepmind, OpenAi or Anthropic,” Explain Firas Sozan, CEO of the consultant Harrison Clarke. The domino effect. This salary inflation is pushing some companies to look for alternatives. Startups such as Hugging Face are moving their search for talent to Europe, where in our continent, “with a Silicon Valley software engineer you can hire three or four of the same level,” according to Thomas Wolf, co -founder of the company. Sectors such as insurance, entertainment and financial services are also uploading their offers to compete for this top -level talent. Why does it matter. IA researchers have become the new players of the technological world, with millionaire signings that reflect the strategic value that companies grant to artificial intelligence. One of the most recent cases is that of the young man Alexandr Wangthe new AI star who will be responsible for directing the Meta Labs SuperintenTintentintentintelligence Labs. The Zuckerberg company has paid $ 14.3 billion per Scale AI, a platform that serves as preparing language models and was founded by Wang and Lucy Guo. They are superstar, and are the minds that will shape the future of AI. Cover image | Reuters and UNCAPPED In Xataka | How to use Gemini to summarize YouTube videos or ask questions about its Android content

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