What's latest at Musk's Twitter: Employees at Twitter are in for a rough ride under Elon Musk’s leadership. According to Bloomberg, Musk plans to eliminate 3,700 jobs at Twitter, or half of the social media company's workforce, in order to drive down costs.

• Twitter’s new owner aims to inform affected staffers on Friday

• Laid off workers will be offered 60 days’ worth of severance pay

• Musk also plans to change the firm's existing work-from-anywhere policy, asking remaining staff to report to offices.

The platform also intends to begin selling blue verification badges for user accounts as early as next week.

• Musk shot back at US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she criticized his decision to charge verified Twitter users — telling her to "pay" up.

As employees race to meet Musk's tight deadlines, a photo of a Twitter manager sleeping on the floor of the company's offices was uploaded on the platform.

In addition, a tiny but rising group of celebrities, actors, and artists say that they are ditching the social media platform.

Meanwhile, L'Oréal is suspending Twitter advertising as major brands and marketing groups are concerned that inappropriate content may spread on the platform under Musk's leadership.

• The beauty company's decision follows a similar one last week by General Motors.

In today’s newsletter:   

• Meta India head Ajit Mohan quits 
• SaaS in pain
• Cognizant’s underperformance continues 

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You are expecting the chief to take stock at the afternoon meeting. There are many important things going on in the company. But, the chief does not turn up. Then he quits.

• Something similar happened today evening with Meta (previously Facebook) employees when Ajit Mohan, the company's India head, abruptly stepped down

• He is heading over to social media platform Snap Inc, according to sources

The India unit of the social media giant is now more than three times the size it was when Mohan took charge in January 2019.

• Revenue has grown from Rs 892 crore in FY19 to Rs 2,309 crore in FY22

• Profit has increased almost 5X from Rs 65 crore in FY19 to Rs 297 crore in FY22
  
  
• With Mohan at the helm, India was the testing ground for Instagram Reels before it took off globally

• WhatsApp, also a Meta-owned platform, is set to cross $1 billion in annual revenue in India next year

• WhatsApp Pay got regulatory nod from NPCI and WhatsApp Business took off in India

Mohan boasts of a stellar resume as a media company operator in India. In a first, Meta created the role of Managing Director for India for him in late 2018.

• He reported directly to Menlo Park (Facebook's headquarters) instead of Asia Pacific

• Prior to Meta, he served as CEO of Star India's OTT streaming platform Hotstar for four years

• Mohan has previously worked as a McKinsey consultant and as an India columnist for the Wall Street Journal

Imagine you're going down the street, listening to music, and there's this fresh banana peel someone flung from their car, ready to take you down. That's how it feels to see back-to-back bad news in the SaaS ecosystem today, only the banana peel is the recession!

To begin, SaaS unicorn Chargebee laid off 10% of its workforce, blaming the macroeconomic environment as well as internal pressure to cut costs and mounting operational debt.

Swipe to the next sad SaaS story. Nasdaq-listed Freshworks has been served with a class action lawsuit by two US law firms, Scott+Scott and The Scholl, alleging that the offering documents used to verify Freshworks' initial public offering (IPO) were false and misleading.

Layoffs in the SaaS ecosystem are surprising because many investors and software enthusiasts were bullish on the sector, and even the funding winter kept away from the segment. As the first SaaS unicorn to conduct a layoff, Chargebee's decision is now quite noteworthy. 

Many SaaS companies are adopting cautious measures to shield themselves from the recession in the US, such as cutting costs, reducing marketing spending, and even freezing hiring. It is worth noting that around 80-90% of SaaS firms' business comes from the US.

According to the Complaint, Freshworks made false and misleading statements to the market and was facing considerable business difficulties at the time of the IPO.

Legal experts believe that this will not have a large influence on the business or the ecosystem, but it will depend on how many more law firms and private investors join this lawsuit. However, the immediate impact is that Freshworks shares are down nearly 7 percent!

In the end, all we can hope for is that no one throws banana peels on the road and that the best SaaS firms in the ecosystem wade through this recession environment effectively.

Cognizant announced its results for the third quarter, with revenue below forecasts. The company pared its revenue guidance for the full year as well, as it continues to hobble due to weak demand and poor execution. Revenue guidance was pared down last quarter as well. 

The company's management attributed the reduction in full-year revenue guidance to currency challenges, lower North American billable headcount, and softer-than-expected bookings growth.

Significantly higher attrition has been a source of concern for the company. This quarter, attrition was 35%, with India having the greatest impact. It is worth noting that 6 percent of this was due to involuntary attrition.

Analysts have called out Cognizant over its performance, with analyst Moshe Katri saying that the underperformance would increase the pressure on the board to examine performance and execution, which could potentially lead to executive role changes.

Kotak Institutional Equities said Cognizant has ceded market share in key verticals, and there is “not much readthrough” for other IT services companies from these results.

New-age tech companies haven't just found fancy with direct retail stock investors, but also with mutual funds. 

• Mutual fund houses such as SBI, Mirae, ICICI Prudential, Franklin Templeton and Aditya Birla Sun Life snapped up shares of Nykaa, Paytm, Delhivery and other new-age tech companies at the time of IPOs or soon after listing

• For example, fintech Paytm's shares were bought by two schemes of Mirae Mutual Fund
  
  
• Delhivery, the logistics and supply chain company founded in 2011, saw two schemes of SBI Mutual Fund put in funds

How have mutual funds' investments done so far?

Go deeper

• Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase’s chief product officer Surojit Chatterjee is stepping down from his current position, effective from November 30, 2022, said the company in its US SEC filing. Chatterjee will continue to serve as an advisor until February 3, 2023. 
  
  
• Troubled cryptocurrency lending platform Vauld’s parent Defi Payments has filed an application in a Singapore Court seeking a four-month extension of its moratorium till March 7, 2023. The Coinbase-backed start-up’s earlier three-month deadline for moratorium was to end on November 7, 2022.
  
  
• Meta Platforms announced a slew of new Instagram features, including a tool for trading digital collectibles. Users can soon support creators by buying their non-fungible tokens (NFTs) directly on Instagram. Meta has picked Polygon as the first partner for this feature.

Email inboxes are a mess, particularly if you are in a job where you get a lot of them on a daily basis (hello there!). This also makes it hard to find that particular important email or clean up your inbox if you are running out of space.

Luckily, Gmail has some powerful search operators that can help you better manage your inbox. Here are some of them:

Deleting large emails: You can use "size:" followed by a certain number to surface larger emails. For instance, "size:50MB" will surface all emails that are larger than 50MB, which makes it easier to delete them and save space. 

Searching older emails: You can use "before: [date]" or "older: [date]" to find older emails after that particular date. 

Narrowing search results: You can use "-[keyword]" to remove all emails having the keywords from the search results.

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