Doom and gloom drives action

Remember the infamous Seqouia RIP slides... well it seems the company CEOs took it to heart. GigaOM has posted a table of layoffs by Sequoia-funded firms including 40 at Adbrite and 25 at Aliph (makers of the uber-cool Jawbone).

It totally makes sense to cut some fat and focus on the core business. Besides, these numbers pale in comparison to the Wall Street and City numbers (or the layoffs from 2001).

Techcruunch does one better and has a layoff tracker graph.

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• The Sequoia Layoff Scorecard
• Keeping Count: The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker
• Inside Details of Sequoia Capital's Doomsday Meeting With its Companies (Om Malik/GigaOM)
• AdBrite cuts 40 of 100 employees [Layoffs]
• Aliph CEO spends $500,000 on new furniture before layoffs [Hosain Rahman]

Pedro Aspe at Wharton

An interesting speech from Pedro Aspe, former Mexican Finace Secretary during the last massive Mexican crisis, now Chairman of Evercore Partners speaking at Wharton.

He uses his experience and background in "financial messes" to eavluate the "mess" in the "neighbor of the North."

Ad market to grown (ONLY) 6%

Doug Anmuth at Barclay's says that ad spend will grown 6%... That's 6% more than many would have expected.

PaidContent did a nice roundup of the forecasts with Nielsen seeing a 5.6% drop in first quarters of 2008.

EMarketer (anslyst of the analysts) forecasts 8.9% increase.


My assesment.... who the hell knows... With Ponzi schemes left and right, even Goldman doing layoffs and everyone being VERY cautious going into 2009, I would not bet my job on any growth percentage.