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Kevin Mayer didn’t sign up for this

Good morning! This Thursday, Kevin Mayer is out at TikTok, Facebook's worried about iOS 14, and you should be writing your own personal manual.
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I'll grant you this, Kevin Mayer: It's hard to imagine a rougher start to a CEO gig than the one you endured at TikTok.
Mayer left Disney on a high, having successfully launched Disney+, and took over what looked like The Next Big Thing in social and entertainment. But that was in early June, and by early July, TikTok was firmly in the crosshairs of the U.S. government. Last night, he decided he was done.
In Mayer's message to his staff, he basically said: This wasn't what I signed up for.
Anyway, the subtext: Mayer wasn't going to be CEO much longer anyway. No matter who TikTok sells to, he'd suddenly have a new boss at a new company. Mayer didn't want to work for Satya Nadella or Larry Ellison. His new boss might not have even wanted to keep him on.
The response within TikTok seems to be something along the lines of "yeah, that makes sense." The FT reported that ByteDance CEO Zhang Timing said he understood Mayer's decision and wished him well, and a company statement …. well, it wished him well.
As for what happens now, Vanessa Pappas, the GM of TikTok and the head of the company's U.S. operations, is the company's interim leader. But there are new bosses coming to TikTok no matter what, so the corporate hierarchy doesn't seem to matter much right now.
When users upgrade their iPhones to iOS 14 sometime in the next month or so, they're going to start seeing a slightly startling message when they open many apps. It will say, basically: Do they want to allow this app to track them on other apps and websites?
Facebook, for one, is rattled. It published a blog post saying that it won't collect the IDFA, and explained that "this is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple's updates to iOS 14 have forced this decision." It said that its decision provides "as much certainty and stability" as it believes it can offer the companies it works with,
This will shock you, but there wasn't a whole lot of sympathy going around yesterday for poor old Facebook.
Anyway, if your company relies on ads, I hope you're ready for what's coming this fall. In addition to Apple's changes, Google's continuing its crusade against third-party cookies. In other words, a lot of the things companies have assumed about how ads work are about to be upended, one opt-out at a time.
I said the other day every CEO should write their company's Risk Factors every once in a while. Well here's another writing assignment: The cool new thing to do in tech is to write the manual on ... you. Or working with you, at least.
Yesterday, Reid Hoffman published "Reid: The Manual,"a Coda document with lots of Reid-on-Reid information into how he works, what he thinks about, and why you shouldn't feel bad when he leaves you to deal with a problem by yourself.
I suspect this is going to catch on. Before you know it, you'll need to enter every board meeting or investor lunch armed with your pitch deck, your business plan and your CEO manual. Plus, it's a good exercise in self-reflection. Like journaling for the MBA set, I suppose.
Edge computing is an emerging concept that holds great promise. AI best practices are still evolving in the cloud. Join us on Tuesday, September 1 at 9 a.m. PT / noon ET for our virtual event "Computing at the Edge." Protocol's Tom Krazit will host a discussion with Edgeworx's Farah Papaioannou, IBM's Rob High, Cox Communications' Nancy Li and Swim.ai's Simon Crosby. This event is presented in partnership with Intel.
Spotify may be the big new thing in podcasting, but Joe Budden said he's leaving the platform:
Sundar Pichai said the pandemic has changed his thinking about the future of work:
The problems with Amazon aren't just with Amazon, Tim Bray said, they're with capitalism:
Congratulations, Jeff Bezos: You're now worth more than $200 billion. More than $87 billion of that was made in 2020 alone, the biggest increase so far this year of anyone on Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Though Elon Musk's not far behind on that metric.
Salesforce is laying off some employees, even after reporting one of its best quarterly results ever. About 1,000 jobs are being cut, The Wall Street Journal reported, and those affected have 60 days to try to find a new spot within Salesforce.
First Quibi decided, OK, sure, we'll work on your TV. Now it's … going to theaters? The company held a screening of its show "The Stranger," at a drive-in in LA, and it sounds like the idea even weirded out the show's creator, Veena Sud. "This is the first time I'm seeing it on a big screen like this," she told the audience, per the Hollywood Reporter. At this rate, I give it three months before Quibi is renting DVDs and showing up on an IMAX screen near you.
Edge computing is an emerging concept that holds great promise. AI best practices are still evolving in the cloud. Join us on Tuesday, September 1 at 9 a.m. PT / noon ET for our virtual event "Computing at the Edge." Protocol's Tom Krazit will host a discussion with Edgeworx's Farah Papaioannou, IBM's Rob High, Cox Communications' Nancy Li and Swim.ai's Simon Crosby. This event is presented in partnership with Intel.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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