What's coming up next week on Caffeine
Plus: Time's running out for the great Caffeine Reader Survey 2025
Welcome to Friday
Hope you’re gearing up well for Easter and you have a moderately easy short week lined up.
As we touched on last Friday, we’re making some changes here at Caffeine but we don’t want to make those in a vacuum.
In order to make sure all our decisions are shaped by you, the readers, please take a few minutes to complete our reader survey.
Caffeine Readership Survey 2025
As you’ve seen for the last week, we’re going to focus on creating more original Caffeine content alongside your usual Daily Shot on Tuesdays-Thursdays while keeping a more streamlined newsletter for Mondays and Fridays.
If you’ve already completed the survey and have some more feedback to share with us drop us a note: hello@caffeinedaily.co - we love to hear from you.
Now read on to take a sneak peek at what’s coming from Caffeine next week for our paid subscribers as well as your usual Weekend Fuel recommendation.
Finally, a correction on yesterdays newsletter. An old headline was left in the section for the Growth Jam event in Wellington indicating the wrong date and content.
Growth Jam is coming to the capital May 22 as part of tech week. Apologies for the error.
Have a great weekend, look after each other and we’ll see you next week.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
Next week on Caffeine:
Check in with Nicola Taylor from Taxi: Fintech is the fastest growing and arguably the most fascinating space in NZ right now, with a 10-year compound annual growth of 32 percent - four times higher than the tech industry as a whole.
It sits upstream of so many other sectors and when it flourishes, unlocks capital across the entire ecosystem. There’s no better voice in fintech or more vocal champion than friend of Caffeine and Taxi co-founder Nicola Taylor. Check in on Tuesday to hear her talk about how far Taxi has come, some numbers showing its impact and a recent law change win.
An interview with a founding member of Twitter on how the Bird was Broken: We HAD planned for this one to go live last week but had to shuffle out content calendar a little. What happens when a product you make to bring people together ends up tearing them apart? Evan Henshaw-Plath was Employee #1 at Twitter and had an ultimate insiders view to one of the most tumultuous and consequential companies in Silicon Valley history. One of my favorite conversations I’ve had in a long time and will be with you next week.
A very special interview that I am not allowed to talk about just yet: I have a another interview I am very eager to publish which is still under wraps but it touches on almost everything we’re passionate about here at Caffeine and I could not be more excited to bring to you on Thursday next week.
Here’s what’s on our radar. Hit us with your own recommendations.
I thought I’d try something different this week, instead of lightly touching on three things I think people should check out this weekend, I’d focus on one thing I found particularly powerful, informative or interesting.
Considering the sheer insanity of what we’ve experienced in the past week weeks at a global economic scale, I thought I’d pair last week’s recommendation with another on the same topic.
We seem to be entering a brave new economic order worldwide driven by men with some reckless disregard for their actions and after calling out Margin Call last week I thought it would be worthwhile singling out one of the best movies documentaries ever made about the last time this happened.
Inside Job is the many, many award winning documentary unpacking the GFC with a series of interviews and explainers which manage to demystify the jargon and lay bare the naked greed which pushed the global economy of a cliff.
There are scenes in this documentary which made me marvel simultaneously at how sly and how stupid some of the people involved were. There’s also scenes which will make you want to smash your TV and how little consequence there was for them.
Watch it on Prime Video or Apple.
If you haven’t picked up Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn William’s book ‘Careless People’ yet, I would highly recommend you do or at least familiarize yourself with some of the allegations made. She just testified before congress about some of them so here’s a link if you want to watch.
One particularly upsetting assertion is that Meta would notify advertisers when young girls deleted a selfie to tell them that now might be a good time to sell those girls beauty products.
“It could identify when [young girls] were feeling worthless or helpless or like a failure, and would take that information and share it with advertisers,” she said.
It’s fascinating having a Kiwi who was at the level she was within Meta give an insiders look at the company and some of her claims are truly blood curdling.
Needless to say, Meta vehemently denies all allegations.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co. Look after yourselves this weekend and we’ll see you Monday.