AI + Debt destroys Getty Images, files for bankruptcy today 4 years after valued at $4.8 Billion in SPAC IPO: Public shareholders get $0. By most measures the business itself was fine: • ~$910M revenue run-rate
• 27% adjusted EBITDA margins
• 59% of revenue on annual subscriptions
• Editorial revenue up 9% last quarter It was the debt and AI churn on consumer side of business that sank it. At June 30: 
• $2.1B of debt
• ~$250M of annualized adjusted EBITDA (Q2 x 4)
• $51.6M of cash
• Negative $122.6M of free cash flow in Q2 That works out to about 8x leverage on revenue that was down 4% in constant currency. At 8x, the plan only works if everything goes right. Instead: • AI took the low end. Annual subscribers fell from 321K to 240K in a year, a 25% drop.
• Subscription revenue retention fell from 93.4% to 88.4%.
• The plan to fix the balance sheet was a $3.7B merger with Shutterstock. UK regulators required a sale of Shutterstock's editorial business. Getty walked away in July after spending more than $100M on the deal. Three months later Getty signed the restructuring. The Getty family and Koch are putting in up to $533M and will own 100% of the company. $270M of unsecured notes get retired, and secured lenders get lower rates and longer maturities. 8x leverage can work when revenue is growing 10%. Getty's revenue was shrinking and its retention was falling, and a 27% margin couldn't cover that gap. If you have venture debt or any other loan, track two numbers: debt as a multiple of real cash flow, and what that multiple becomes if AI takes your low end the way it took Getty's.

I remember when 200tps felt impossibly fast. This is going to be crazy.

Perhaps the threat was never a rogue AI agent trying to subvert humans—but humans using AI to hurt other humans.

pretty much every major ai company now has a personal agent product except google: meta → muse anthropic → duet openai → dots spacex → bots slowly but surely the competition is shifting from who has the smartest model to who owns the persistent relationship with the user. this will be even more the case going forward. you're seeing this because we likely reached peak intelligence required to power most of the worlds workflows probably earlier this year if not late last year.

Spent multiple hours now evaluating Railway alternatives to move my shit to. Conclusion is that Railway's product is uniquely good and nothing comes close to a drop in replacement 🙃 Minimum cost to replicate my setup today is 3x higher than I am paying them currently

>junior dev at a mid startup >wednesday morning >just want to push a minor bugfix to our php app today >open laptop, check slack >company group chat is an absolute warzone >CTO typing in all caps about php2shell >fucking php >whatever, server hasn't blown up yet, I just need to get my code in >open gitlab to merge the PR >forced emergency logout because of a critical gitlab security patch release >fucking gitlab >pipeline fails because of some weird regex compiler bug >spend 40 minutes fighting CI/CD >i can just use AI to help debug >fire up opencode >api keys nuked because they were breached >fucking opencode >i’ll just get fresh LLM api keys from our corp proxy, LiteLLM >it won’t connect? It’s down? >look up LiteLLM news: supply chain compromise >fucking litellm >cold sweat forming >slack alert: db connection error >check our database connection >we host on TiDB Cloud >they just announced a security breach, unauthorized access via stolen service account credentials, data copied >fucking tidb cloud >full panic attack incoming >figure fuck it, just ship the container to Railway and go home >open Railway dashboard >bright red banner: "Security Disclosure: Rotate all environment variables immediately. All builds paused." >fucking railway >try to open the app URL in browser to see if anything is even working ⁠>NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID⁠ >eMudhra intermediate certificates compromised >4 >instantly untrusted by every major browser >fucking emudhra >stare blankly at mac screen for 10min >random pop-up >restarting in 10min to fix a critical vulnerability >fucking macos >close laptop >leave office >never come back