It’s been a very news-heavy week (aren’t they all?), with many headlines and reports reflecting the ongoing layoffs happening across multiple sectors; more than 52,000 cuts announced this week alone.
Obviously for those affected, it is devastating. For those unaffected it can sow uncertainty and fear in their job security. For those who do feel stable, it’s not uncommon to feel helpless to the machinations around you—watching people you respect and care about go through something traumatic.
I wanted to share a few ways that you can support affected friends, colleagues and connections as they begin searches for a new role.
Advocate internally: If there’s an open role at your company that matches their skills, recommend them directly to the hiring manager. A warm intro with context about their work carries weight.
Be their prep team: Offer to review their resume with fresh eyes, serve as a reference if you’ve worked together, or run through mock interviews to help them practice.
Amplify their voice: If they’re open about their search on LinkedIn, reshare their posts. Your network isn’t their network, and visibility matters when everyone’s competing for the same roles.
Tap your circles: Ask friends, family, former colleagues, etc. if they know of openings. Sometimes the best opportunities come through unexpected connections.
Just show up: Check in. Listen without trying to fix everything. Be a distraction when they need a break from the stress. Sometimes the most helpful thing is reminding someone they’re valued beyond their job title.
Things are tough right now, and it’s easy to feel powerless. But we’re not. Looking out for each other—whether that’s making an introduction, lending an ear, or simply being present—matters more than we think.
-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development
Open Mic
Tips for Effective Communication During Busy Stretches
By Dillon Friday, Director of Client Services, Hypha HubSpot Development
Every January, agencies like Hypha experience the same rush: clients (and we, to be fair) return from holiday break ready to “hit the ground running” with Q1 initiatives. The pace picks up fast, and there’s no great way to slow it down.
During these stretches, effective communication makes a huge difference between staying on task and falling behind.
I’m not a perfect communicator, but I’ve gotten better over time—mostly by making mistakes and learning from them. It’s also helped that I grew up playing two sports that rely on communication amid action.
In soccer, there are no timeouts or long breaks to discuss strategy. Once you’re on the field, you have the attention span of your teammates for just a few seconds. You learn to give quick, direct commands and use gestures to signal plays. Ice hockey is similar—fast action, tight spaces, loud environments where communication had to be short, precise, and often nonverbal.
The lesson? Be concise, specific, and direct. And when you have time to listen, really focus on what your teammates are communicating back. The window to develop actionable strategies is short. You cannot waste it.
In today’s remote work environment, we’re communicating across multiple channels—email, internal communication software like Slack, project management software like Asana, video calls, etc.
My approach is to hit those channels strategically because you never know which one will resonate at the right moment. Send an email, then follow up with a Slack DM. Add context in your project management system and reiterate it in chat.
Also, remember that people’s attention spans are limited. If someone’s in back-to-back meetings with only 5–10 minutes in between, what can you say and how can you say it most efficiently?
This is where consistency matters: regardless of the communication channel, I try to be concise, specific, and direct.
Finally, use non-verbal signals in the digital space. Update your Slack status. Block calendar time when you’re unavailable. Set specific out-of-office messages.
When you consistently provide these signals across channels with clear messages, you build strong team communication—especially during those busy stretches when everyone’s working against tight deadlines.
It hasn’t been smooth sailing since the TikTok deal officially closed. App deletions are up 150%, and many are distrustful of the new algorithm (though the company claims they’ve yet to make changes). Whether this downswing will remain the norm or just a bump in the road is yet to be determined.
“Those concerns have already sparked accusations of censorship, while over the weekend, TikTok suffered significant stability issues, caused, TikTok says, by a power outage at a U.S. data center.
“But the instability, combined with the broader concern about the app’s separation from its Chinese owners, has spooked a lot of users, and prompted a sudden uptick in downloads of several alternatives, including: [UpScrolled, Skylight and Yope].”
AI has been citing YouTube more frequently than Reddit, so maybe it’s time to double down on your video strategy. YouTube has always been a great play, as it’s the second largest search engine (behind Google), and AI referrals are a nice second benefit.
“[A]ccording to Adweek, the landscape is shifting. Large language models (LLMs) are becoming more adept at parsing videos, and YouTube happens to have the most expansive library of thoroughly researched, intuitively structured long-form explainer videos. As a result, data from AI marketing platform Bluefish shows that 16% of LLM answers over the past six months contained information from YouTube, compared to just 10% for Reddit.”
Hypha Highlights
This piece breaks down how HubSpot’s CRM data architecture actually works: objects (tables), records (rows), properties (fields), and associations (relationships), and how they fit together. It addresses a common issue we see in real accounts, teams creating hundreds of custom properties when a smaller, more intentional set would do the job. The result is slower performance and a CRM that’s harder to use than it needs to be.
It also covers when adding properties is enough versus when a custom object is the better call, the technical limits you need to understand before building, and mistakes that are hard to undo later (like locking in permanent API names). It’s written for technical teams designing complex HubSpot architectures who want to get the structure right before they start building on top of it.
“With AI enabling 24/7 execution, marketing operations are constantly running. The 168-Hour Executive Framework is a roundtable conversation about strategically deploying all 168 hours available to your organization each week.”
AI in Action
News, updates and tools from the AI industry.
Busy week! Let’s check in:
Yahoo launched Yahoo Scout, a new AI-powered answer engine built on the company’s 30 years of search history, 500 million user profiles, and 18 trillion annual consumer events. According to Yahoo, Scout is powered by Anthropic’s Claude as its primary foundational model and leverages Microsoft Bing’s grounding API, rolling out across Yahoo’s properties including Mail, News, Finance, and Sports with features like instant shopping research, real-time financial analysis, and comment summaries.
Anthropic expanded Claude’s capabilities with interactive apps built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing users to work directly with tools like Slack, Figma, Canva, Asana, and monday.com inside the chatbot without switching tabs. According to The Verge, the update lets users actually engage with app interfaces rather than just receiving text responses, enabling tasks like customizing Canva decks, formatting Slack messages, building charts, and managing projects—all within Claude’s chat interface.
Speaking of Anthropic, OpenAI is planning a fourth-quarter IPO this year in what The Wall Street Journal describes as a race to beat Anthropic to public markets. OpenAI is holding informal talks with Wall Street banks and has hired new finance executives including a chief accounting officer and corporate business finance officer, with executives reportedly concerned about Anthropic beating them to an IPO after the Claude maker told financial partners it’s open to listing by year’s end.
Plus, Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest at least $50 billion in OpenAI as part of the AI company’s pursuit of more than $100 billion in funding that could value it at $830 billion. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is personally leading negotiations with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, making the potential partnership particularly notable given Amazon’s close ties to OpenAI competitor Anthropic. This investment comes amid an announcement that the company has cut 16,000 jobs.
Chinese tech giants are accelerating AI model releases, with ByteDance and Alibaba planning Lunar New Year launches in mid-February, according to reports. The moves are part of a broader push that includes Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5 and Baidu’s Ernie 5.0, according to CNBC, coming just over a year after DeepSeek disrupted global markets.
Google launched major AI updates to Chrome powered by Gemini 3, including a new side panel for multitasking, Nano Banana image editing, and Connected Apps integrations with Gmail, Calendar, YouTube, and other Google services. According to Google, the company is introducing “auto browse,” an agentic feature that handles multi-step tasks like researching hotel and flight costs, scheduling appointments, filling out forms, and even shopping by identifying items in photos and adding them to carts while applying discount codes. Chrome will also support Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a new open standard for agentic commerce.
“This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.
“Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.”
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Case Study: QuickBooks to HubSpot/Fishbowl Migration
A pharmaceutical manufacturer ran customer relationships inside QuickBooks Online for nearly a decade. Invoices and transaction history lived there, and a standalone CRM felt unnecessary—until growth exposed the cracks. With almost 4,000 customer accounts, sales had no shared communication history, deal context buried in notes, and reporting that required manual exports. They’d already selected Fishbowl ERP and needed to extract ten years of data and introduce a real CRM without disrupting operations.
We built a three-system setup. QuickBooks data moved into Fishbowl first, then customer and deal data were migrated into HubSpot Sales Hub Pro with proper company hierarchies and deal associations. We normalized 17,000+ records before import so everything came in clean. Fishbowl’s native HubSpot integration synced inventory and order data, giving sales visibility without switching systems.
The result: three months from kickoff to go-live, zero downtime, and a sales team with full customer history, pipeline reporting, and durable deal context.
If you’re running customer relationships inside accounting software and ready to move, Hypha handles the migrations others avoid.
