We’re back, baby!

I’ll go into what spurred this latest break later (spoiler: that’s both a hint and a pun), but for now, let me say I’ve missed you all and doing the Support Human Roundup specifically. Thank you as always for hanging in there while I was away, and for sticking with me now.

I’ve decided to declare content (and to a lesser extent, upcoming events) bankruptcy for this first issue back, so I’m only including stuff I’ve had bookmarked or seen in the last week. Rest assured, I’ll be back to offering all the recs next week!

Quick housekeeping: When I decided to bring back the Roundup, I also decided to make it its own thing. So, going forward, there will be three editions of the Support Human newsletter: Bad Job Bingo (which will go out on Mondays), Features (which has no set schedule, but when they do go out, they’ll go out on Wednesdays), and this Roundup (which will go out on Fridays).

With these changes, I will no longer be sending out the Brief, as its readership was low and there just doesn’t seem to be a need for it anymore.

Everyone who is subscribed to the newsletter is subscribed to all three editions by default, but you can change that by logging into your Support Human account, going to Manage Profile, and unchecking the box next to anything you don’t want to receive in the Subscription preferences section.

Hannah Williams (founder of viral series Salary Transparent Street) announced a few weeks ago that she had sold STS to NowThis Media and joined their team as Supervising Producer (and it sounds as though the rest of the team joined NowThis as well). I’ve long considered STS a spiritual sibling to Bad Job Bingo, so I’m thrilled to hear it’s set up to last for the long run. Congrats to the STS team, and I wish you many more years of salary transparency!

In much sadder news, Brian Levine announced that the team at CX data analysis and reporting app Yetto was shutting down the app and the company. Yetto was deeply loved while it lived and will be deeply missed in its passing. RIP Yetto. <3

ElevenLabs announced that it had raised $500 million in a Series D round at an $11 billion dollar valuation. They said they are “using the funds to double down on ElevenAgents, which enables enterprises to deploy voice and chat agents with the reliability, integrations, testing, and monitoring required for large-scale customer operations.” Coooooooooooool. What could possibly go wrong.

The Archive of Our Own (a project of the Organization for Transformative Works) announced today that it had surpassed 10 million registered users this month (which, as their release points out, is roughly the population of the entire country of Portugal).

AO3 is, of course, one of the largest (if not the largest) fanfiction archives in the world. It’s relevant to this newsletter not only because yours truly is an avowed fangirl, but also because it’s a monument to a bygone internet era that’s completely free from enshittification: no algorithms, no AI, no marketing, no data-mining, no mobile apps, just a simple platform for finding and reading fanfiction that is entirely funded and managed by fannish volunteers. It also deals with some of the thorniest moderation dilemmas of our time, and has evolved a works-tagging system that outshines anything that has come before it in Tech.

Since its very inception, AO3 has been a canary in the coal mine for the state of the internet. Whatever laws and legal cases and technology that threaten the health and existence of AO3 will invariably threaten future freedoms of and on the World Wide Web. The fact that AO3 has stuck around long enough to accrue over 10 million registered users is a miracle wrestled into being by the enormous effort of impassioned coders, tag wranglers, legal scholars, and support and trust & safety professionals, all of whom volunteered themselves for a community they refused to see become a victim of censorship and capitalism. That’s a miracle that we should all celebrate.

Here’s to 10 million more.

I am ridiculously excited to be bringing back the best part of my week: celebrating CX folks’ careers and accomplishments!

Congrats to everyone, and kudos to their companies for recognizing and rewarding their talent.

Happy book birthday to Ines van Dijk, whose book The Customer Support QA Playbook: Quantifying Quality Made Simple was published January 21, 2026! There is a dearth of quality¹ books written by CX folks for CX folks about Support disciplines, so I’m psyched to see Ines step up to the plate to help our profession grow, especially for such an important practice as quality assurance.

Alice Hunsberger shared the publication of the book Introduction to Generative AI, Second Edition: Reliable, Responsible, and Real-World Applications, for which she wrote the foreword. Well done to authors Maggie Engler and Numa Dhamani and to you as well, Alice! (It looks like the book is currently on sale for 40% off, if you want to pick it up!)

Sarah Betts wrote about the role of systems thinkers in teams and how they’re just one part of a healthy organization.

Chrissy Sebald broke down why it’s important to be clear when you say you want to do QA.

Amir Satvat gives excellent advice to those with shiny new job offers: don’t lose your nerve when it comes to negotiating.

SignalFire released a report that “challenges multiple assumptions about where unicorn founders come from,” including that “global talent and immigrants play an outsized role in the U.S. unicorn ecosystem” and “product leaders and technical operators quietly dominate outcomes.” Gee, go figure.

Dragostina Marinova wonders why those Durex pills are so chewy, and hey, also points out why it’s really quite important that you stock products in their correct categories.

Terry Godier wrote a fascinating piece on podcasts and phantom fluency, and I can’t decide whether I agree (I really, really love podcasts). H/T to Daniel Knauss for getting my eyes on this one.

Anil Dash wrote about Wikipedia at 25 and clearly feels about it the way I feel about AO3.

Kate Mueller of The Not Boring Tech Writer podcast interviewed Kelton Noyes about how he made the leap from Support to full-time documentation.

Navigating CS Talent in the AI Age
February 9 at 6:15pm CST. Hosted by Women of Customer Success at Hotel Chocolat, Chicago, IL. Featuring Danielle Gupta, Maya Emme, Kim Malone Caruso, Lynn Pietryga and Tayo Alabi. Get tickets here.

Masterclass: Cracking the Code of Self-Service
February 18 at 11am PDT. Webinar hosted by ElevateCX, featuring Alison Groves, Ben Foden, and Sarah Hatter. Register here.

Contact Centre Strategies Summit
February 25-25 at the Old Mill Toronto Hotel, Toronto, ON. Get tickets here.

Community Led Growth MicroConf
March 13 at 8:30am EDT. Conference hosted by Tightknit in NYC, NY. Get tickets here.

Success Amplified: At The Top
March 25 at 1:30pm EDT. Executive forum hosted by Women of Customer Success in NYC, NY. Keynote by Cassie Young. Get tickets here.

Customer Experience Strategies Summit
May 12-13 at the Hilton Toronto Airport Hotel & Suites, Toronto, ON. Get tickets here.

TrustCon 2026
July 20-22 in San Francisco, CA. Call for proposals open now.