• My sister and I moved to Las Vegas with only what we could fit in our car.
• When we moved into our Las Vegas apartment, we had no furniture, pots, silverware, or even a bed.
• We furnished our entire apartment for under $200. Here's how we did it.

When my sister, an aspiring dancer, asked me to move from North Carolina to Las Vegas with her, I didn't hesitate. "Hell yeah!" I said excitedly.

Then, reality set in.

It took exactly one afternoon for us to realize that moving companies and shipping fees would cost thousands of dollars — thousands that we didn't have.

Our best option was to leave our materials behind, except for what we could fit in our shared 2012 Toyota Camry, and embrace what Las Vegas had to offer.

We couldn't wait to begin.

Fast-forward a few months, and I'm sitting in our new apartment, which we've fully furnished for under $200 — a fraction of what it would have cost to haul everything from North Carolina. We even designed it with a cottagecore theme that I love.

There's no big secret to how we did it. We thrifted basically everything. However, I went a step further and waited for specials, scoured different locations for the best deals, and wasn't above dumpster diving.

How we used thrift store deals to stock up for cheap

Call it coincidence or divine intervention, but the Airbnb we temporarily rented until we could find a full-time apartment happened to be conveniently located close to a Las Vegas thrifting icon: the Opportunity Village Thrift Store.

We saw it on the first day we arrived in Vegas, and it became our first official stop after securing our apartment. It happened to be on a Monday, when the store had specially tagged items for $0.99.

We bought bundles of hangers, bed sheets, comforters, and pillows, all $0.99 each. We filled our entire kitchen with glasses, forks, knives, plates, pots, and pans, also $0.99 each. In the span of a few hours, we had a fully stocked kitchen for under $25.

My favorite bargain is a set of beautiful pots, adorned with strawberries. We cook in them nearly every single day.

Beyond the Opportunity Village Thrift Store, Goodwill also has a network of stores throughout Las Vegas. They have deals like 50% off specially tagged items every day of the week.

We combed through each Goodwill location, scouring for cheap furniture that could fit in our car. One of our treks rewarded us with a $5 TV stand and two $8 bar-side chairs. (We brought the TV with us from North Carolina.)

We found more deals on Facebook Marketplace

Unlike thrifting, which depends heavily on luck, I searched for exactly what I wanted on Facebook Marketplace and filtered by price and day posted.

Early on, I realized that filtering for day-of postings was the go-to strategy. Facebook Marketplace is all about being first. Sometimes, I messaged people an hour after they had posted, only for the item to be claimed.

Aside from the deals, an extra perk I discovered about Facebook Marketplace is that it led me to pockets of Vegas off the beaten path.

I found a $5 swivel office chair (essential to remote work) in one of the upscale Summerlin neighborhoods, which needed a gate code, which I got from the seller. She was a kind, elderly woman looking to downsize, and I never would have met her or glimpsed this part of Vegas, otherwise.

I also traveled up north to pick up a $10 foldable desk and spotted several must-try restaurants, like the famous Korean-Mexican fusion restaurant, KoMex. My sister and I checked them out later after we got settled.

We found our mattresses on Facebook Marketplace, too. We each paid roughly $25 for our used queen-sized mattresses, plus $10 for delivery, since we couldn't fit them in our car. While it was the most expensive secondhand item we bought, it was still a steal.

Some of my favorite finds are curbside gems

While the strawberry pots and bar stools are great, many of my favorite items were free. While exploring my new neighborhood, I quickly discovered the delights of dumpster-diving.

On my daily walks, I transform into a curbside-pirate, visiting the dumpsters in the nearby neighborhoods whenever I can.

One gem I found was a beautiful suede chair in perfect condition for my sister's desk.

I also discovered two mirrors — one with ornate wire art and a standing mirror with only a little paint damage.

Furnishing my new life in Vegas wasn't only an exercise in savvy budgeting; it taught me that building a new life takes patience and an open mind.

Just like it took time to find the right pieces for the right price, it also took time to discover my go-to coffee shop, find my favorite restaurants, and make new friends. But I wouldn't trade any of my second-hand items, or the stories that came with them.

• When my kids were young, I wanted to stay home with them and be there for their firsts.
• Now that they're older, I want to return to a full-time position.
• The gap in my résumé is an obstacle, and I also want flexible hours.

Before having my first child in 2020, I worked every weekend and many holidays as an award-winning television reporter. The combination of motherhood and the pandemic inspired me to stay home with my children instead of sending them to day care as infants. Fortunately, my husband's career took off at the same time, allowing us to have that option.

Now I have two kids — a 4-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter — and like many mothers, I've always struggled to find the right balance between spending quality time with my kids and wanting to excel in my profession.

I stayed home with my kids when they were young

Initially, I thought I'd return to work when my son was 1, but finding childcare was difficult. It was hard for me to focus on the job search without it, and shortly after starting the job search, I learned I was pregnant again. My pregnancy and a lack of suitable day care with open spots led me to continue staying home, working on occasional freelance projects.

I enjoyed spending the first two years of my son's life at home with him, nursing him around the clock and being there for his first words and steps. I wanted to give my daughter the same undivided attention. So, a few months after she was born, our son started day care. We figured he could learn how to socialize and make friends while also learning from people who've devoted their lives to early childhood education.

The years flew by. We bonded through nursing on demand, and I enjoyed witnessing her learn to walk and talk. I took her to storytime at the library and saw such joy in her eyes as she interacted with other children. By the time my daughter was 2, we decided to send her to day care as well. I knew she was ready — and frankly, I was ready to re-enter the workforce and take my career to the next level.

But finding an affordable day care with an open spot was like finding a needle in a haystack. I lucked out, and she started going to day care for about six hours a day. I've had to increase my freelance projects to pay for it, which has left me with little time to apply for jobs.

I'm enjoying the flexibility freelancing offers, but now that my kids are older, I desire higher pay, benefits, and dependable income. It's an unstable field, and it's hard to make the same amount of money freelancing as I did in my reporting career without working excessive hours, so I've started to casually look for full-time remote roles.

However, this time around, I'm prioritizing a better work-life balance. I want the flexibility to tend to my children when needed, whether they're sick, have a half-day at school, or are out for spring or winter breaks.

It's a competitive job market, and the gap in my résumé is an obstacle

With the numerous layoffs in the news industry, finding remote positions is extremely competitive, even for a veteran journalist like myself, who is bilingual, college-educated, and a Fulbright alum. Often, I'll see that positions on LinkedIn receive hundreds of applications within a day of being posted. Before quitting my previous reporting role, I don't think I fully comprehended how difficult it'd be to re-enter the workforce.

The gap in my résumé also feels daunting. Should I put stay-at-home mom on my résumé, or should I just list the freelance projects I've worked on? During the application process, I've struggled to explain the varied transferable skills and experience I've acquired since leaving my full-time position.

I've done everything from writing for national publications to self-publishing my second book. I blog about my travels and create content for Instagram. I delved into marketing by pitching and promoting my book and blog for two daytime television shows. I've also acquired management skills as chairperson of our family reunion board of directors and fundraised to host two 100-person weekend-long events. But how do I succinctly capture that and previous working experience in a résumé or during a phone interview?

I've wondered if stating I'm self-employed sends my résumé into the rejection pile. Finding full-time employment after taking a break to care for my children has been harder than I envisioned. But, I'm confident the right position will come along, one that utilizes my talents, piques my interest, and pays me at least the same salary I made before, while also allowing me to spend nights, weekends, and holidays with my children.

• Daliana Liu was a data scientist at Amazon and a startup before leaving to start her own business.
• She now works as a coach for data scientists looking to accelerate their careers and brand.
• Liu said she still gets cold DMs from recruiters at Meta and OpenAI because of her online presence.

This as-told-to-essay is based on a conversation with Daliana Liu, a data scientist and career coach. Business Insider has verified Liu's employment with documents. It's been edited for length and clarity.

After finishing my undergraduate math degree at a college in China, I moved to California to get my Master's in Statistics at the University of California, Irvine.

In January 2014, I started working at a startup, before being recruited by Amazon a little over a year later as a business intelligence engineer.

I started at Amazon in Seattle, working on an A/B testing platform for their retail website. I created various statistical analyses and reports and supported product managers.

I trained employees on how to use A/B testing to make better product decisions, eventually starting my own newsletter for Amazon employees to share experiment insights from across teams.

An internal Amazon newsletter was my first content creation

The newsletter was my initial content creation. I learned to create engaging titles and make my writing concise and interesting.

During that time, I began writing on Medium about technical data science. Once, I wrote a viral post about saving money by picking the right month to start renting an apartment. It was exciting to help people make better decisions using data.

I started posting to LinkedIn in 2019. I wanted to share the unfiltered truth about being a data scientist and getting a job at Amazon, after seeing misleading posts about the industry. A couple of my posts blew up, but the majority of my following was organic from posting regularly. I now have nearly 300,000 followers on LinkedIn.

I then started a public newsletter. I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur and thought having public channels would help me find investors in the future.

I moved up the ranks at Amazon and started a podcast

In December 2020, I moved to San Francisco to work for Amazon Web Services as a machine learning engineer. I got promoted to senior data scientist in 2021 and had to work with a lot of external customers.

I read books about communication and influencing stakeholders. I wanted learn good communication for my own leadership within the company, as well as our clients.

In 2021, I launched a podcast interviewing data scientists on their day-to-day work, how they tackle technical problems, and their career journeys.

One of the guests I interviewed invited me to a dinner with his CEO, who offered me a job to work as a data scientist for his startup, Predibase. I quit Amazon in June 2022 to work at the startup.

During the year I worked at Predibase, I continued to experiment with my podcast while also creating a career course for data scientists, teaching them essential communication and influencing skills.

Between 2021 and 2023, when I posted weekly episodes, my podcast had 50,000 subscribers across platforms. My startup job supported me in pursuing a side business, and I started making income from sponsorship and events through the podcast. I started getting sponsorship in March 2023.

I quit Big Tech to start my own business

As much as I loved working in tech, I always wanted to do something of my own. Once I got to the point I had business contracts in place for my podcast, a plan for my course, and some savings, I decided to quit my job and start my own business in September 2023.

Around the time I quit the startup, a VC firm tried to recruit me for a platform community growth role because they like my content and the podcast I built. I didn't take the job because I wanted to focus on my own business.

I now have a career accelerator course teaching data scientists communication skills, how to get promoted, and how to build their brands.

Being a thought leader opens job opportunties

While working for Amazon and the startup, I had recruiters from top companies like Apple and Netflix getting in touch. Even after leaving Big Tech, I still get messages from people at companies like OpenAI and Meta trying to recruit me.

They mention they like my experience in data science which they can see from my LinkedIn. They can also see my Medium blog and my podcast. I was able to get jobs through my podcast and recruiters often reference my content creation when they've reached out.

It's very important in this job market to be a builder, and a great way to demonstrate that is to publish blog posts or create a demo for recruiters to stand out.

I think Big Tech companies value my technical skills and industry thought leadership, which I post about on blogs and LinkedIn. Having a large following makes it easier for these recruiters to find and trust me.

Startups and VC funds seem to value both my technical skills and content creation skills, also that I've built a community.

By publishing my thoughts, I've opened myself up to data science roles, as well as developed transferable skills. If my path as a thought leader doesn't work out, I think it would be easy for me to find a job in data science, marketing, or a community role.

I'm not tempted to return to tech or startups. There's uncertainty as an entrepreneur, but I get to choose my clients and projects. I can take time off and travel. I'm not married or a parent yet, but when that time comes, I want the freedom to be fully present.

• Why does Instagram want to show you stuff it thinks you'll like instead of letting you pick for yourself?
• And why is Instagram focused on getting people to share photos and videos privately?
• The two ideas are connected, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri explains: Normal people simply aren't sharing as much in public as they used to.

Adam Mosseri's official title is head of Instagram, Meta's massive photo and video app. He also runs Threads, the Twitter clone the company launched two years ago.

Unofficially, he's become one of Meta's chief explainers, frequently jumping on social media to defend and proselytize on behalf of his employer.

So when I got a chance to interview Mosseri, I had a long list of questions about… lots of things: I wanted to know how Mosseri felt about the company's recent pivot to Trump-friendly policies, and how he looked at TikTok, and a million other things. I didn't have enough time to get to everything, but I got to a lot of it, and you can hear our whole conversation on my Channels podcast.

In the edited excerpt below, Mosseri and I go over some big-picture stuff that tells you a lot about the current state of social media: Like why Instagram, Facebook and every other social media platform rely on algorithms to show you stuff they thinks you like, instead of relying on users to program their own experience. And why the company is gung-ho on getting users to privately send each other photos and videos, instead of its initial focus — getting them to post stuff on a public feed.

And I also wanted to know about the backstory behind Threads — the text-based social network it launched just as Elon Musk was taking over Twitter. Mosseri was happy to talk about all of it.

Peter Kafka: In the first few years of social media feeds, users would see a list of everything that everyone they were following had posted, in chronological order. Now, the standard at every app is a curated, algorithmic feed. Why does everyone who runs a social media product think that's better?

Adam Mosseri: It's because it's the only way to grow these experiences.

The amount of content people post publicly in feeds is going down across the entire industry, because people are moving more and more sharing to stories — which you could argue is a different kind of feed — but even more into messaging, group chats, one-on-one chats.

On Instagram, there are way more photos and videos shared into DMs than into stories, and way more photos and videos are shared into stories than into the feed. So if the amount of content you have to rank is decreasing — how engaging the feed is is also just decreasing. It's just getting worse.

We show recommendations because you might follow 200 accounts and one in 10 of them posted. So we've [only] got 20 things [to show you]. And we can reorder those 20 things 20 factorial ways, but that's only so much upside.

Whereas if we look at the billion things posted in a given day and we find something you're interested in, there's more upside.

Instagram has been encouraging messaging. It's something you've been talking about for a while. It's something users were doing on their own, and now you guys are responding to it?

Oh yeah. It's a paradigm shift.

The thing you hear is that people are going to chats because they feel like that's safer or they can have more candor. But are regular people literally thinking about how their posts are gonna be received? Is there some other reason people are sharing more privately versus publicly?

The foundational reason is that there are more things that you would feel comfortable saying to somebody one-on-one than things you would feel comfortable sharing publicly.

This is a weirdly sad example, but you could think of sharing in-feed as standing on top of your roof, yelling something at a hundred people, and hoping that 20 people hear it. There's some things I would do that for. But the average thing — the amount of things I would say to you on a phone call, my wife on a phone call, my best friend on a phone call — there's a lot more of those things. I think that's the most important reason.

How does that shift affect the business of Meta?

It moves more and more of that friend content into private experiences. And then the question is, can you either make those private sharing experiences symbiotic with the ones that we monetize — like feed and stories? Or can you monetize those experiences directly?

For Instagram, the thing that has been amazing is that we have leaned into video in a way that actually grows messaging. When I worked on the Facebook app, we leaned a lot into video in 2014, 15, 16. We were very focused on trying to catch up with YouTube, and growing video grew the amount of time spent in the Facebook app — but it decreased everything else. It decreased messages, comments, likes, and revenue — because there's less ads per minute.

[But] with Reels on Instagram, because they're short and because they're entertaining… I'll see a standup comic doing a bit that I love and I'll send it to my brother, because I know he's going to enjoy it.

Or I'll see a piece on politics and I'll send it to you. Because I think you might be interested in it. And then you and I talk, maybe you look at your feed, maybe you engage with something else. Maybe you send that to somebody else.

So there is a private messaging part of the experience, [but] we've managed to build it in a way that's very symbiotic with the public context — like feed and stories and reels, which we monetize directly with ads.

We're going to show you engaging stuff, you're going engage in it, and we'll be able to monetize your eyeballs like we always have — and then you'll share it with other people.

It's a positive feedback loop. And it's important particularly for Instagram because we are about connecting with your friends over creative things. I mean, for some people, we might be a pure entertainment-based or public content-based app. But we want friend content to continue to be a core part of the experience for most users.

And this allows Instagram to stay social, but still grow as a business.

I wanted to ask you about the Threads origin story. I didn't realize that it was originally supposed to be a feature within Instagram.

We were talking about different ways to compete more directly with Twitter…

Why? I know that back around 2010, the two services were fiercely competitive. And then basically that competition stopped, because you guys just lapped Twitter over and over and you won. There were many more people who wanted to engage in a Facebook and Instagram-like experience than they did on Twitter.

So why bother going back to Twitter?

I think Twitter's a great app in a lot of ways. I use Twitter a lot, still. I think it's better for public conversations.

Even though it's not the biggest app, there's a lot of cultural relevance. There's a lot of really vibrant, amazing communities there — NBA Twitter, black Twitter there. There's these insular networks like VC Twitter and crypto Twitter.

And part of what we care about at Instagram is being a place where creatives do their thing.

And the initial thought was to bolt it onto Instagram?

Around that time we really accelerated our work on broadcast channels on WhatsApp and on Instagram and on Messenger — which by the way, are a big deal in a lot of the rest of the world, particularly popularized by Telegram. We looked at and had a bunch of designs for building something like Threads as a tab into Instagram. And we did consider and ended up building a separate app, and there were a lot of contentious debates.

What did you want to do? Where did you want what's now called Threads to live?

I was excited about channels. But Mark [Zuckerberg] made the point — and I agreed with him — that channels are not going to be a place where you keep up with tons and tons of culturally relevant people. They're going to be a place where you subscribe to the five or 10 you care about most.

I was more bullish on building something within Instagram. Mark's point was that a separate app will be harder — but if it was successful, it would be a more valuable thing to create in the world.

A lot of what Mark does is anchor us really high. And no matter how strong a year we have, the question is always — how can we do better?

It was late. I was in Italy for my anniversary with my wife, and [Mark's] like, "Well, if you were gonna do something bigger, what would you do?"

So I was riffing and I kind of pitched a version of Threads: We'll lean on Instagram's strength with creators. We'll use Instagram identity. You can bootstrap it with [Instragram's social] graph, but we'll focus on basic replies and threads. I called it Textagram as a joke. Which unfortunately stuck as a name for months before I managed to kill it.

And Mark's like, "Yeah, that's a good idea. We should do that." And I was like, "I don't think we should do that." And in the classic Mark move, he said, "OK. But if you don't do it, I'll have somebody else do it, and it'll be built on Instagram."

And I said, "OK. Sounds like I'm signed up." So he gets the credit.

• Food hall startup Wonder eliminated all delivery fees this week, the company said.
• Wonder operates its own delivery network as well as a growing list of food halls.
• Fees have long been a contentious issue among food delivery customers.

Food delivery customers often find a list of fees on their receipt when they order dinner in.

Wonder, the food hall startup helmed by entrepreneur Marc Lore, has a solution: Eliminate delivery fees altogether.

On Monday, Wonder eliminated its $1.99 fee on delivery orders, Courtney Lawrie, Wonder's senior vice president and general manager in charge of Wonder's restaurants and delivery experience, told Business Insider.

The company also waived its 12% service fee for orders placed through Wonder+, its $7.99-a-month subscription service.

Delivery fees have become common for many delivery services such as DoorDash and Uber. DoorDash, for example, says that its delivery fee covers "costs associated with getting your order directly to you."

The fees can also provoke frustration from customers when they see their delivery order's price rise as they select the delivery option.

"People are tired of paying fees across all of these marketplaces," Lawrie told BI.

Wonder operates its own food halls as well as its own delivery service, making it more vertically integrated than most of its competitors, which deliver food from an array of restaurants. The startup also acquired delivery service Grubhub earlier this year.

All that means that Wonder doesn't have to deal with middlemen when it needs to get food to customers' doorsteps, Lawrie said.

"We're uniquely positioned to be able to provide that savings to customers," Lawrie said.

Wonder has just under 50 food halls at the moment. Customers can have their food delivered, or, for a 5% discount, they can stop by one of the food halls to pick up their order themselves. Wonder's food halls serve dishes created by chefs including Bobby Flay and Marcus Samuelsson.

At Wonder's New York City locations, menu items range from a fried chicken sandwich with a side and a drink for around $12 to a 16-ounce ribeye for $37.

Its locations span city centers as well as more sparsely populated suburbs.

Wonder sees an opportunity to grow its business among suburban diners by giving them the range of choices in Wonder's food halls, Lawrie said. "They might not have access to the variety that we can provide," she said.

Many consumers are cutting back their spending, including on eating at restaurants, due to worries about a potential recession.

Even so, demand for food delivery — both restaurant orders and grocery hauls — remains steady, companies like DoorDash and Instacart have said in recent earnings reports.

Do you have a story to share about gig work? Contact this reporter at [email protected] or 808-854-4501.

• Tesla is now accepting Cybertruck trade-ins, showing owners a glimpse of its depreciation rate.
• Two owners shared their Cybertruck trade-in estimates, revealing a roughly 37% to 38% depreciation after a year.
• EV depreciation rates tend to be higher than other cars, but the Cybertruck's appears to outpace rivals like the Rivian R1T.

Tesla's Cybertruck launched with some asterisks.

Owners technically weren't allowed to resell the vehicle for a year — if they did, Tesla said it could sue for damages and blacklist the owner from buying future Teslas. Tesla also didn't offer Cybertruck trade-ins.

Now, more than a year and a half since the first Cybertrucks were delivered, the company is allowing owners to trade in the electric pickup for credit toward a new Tesla, offering a glimpse into its depreciation rate.

Two Cybertruck owners shared the estimated trade-in values that Tesla offered them after they requested a quote: one who owns the all-wheel drive model and the other who has a top-of-the-line Cyberbeast variant. Despite a difference in mileage of more than 10,000 miles, both vehicles showed a similar depreciation rate of around 37% to 38%.

The all-wheel-drive owner told BI he spent around $100,000 on the Cybertruck about a year ago, including add-ons. After driving 19,623 miles with the vehicle, his trade-in estimate came in at $63,100, a roughly 37% depreciation.

The Cyberbeast owner said he purchased the vehicle in September for around $118,000 plus tax, which took the total cost to roughly $127,000.

The owner received a trade-in estimate of $78,200, also representing around a 38% decrease in value in 8 months of ownership.

Tesla's trade-in estimates are just that — estimates. Tesla notes in the fine print under the estimate that the value is "based on current market conditions and vehicle details," and that the estimate could differ from the final offer. In other words, the final amount Tesla is willing to credit to the owner could end up being less. EV news website Electrek reported earlier on Tesla beginning to accept Cybertruck trade-ins.

Vehicles famously begin to depreciate as soon as owners drive them off the lot, but Tesla's trade-in estimates give a glimpse into how the company values used Cybertrucks at a time when some car dealers have shared struggles to sell used models.

The trade-in estimates shared with BI suggest the Cybertruck has a higher depreciation rate than the average vehicle. Kelly Blue Book estimates that new cars depreciate about 30% on average over the first 2 years and lose an added 8% to 12% each year after that.

But it's important to note that EVs tend to depreciate at a higher rate as used models have increasingly hit the market amid the EV buying slowdown in recent years. An iSeeCars study that analyzed over 800,000 5-year-old used cars sold from March 2024 to February 2025 found that EVs lost the most value, depreciating 58.8% in five years.

The study found that trucks and hybrids retain the most value, with trucks losing 40.4% of their value in a five-year period. Still, the rates that Cybertruck owners shared appear steeper than similar models like Rivian's all-electric 2023 R1T, which depreciated about 29% in the last two years, according to Kelly Blue Book.

Not all Tesla models depreciate at the same rate. While the iSeeCars study revealed that the Tesla Model S ranks among the top depreciating vehicles, with an average five-year depreciation rate of 65.2%, the Model 3 holds the lowest five-year depreciation rate among EVs at 55.9%.

While depreciation rates can vary based on several factors, including market conditions and mileage, the Cybertruck's decline in value comes amid wider pressures on the brand.

Amid political backlash over Tesla CEO Elon Musk's involvement in DOGE, Cybertruck owners have faced harassment and vandalism. Some owners have expressed interest in selling their vehicles, with one telling BI earlier this year that he returned his Cybertruck soon after purchasing it due to concerns about his kids getting bullied.

Despite Musk saying Tesla had over 1 million reservations prior to its release, a March recall filing revealed Tesla delivered fewer than 50,000 Cybertrucks. BI also earlier reported that the automaker has scaled back Cybertruck production in recent months, dropping targets for several Cybertruck lines.

Are you a Tesla employee? Contact the reporter from a non-work device and email at [email protected], or via the encrypted message app Signal at aalt.19.

After launching in the US and select other regions earlier this year, YouTube Premium Lite is now expanding to a few more countries – here’s the full list.