Daily Crunch: Peloton CEO to shareholders: ‘Turnarounds are hard work’

Christine Hall, Haje Jan Kamps / 6:40 PM EDT•May 10, 2022

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On the 10th of May, Apple officially retires the iPod after 20 years, and Christine and Haje are the last ones to use it.

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Peloton’s rough ride: For a bicycle that goes nowhere, Peloton missing its revenue estimates for the first quarter is putting the company on a downhill trajectory. We are now watching how CEO Barry McCarthy will lead his team to turn the red knob to the right, rise out of the saddle, and pedal Peloton into a course correction.
• IBM tips its hat: To Red Hat, of course. Ron gave us an inside look at how the company has been doing since joining IBM in 2018 — really good, as far as we can tell — with Red Hat giving IBM “some cloud credibility it had been missing” and one of the reasons IBM did so well in its first-quarter earnings.
• Bitcoin go bye-bye: Jacquelyn spoke to some crypto experts trying to make sense of Bitcoin’s value decrease, which at the time was down more than 50% from its November 2021 peak. It seems like a complicated mess with a lot of acronyms flying around. So much so that even investors in China (remember it banned cryptocurrency) that found a way to still buy and sell tokens are keeping a watchful eye.

Startups and VC

This news cycle on Ye Olde TechCrunch is a hardware feast, as evidenced by the launch of the entry-level quadcopter by DJI at under $700. Remarkable raised a round of funding for its e-paper notepad, and the team behind IkeaBot raised $4 million to further develop its controller.

We loved this piece about Bonobos founder Andy Dunn and his work in destigmatizing mental health challenges.

Moar newz.

BNPL in 2022: 4 fintech investors discuss regulation, trends and how to stand out

LdF opens in a new window.

Slower wage growth and rising inflation have encouraged shoppers to defer payments on everything from groceries to durable goods.

Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna own 75% of the sector in the U.S., which leaves little room for startups. If their products and services are clearly differentiated, they can have an easier time.

Four investors were interviewed to learn more about the industry.

• Frances Schwiep, partner, Two Sigma Ventures
• Melissa Guzy, co-founder and managing partner, Arbor Ventures
• Jonathan Whittle, co-founder and partner, Quona Capital
• Jason Brown, partner, Victory Park Capital

They talked about how to manage fraud and default risk, as well as what kinds of investment opportunities they are looking for.

Techcrunch+ helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.

BNPL in 2022: 4 fintech investors discuss regulation, trends and how to stand out

Big Tech Inc.

It looks like the EU internal market commissioner had a good day yesterday, meeting Musk and getting his approval on the EU's Digital Services Act, which is intended to provide more governance rules. The U.K. is moving forward with a data reform bill.

There are some other Tuesday tidbits.

• Nintendo shared a new milestone today — over 100 million annual playing users. That’s a lot of Super Mario Bros. going at the same time. Oh wait, we are behind the times; perhaps it’s better to say Splatoon.
• The U.S. and some of its allies have decided to formally blame Russia for the Viasat cyberattack that took place in February.
• Salesforce acquired Troops.ai, which will become part of Slack and build a bunch of Slack bots for sales teams to more easily retrieve and update data.
• The parent company of Tinder, Match and OkCupid sued Google, alleging the company was trying to maintain a monopoly in the way people pay via the Google Play app marketplace. We think language from the lawsuit says it all: “Ten years ago, Match Group was Google’s partner. We are now its hostage.”
• While Google is dealing with that, it is also joining with Microsoft, Yahoo and others to provide support behind a proposed New York bill banning the use of controversial search warrants. If passed, New York would be the first state to ban what Zack reported was “so-called geofence warrants and keyword search warrants, which rely on demanding tech companies turn over data about users who were near the scene of a crime or searched for particular keywords at a specific point in time.”

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