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Friday was more like Fri. We're here with the latest headlines, but our brains are mostly focused on the hardcore fun we're going to have this weekend. Like doing laundry, napping, playing with our pets, reading a book and sleeping in. Christine and Haje are old and boring.
The TechCrunch Top 3
Selling Tesla, getting a pretty tweet deal: Everyone’s favorite social media-acquiring billionaire is selling $4 billion worth of Tesla stock and supposedly has a new Twitter CEO lined up. He also shared that he has the beginnings of a plan for how to monetize tweets.
Wait, companies have to make money? Robinhood’s stock price is going off a cliff as competition gets stiff and its business model is more and more skew-whiff.
Home is where the benefits are: Airbnb employees received a fun surprise this week when the company told employees it was instituting a “live anywhere, work anywhere” philosophy. Want to work in the office? You got it. Want to keep working from home? No problem. Want to move to a foreign country and work from there? Yes, but only up to 90 days every year. We guess even they had to draw a line somewhere.
Startups and VC
The Ukrainian and Russian governments have been at odds with the manufacturer of drones. In an apparent attempt to appear more neutral, DJI has recently suspended sales in Russia and Ukraine.
Jim's feature article about bidirectional charging caught our attention this morning. If the power goes out, what does it take to power your house from your car's batteries?
Johnny is in the basement and I am on the pavement.
They grow up so fast: That feeling when you really want to plow some cash into a startup, but they’re just a little bit too young? Yeah, Techstars hates that too, and it debuts a new fund aimed at investing in earlier-stage companies.
Do I look like I know what a JPEG is: Revise raises $3.5 million to give NFTs powers beyond just being a pretty picture.
The Game of Phones: Vercom, who wants to be a competitor to the likes of Twilio and Sinch, acquires marketing automation MailerLite for $90 million.
Charged with billions in capital, meet the 9 startups developing tomorrow’s batteries today
In his first article, Senior Climate Writer Tim De Chant looked at nine EV battery companies that have collectively raised over $4 billion in the last 18 months.
Improving tech like solid-state batteries, replacing specific chemical components and using hybrid chemistries are just a few of the techniques startups are using to unlock benefits.
He writes that cars and trucks won't be the only thing touched by the battery revolution.
Better, lighter and longer- lasting batteries will drive changes in our lives that are both welcome and unexpected.
Charged with billions in capital, meet the 9 startups developing tomorrow’s batteries today
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Big Tech Inc.
We're going on a roller coaster ride of good news versus bad news, so keep your hands and legs inside the newsletter, and you'll be good.
Amazon’s crown is slipping: In the kingdom of the public cloud, we note that Amazon is an “undisputed king,” but Microsoft is poised to storm the castle. Amazon continues to hold court, controlling a third of the public cloud for years, but Microsoft has been quietly amassing a public cloud army that now accounts for 22%, up from 20% last year.
And Amazon’s earnings, not so good: Shares of the company were down to a two-year low on the news that the company reported a first-quarter loss attributed to “inflationary and supply chain pressures.”
Apple has a different earnings take: In today’s fruit news, Apple reported some record-breaking services revenue figures that increased 17% from last year to reach $19.8 billion. There are a lot of reasons for the good quarter, including selling a lot of iPhones, computers and watches.
Netflix made some layoffs: Some of Tudum’s editorial staff found themselves laid off yesterday. Tudum, you might remember, is Netflix’s in-house publication that only started five months ago. While Netflix said Tudum was not shutting down, it is moving forward without an editorial manager and at least seven others.
On Friday afternoon, former Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey turned to the platform that he co-created to speak about its future, days after the company was bought for $44 billion by Elon Musk. ...Hey everyone, and welcome back to Chain Reaction In our Chain Reaction podcast this week, Anita and I chatted with Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire on why gamers are skeptical of NFTs and wher...Emergence Capital’s Lotti Siniscalco breaks down how startup founders can create a killer pitch deck.
“Trust me with what you don’t know or what’s not working,” says GV investing partner Freerique Dame, “because once we invest, we’re going to have to work on this stuff anyway.R...DoorDash announced today that it’s expanding its gas rewards program for delivery people on its platform. The program enables delivery people using their DasherDirect card to receive 10% cash...Update: Delayed again due to weather, right after I hit publish. Come back on May 1! We don't usually give mother nature quite so much power over launch timing, but for our first helicopter cat...Airbnb today announced that it will soon no longer offer refunds for COVID-19-related circumstances, including cases where a guest or host becomes sick with COVID-19 — reflecting an update to...Less than a year ago, Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei, intending to perform research in the public interest on making AI more reliable and explainable. Its $124 m...Amazon stock plunged to a two-year low as shares slid as much as 12% on Friday morning after the company reported its first-quarter results yesterday. The company reported a loss of $3.84 billion, ...As you might’ve heard, it’s getting a little crowded in space, between thousand-satellite constellations à la SpaceX’s Starlink and the millions of pieces of space junk accumulated from decades of ...Today’s batteries are better in every respect than those made five years ago, but they still leave much to be desired. What’s needed are some breakthroughs.
When the CEO of FedEx, the global leader in logistics, promises “an enormous effort towards autonomous trucks” this summer, wisdom — conventional or otherwise — says listen up, things are about to ...Recycling is an essential — if not particularly glamorous — part of fighting climate change. It’s no secret that the world has a serious trash problem. The U.S. alone generates 292.4 mi...Roku’s first quarter of 2022 shows signs of slowdown, particularly with a slowing of total net revenue and subscriber growth, which was below what analysts estimated. There was a significant ...Elon Musk has lined up a new CEO for Twitter and told banks that agreed to help fund his $44 billion acquisition offer about his plans to monetize tweets, according to a new report from Reuters. A ...It’s not exactly shocking news at this point that the cloud infrastructure market had another standout quarter. After the big three vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — report...As it turns out, not charging for what was once a paid service is a great way to accrete customers, but it’s also an at-times tricky way of making money.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This was a live week! Which meant that Mary Ann Azevedo was ...
