🤦 A Layoff Disaster
Bitcoin 'Founder' gets $54bn, Monzo raises $500m, & Congress gets lectured on Blockchain
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So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
11 tech & startup stories in 141 super short seconds.
💰 Monzo raises $500m at a $4.5bn valuation. The UK based fintech challenger bank has come back from the brink, having reduced its valuation to £1.25bn in May last year. How come the surge in valuation? Monzo has grown to 5m UK customers with an average deposit of £620. The bank has also recently launched a Buy Now Pay Later product. Read more here.
👨💻 Congress learns about Blockchain? Watch this 6 minute video of a blockchain expert explain all things crypto and web 3 to the US Congress. Video here.
⚖️ Legal Tech Growth. Pretty interesting article on ‘legal tech’, what it is and why it’s poised for hyper-growth. Read it here.
🤔 The Future of Tech. Benedict Evans has published a fantastic presentation on the future of technology, he discusses ‘web 3’, the metaverse, gaming, SaaS and music. You can view the presentation here.
🚲 DoorDash Joins the Race. The delivery company has launched an “ultra-fast” option which delivers within 15 minutes. It’s being trialled in New York and we’d expect it to go beyond that soon. As part of it, it will employ drivers full-time (rather than as gig workers). Welcome to the party DoorDash! In related news, the European Commission is taking steps to class gig economy workers as employees.
✍️ ‘Hitting the grown running’. The “Great Resignation” is underway, if you’re changing jobs we wrote a super short blog where we give five tips for people starting new jobs. Have a read here.
💰 $54bn to the Bitcoin ‘Founder’. A man who claims to be the founder of Bitcoin has won a court case which allows him to keep 1.1m Bitcoin (worth $54bn). Although disputed whether he really is the founder of Bitcoin, known as ‘Nakamoto’, him and a business partner worked to mine some of the first Bitcoin in existence. He’s given $100m to his late partner’s company for IP infringement but wow… what a win.
📈 $GRPVNE In 2020, 23 year old Alex Masmej tokenized himself. He sold $ALEX to people who would in return get a percentage of his income and be able to get special privileges. It represents the ‘financialisation of everything’. This article suggests a future where this is the norm.
🏆 Top Terms Google has announced the top 10 search terms in the UK for 2021. The leader? The European Championships. Other terms that made the list include the vaccine, Prince Philip, Matt Hancock, Emma Raducanu & Sean Lock.
🐦 Dorsey Logs Out Jack Dorsey has left his role as CEO of Twitter. He has made way for Parag Agrawal, previously CTO, to fill his place. Dorsey had been accused as distracted, not least by being CEO of Square. In his leaving email he took the chance to have a dig at Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. It’s also not the first time Dorsey has stepped down as CEO after he was pushed out in 2008, only to return in 2015. Will he return?
🤦 A Layoff Disaster? Better.com, a US based digital mortgage lender, was criticised last week after its CEO layed off 900 employees in a horrific zoom call which you can watch here. Do we think this is better or worse than Bird, the electric scooter company, laying off 400 employees through Zoom (listen here)?
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis