So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 150 super short seconds.
🥽 The Pope Enters The Metaverse! The Vatican has just announced plans to launch an NFT gallery accessible through VR of the Vatican’s art collection. To do this, the Vatican has formed a partnership with Sensorium, a startup that helps organisations enter the Metaverse. This is cool but feels quite forced, will people actually use this? Read more here.
🏠 AirBnb Goes Remote! The travel giant has announced its new policy to enable its employees to work wherever they want without differential salaries (a big deal). Why? This is a huge play to attract the top remote talent in the world. Read more here.
📉 Lending Stocks on Robinhood! The US broker has launched a new feature to allow users to lend out their stocks to earn passive income. This is called Securities Lending, and although it’s a pretty common practice in the industry it’s controversial as borrowers often want to short the stocks they borrow. Read more here.
⚡ Electricity! Check out this awesome podcast with Avical Garg, the Co-Founder of Electric Capital. What’s that? It’s a VC firm that’s just raised a $1bn fund to invest in crypto companies. Why are they interesting? Most of their employees are coders. Listen to the podcast here.
🛒 Another 10-minute delivery app?! Zepto, a 10-minute grocery delivery app based in India has raised $200m at a $900m valuation. Can this trend of mega funding rounds into these types of companies continue? We’re not sure. Read more here.
💎 OpenSea Acquires Gem! OpenSea, the Ebay for NFTs, has acquired Gem to boost it’s ‘pro’ offering. What’s Gem? It’s a product that lets users buy NFTs across multiple marketplaces with a single low cost transaction. This is a great acquisition! Read more about it here.
💰 Billionaires Unite Elon Musk has found 19 new investors who have committed $7.1bn for his purchase of Twitter. They include his friend and Oracle co-founder, Larry Ellison, as well as investor groups like Fidelity, and crypto exchange Binance. Perhaps most alarmingly, the Qatari sovereign wealth fund is investing… not exactly proponents of free speech.
🍏 Apple’s Next Act It has been 11 years since Steve Jobs passed away. Since then they have become a three trillion dollar company and launched several new products. However, they’ve also had to appear before Congress, had some high-profile issues, and arguably failed to find their next iPhone moment. This is all covered in a new book “After Steve” which you can learn more about here.
🫖 Gates Sit Down Bill Gates recently sat down with the BBC to give a comprehensive interview that we found fascinating. In it, he covers his relationship with Elon Musk, vaccination conspiracy theories, his divorce, and relationship with Epstein. Read about it all here.
📊 How is Felix? Since 2019, Felix Krause has been collecting metrics about his life, accumulating 383,539 data points. This includes location data, computer usage, fitness, sleep, health information and much more. It is absolutely incredible & you can check it out here.
🇺🇦 Supporting Ukraine 🇺🇦
We’re incredibly saddened at the current situation unfolding in Ukraine. We want to actively state that we stand by the people of Ukraine and are encouraging all our readers to donate via RedCross here.
£10 could provide a hygiene kit to a family of five, giving them supplies to stay healthy for a month
£20 could provide five blankets to families taking shelter
£33 could provide 40 chlorine tablets to ensure that families have access to clean, safe water
£72 could provide a thermometer to help treat those who have fallen ill
£210 could provide a fully equipped first aid kit, including supplies, to a first aider treating those wounded
If you also want to help in other ways (e.g. joining a protest, hosting Ukrainians or support the cyber defence) then check this link.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis & Polygon