💰 Competition Is For Losers
Dogecoin goes to the moon, Signal shows up Facebook, & Clubhouse funds 50 original shows
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
11 tech & startup stories in 126 super-duper short seconds.
💰 Competition Is For Losers! Heard of Peter Thiel? He co-founded Paypal, Palantir and was the first outside investor in Facebook. Watch this amazing talk he gave back in 2014 about why startups should do everything they can to avoid competition and become a monopoly. Full talk here.
💼 Microsoft Teams announced 145m daily active users. Pretty impressive considering Slack’s head start… does this prove distribution always wins? Read more here.
🙁 Europe Falls Behind on Innovation. Every year since 2005, the Boston Consulting Group has released a report and analysis of the world's 50 most innovative companies. Don’t want to read the 28 page report? Check out this short analysis here.
🚴 A Bad Week For Peloton! Peloton has recalled 125,000 of their treadmills after the tragic death of a 6-year-old child. Techcrunch also announced earlier in the week that a bug in one of Peletons APIs was exposing user data. Read more here.
🇨🇦 Wealthsimple raises $750m. Canadian fintech Wealthsimple has raised new funding at a $4bn valuation. Read more here.
💳 Behind Payments Visa connects 3.3bn cards, 46m merchants and 16,000 financial institutions worldwide. It’s a fascinating company that all of you have interacted with, but what makes it the ‘original protocol business’ and what is its future? Check out this amazing podcast that runs through it all here.
🎤 Clubhouse Originals? Audio based social media app Clubhouse is funding 50 pilot audio shows made by creators on its platform. Read more here. Equally, read more about how Twitter has been fighting back this week with Twitter Spaces here.
💽 Game-changing Chip IBM says it has developed a chip that can improve performance by 45% and use 75% less energy - a breakthrough that would enable us to 4x the battery life of our phones. We need this ASAP! Read more here.
📟 Sneaky Signal Signal, the privacy-first messaging platform, has exposed Facebook (yet again) for their ‘creepy’ data collection. Signal created Instagram ads that showed exactly what Facebook’s knew about you. Facebook swiftly shut them down. Another week, another war for Zuck.
🚫 Workplace Politics Project management software company Basecamp announced that ‘societal and political discussions’ would be banned from the work environment. This not only triggered a major backlash on social media, but also a third of their employees quit. Will this be an emerging workplace trend?
💎 Diamond Hands Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency started as a joke and named after a meme, is now worth more than Ford and BP. It has seen an incredible surge of more than 14,000% since the start of the year. This comes as Elon Musk, a proponent of Dogecoin, is expected to mention it on his guest appearance on 'Saturday Night Live’.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis