📉 Crypto Meltdown
China's Surveillance State, the iPhone's 15th Birthday, and A Metaverse Wallet
GM Grapeviners,
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
P.S. Don’t forget to support the humanitarian efforts in Ukraine here.
The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
12 tech & startup stories in 159 super short seconds.
📉 Crypto Meltdown Things aren’t going well. A quick round up: Bitcoin falls below $20k for the first time since 2020, crypto-lender BlockFi is rumoured to be in negotiations to sell for a measly $25m (a 99% reduction in valuation from it’s last funding round), an ‘cryptoqueen’ Ruja Ignatova is on the FBIs Top 10 Most Wanted list.
⚽ Ronaldo Saving the Day? Cristiano Ronaldo has signed an exclusive contract with Binance, a leading crypto exchange and NFT marketplace, to promote a series of NFT collections. There has been plenty of involvement from celebs in the NFT space, but this is perhaps the biggest we’ve seen. This is important as NFTs are far from reaching mass adoption. Read the full story here.
🤝 Entrepreneur First Raises Series C! Entrepreneurs First, the accelerator that helps people meet their co-founder a start startups has raised $158m at a $560m valuation. The backers include Patrick and John Collison, Tom Blomfield and Reid Hoffman. Read more here.
💸 Facebook’s Metaverse Wallet! TechCrunch has written a pretty interesting article on Facebook's plan to create a single wallet for the metaverse. If this works, it’ll ensure Facebook is heavily embedded in all metaverse transactions. This could be huge. Read the story here.
🎂 Happy Birthday, iPhone! On Wednesday, the iPhone turned 15 years old. Steve Jobs’ invention quite simply changed the world. See how it has changed us here.
🤔 There is no such thing as data. Benedict Evans has written an awesome article criticising the Economist's famous headline ‘Data is the new oil.’ We love Evans’ essays, but this one is particularly good. Take a read here.
💀 Fintech Funding is Dead? With all the headlines about layoffs in the fintech space, many have speculated that ‘fintech funding is dead’. It turns out that isn’t true, according to this snappy 9 minute podcast.
🥚Poaching Brilliant Talent. How do you poach brilliant talent in 2022? All in all we’re often surprised with how reluctant startups are to poach people in existing roles. If you’re interested in how to do this well, read this handy guide here.
😞 Zendesk Goes..Private? Having turned down a $17bn acquisition in February, the customers service SaaS scale-up has been acquired for $10bn by a bunch of private equity firms. The SaaS market has been a bit turbulent over the last three months, with enterprises looking to cut costs. Read the full story here.
👮♀️ Minority Report Sequel Social Scientists at the University of Chicago have developed an algorithm that says it can forecast city crime within a 90% accuracy rate. The academic paper showed that the response to crime is biased by neighbourhood socio-economic status. Read more here.
📸 Snoopy We’ve covered several times over the last few years China’s expanding surveillance state. Since Covid, the governments invasion of privacy has had a significant boost. Facial recognition, phone tracking, DNA & biometrics, as well as big data profiles are some of their primary methods. Learn more here.
💵 Small Business is Big Business. SumUp, a London payments fintech, has raised £507m at a £6.8bn valuation. SumUp sells payments solutions, like card readers, business accounts and invoicing solutions, to small businesses. Off the back of the fundraising, SumUp is hiring for 250+ roles. Read the full story here, or checkout their careers page here.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis