So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
11 tech & startup stories in 162 super-duper short seconds.
💸 Reddit Raises Funds. Reddit is raising $410m from Fidelity at a $10bn valuation. Reddit makes most of its revenue from ads, making $100m over the last quarter. Read the full story here.
📱Better NFT UX! Built For Mars has done a brilliant UX analysis of OpenSea, a platform that lets folks buy and sell NFTs! Check out his analysis here.
🦄 Unicorn Births Surge! Q2 2021 saw a 491% growth in new unicorns vs the same quarter last year. CB Insights wrote a pretty cool analysis on this growth, which you can find here.
🚴 10 Minute Delivery! If you’ve been outside in the past year you’ll have noticed a flurry of ‘on-demand grocery delivery’ services popping up. Dija, one of these startups, just got acquired by Gopuff, a US competitor, for an undisclosed value. You can read more about the acquisition here.
🚁 Amazon Winds Down UK Drone Delivery! Amazon is winding down its drone delivery project in the UK. This wired article here describes the chaos of the project and its dysfunctional management team.
🚀 3D Printed Rockets? Check out this awesome video of Relativity Space, a privately owned space company, 3D printing a rocket. The video talks through some of the complexities of 3D printing and why 3D printing rockets is so important. Watch the video here.
🍔 Heard of Dark Kitchens? Travis Kalanick, Uber’s old CEO & Founder, is expanding his dark kitchen company into Europe. Read more here. Dark Kitchens are kitchen-only restaurants with no waiters, no seating, and no branding that sell via Deliveroo / Uber Eats. What’s even more interesting is that a single kitchen could sell food from several restaurants and keep costs to a minimum.
↩️ U-Turn at OnlyFans The content subscription site which as more than 120m subscribers, announced last night that it will ban sexually explicit content from its platform starting in October. This is a drastic change as it had found a niche within this area. It comes after a BBC investigation found that the site allows moderators to give multiple warnings to accounts that post illegal content without shutting them down.
↔️ Movers & Shakers It’s been an interesting week when it comes to hiring in big tech. Google’s VP of Health is heading over to Cerner (a large health IT services company) & Snap hired a longtime Facebook excec to oversee their push into augmented-reality. Perhaps most interestingly, it came out that Apple tried to hire the former Google Search Chief - sign for the future?
🖱️ What’s On Your Feed? Facebook, after accusations of spreading right-wing content, release its first ever report on the content of people’s news feeds in the US…and boy are we happy they did. Take a look here for some of the highlights that include a ‘your reality’ word search & a debate on whether sugar goes in spaghetti.
🤖 MuskBot Elon Musk has announced that Tesla will build a robot that shares a human form, in order to perform repetitive tasks. Check it out here.
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Over & Out,
Nick, Louis, & David Hockney