🥊 Shopify vs. Amazon
David Dobrik's new Startup, Square Buys $170m of Bitcoin & Football Arrives on the Blockchain
So, what’s happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍 Crypto continues to thrive, innovation returns to Twitter (finally) and Mark Carney joins Stripe.
Don’t forget to join us on Clubhouse today (@louissutton & @nickdaley) at 6pm UK where we’ll be talking about the all of the below in detail 🥳 (we’ve been given more invites so message us on LinkedIn if you want one!).
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
11 tech & startup stories in 184 super short seconds.
🎧 Spotify Stream On! At Spotify's yearly broadcast, it announced plans for a high-end subscription service with ‘CD-quality’ audio, alongside a whole host of new content and creator-focused features. You can watch Spotify's CEO introduce the event and talk about the company's strategy here. They also announced a ‘first of its kind’ audio advertising marketplace for podcasts.
🚀 Innovation Returns to Twitter The social network hasn’t changed much since its founding, apart from when it doubled the amount of characters allowed in a tweet in 2017. However in the last few weeks they’ve announced and tested new features for their 192m daily active users including an audio chat service (similar to Clubhouse), a platform for newsletters, and new options for followers to pay for exclusive content & launch their own communities.
🥊 Shopify vs Amazon. Shopify announced some press figures last week. Consumers spent $120bn through the platform and company revenues doubled for the third consecutive quarter. Benedict Evans has pulled together a brilliant analysis of this news here. Meanwhile, Amazon has acquired Selz, a direct competitor to Shopify. Read more here.
📸 $200m Photo App YouTube superstar, David Dobrik, has co-founded a new photo-sharing app called Dispo. People are desperately chasing invites to try the beta which aims to replicate the feeling of using a disposable camera. This week, they announced an $20m injection of funding at a $200m valuation. Is this the next Instagram or VSCO?
❄️ A Frosty Update From Palantir. Check out this video of Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, talk about his company on the side of a snowy mountain. He also addresses some interesting points about ‘software’ and its impact on society. Watch here.
💰 Square Buys $170m of Bitcoin. The news quickly follows Tesla, who bought $1.5bn of bitcoin earlier this month. Square’s $170m bitcoin portfolio represents about 5% of its cash on hand. Interested to find out more about Square’s business mode? Watch this brilliant video from CNBC here.
⚽ Messi Blockchain SoRare, a digital-asset network for football collectibles, has raised $50m from various tier 1 VCs as well as current and ex-footballers such as Rio Ferdinand & Antoine Griezmann. You can buy and sell players who have varying levels of uniqueness while they gains points from how they perform in real life. It’s a sign of growth for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Want to learn more about them? Read this guide.
🏦 Stripe’s Adult Supervision. Mark Carney, the former governor of the bank of England has joined the board of directors at Stripe. The payments giant is currently planning funding round at a $100bn valuation. Why were Stripe so keen to bring on Mr Carney? Find out here.
💰 WeWork Payoff Their former co-founder and CEO, Adam Neumann, is set to get an extra $50m payout as part of a settlement with Softbank. This is in addition to the bank buying around $500m of his WeWork stock and extending the $430m loan they made to him in 2019. Turns out it pays to create a company with a (currently) unsustainable business model.
💱 Exchange-ception Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, has filed to go public. Their S-1 showed us that they have 43m users, with around 2.8m of those using the platform each month. They have also grown to holding around $90bn in assets in 100+ countries, making a profit of $322m in 2020. It’s a big moment of validation for the crypto industry.
🔮 Behind the Scenes of VC Venture capital is a notoriously opaque business, even more so the decision process in which funds decide which companies to fund or not. Although every fund does it sightly differently, this Harvard Business Review article is the closest to figuring it out. The top factors considered? The founders, business model, market, industry and valuation (in that order).
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis