👊 Trouble at Google
GOAT raises at $3.7bn valuation, Buzzfeed is going public, & McAfee passes away
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
12 tech & startup stories in 174 super-duper short seconds.
💰 A16zs New Crypto Fund Prestigious VC firm Andreessen Horowtiz has announced a new $2.2bn crypto-focused fund, to find the crypto startups of tomorrow. Read more about the fund and the strategy behind it here.
🥇 Gold Rush If you needed more evidence that crypto was in the hype phase, then look at VC funding. Over $17bn has been poured into the space this year which is by almost equal to the total of the last few years combined. In related news, red flags are starting to appear in ‘DeFi’ with tokens dropping around 60%.
🎥 Heard of Secret Cinema? Check out this interesting analysis on which players may disrupt the cinema industry here.
⚽ Ikea’s Cool New Ad Last week, Cristiano Ronaldo wiped $2.8bn off of the value of Coca-Cola by swapping it out for a bottle of water in a pre-match press conference. Ikea responded quickly and launched an ad around the incident which you can see here. Genius.
🆕 Windows 11 Microsoft has announced its new version of Windows, equipped with a new start bar, a new layout and faster updates! Read more here. Microsoft also took a direct stab at Apple this week, saying ‘the world needs a more open platform’. Read more here.
💵 Open Banking Acquisition 2.0. Visa has announced its intention to acquire Tink, a European open banking platform, for $2bn. This move comes just a few months after Visa was forced to abandon its acquisition of Plaid due to competition laws. Read more here.
🐝 Buzzfeed will go public, finally Fifteen-year-old Buzzfeed is looking to go public via SPAC at a targeted valuation of $1.5bn. Their S-1 showed some interesting stats including a total of 38m monthly visitors and an average of 21.2 minutes spent on the site per user (about 3x what ‘Vox’ gets). Hear more about the move from the company's CEO here.
🤔 A Sexist Job Matching Algo? Read this interesting article about how LinkedIn discovered their job matching algorithm as bias and what they did to fix it. Essentially the algorithms were ranking candidates partly on the basis of how likely they were to apply for a position, ending up referring more men than women. Read the full story here.
❗ RIP McAfee The founder of anti-virus software ‘McAfee’, John McAfee, has been found dead in a Spanish prison shortly after the news that he was to be extradited to the US on tax evasion charges. After selling his security company for $7.6bn, he got up to a lot (most of it not exactly ‘good’). Check out the story of the last few years of his life here.
🤳 Gig Military Premise Data Corp. has been paying users around the world to complete basic tasks for small payments. This includes taking pictures, filling out surveys or counting ATMs. What those people don’t know is that the U.S. military and foreign governments are the ones asking for this data. Is this spying-on-demand? Is it the future of espionage?
👊 Trouble at Google A NY Times article has the tech world talking about Google. 15 current and former execs told the paper Google was suffering from ‘a paralyzing bureaucracy, a bias toward inaction and a fixation on public perception’. We think this is a bit of an over-reaction and, frankly, an inevitability as the company grows but take a look for yourself & let us know your thoughts!
🐐 You Goat This Sneaker marketplace ‘GOAT’ has doubled its valuation to $3.7bn in a new $195m raise. This is an indication of the growth of the streetwear and sneaker market. GOAT has some 30m members & 600,000 sellers while reaching $2bn in gross merchandise volume.
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Nick, Louis, & Carl Jr.