GM Grapeviners,
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
We’re most of the way through our 1 month challenge to grow The Grapevine by 1,000 subscribers. Thank you to everyone who has shared the newsletter with their friends, we’ve made 521 new subscribers so far. Wow.
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 109 super short seconds.
⚡ Bailing Out Bulb. This time last year it was announced that Bulb, the UK ‘challenger’ energy supplier was going bust and would be bailed out by the government. It’s now been revealed that this bail out will cost UK taxpayers about £6.5n. Read the full story here.
🦹♀️ No Bail Out. FTX might be the fraud of the year, but their team is roaming free. One fraudster that isn’t is Elizabeth Holmes. She’s been sentenced to 11 years in prison for her role leading Theranos. Need a recap on the story, check out this video here.
🏦 “I’ve Got a Text!” British police are reaching out to 70,000 people who have likely been victims of a banking scam. The fraudsters would pose as employees of major banks and warn individuals of suspicious activity before getting access to their accounts. As many as 200,000 people may have been victims.
🚗 AI Insta Pics. Jaguar cars has used DALL-E to create a whole set of images for their instagram. These images are incredibly sophisticated and show the power of DALL-E which uses 12 billion (with a B) parameters to transform words to pics. Check out their insta here.
📱 Riots in China. Workers at the world’s largest iPhone factory are protesting with riot police dressed in hazmat suits. A mixture of strict covid rules, strict quarantines, and failure to pay bonuses led to the protest. The videos are crazy.
🤔Web3 Is Over? We certainly don’t think so and neither do some of the smartest VCs in town. Have a quick read of this blog here that takes a long term view of web3.
🐒 The Bored Ape Marketplace? A community of people who own Bored Apes (a famous NFT collection) are starting their own NFT marketplace to let people buy and sell NFTs. This is a unique approach, so it’ll be interesting to see if it gets used! Read more here.
🏠 Challenger Bank Branches. While most UK banks are closing down branches, OneBanx is a UK fintech planning to open up ‘hundreds’ of branches, using Open Banking to ‘aggregate’ all banks into a single branch. This is pretty unique and they’re crowdfunding now, take a look here. Capital at risk etc.
😂 Ligma & Johnson! Remember the two pranksters that pretended to get fired from Twitter and tricked the majority of the main stream media? Elon Musk has ‘welcoming’ them back! Check out the tweet below, or read the full story here.
😮 Chamath & Lex. Last week Lex Friedman had Chamath Palihapitiya on his podcast and it was truly brilliant. They discussed Chamath’s childhood, philosophy’s on how to tackle life and the parallel between poker and business. This is well worth a watch and listen 👇
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis