GM Grapeviners,
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
10 tech & startup stories in 130 super short seconds.
🏦 World’s Largest Exchange Goes Bust All of the news this week has been about FTX - the infamous crypto exchange led by “SBF” who was described as the ‘Warren Buffet of Crypto’. In a shock to everyone, FTX looks likely to go bust. This is set to be a defining moment for crypto… and SBF’s wealth. Read the story here.
😞 Stripe Layoffs. The payments giant has announced its laying off 14% of its workforce. Why? Patrick Collision published a memo explaining why, and the reasons are all too familiar…over hiring during a growth period, inflation, uncertain economic conditions. Check out his memo here. Facebook followed suit this week too.
🦹 AI Thief Open-source programmers on GitHub have filed a class action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI, for copyright infringement. GitHub’s Copilot was launched earlier this year to suggest code in real time. It was trained upon millions of public repositories. This is a pivotal moment for AI.
🏠 WhatsApp Launches Communities! WhatsApp is launching a group chat feature for organisations, schools, groups, clubs and communities. These ‘communities’ will have a whole bunch of features including announcements, admin controls, sub groups and 32 person video calls.
📰 How Do Americans Get News? Good question! The Pew Research Centre has an awesome one page report here with all the answers. In short, WhatsApp, Twitch, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Youtube, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter are all trending down. Any guesses on who is stealing their traffic? Take a peak at these graphs here.
🤔 Coinbase’s CPO Steps Down! Surojit Chatterjee has stepped down from his role leading product at Coinbase. Say what you want about Coinbase, but Surojit led the org through a fundamental shift towards B2B, Non-Custodial and web3. Read his statement here.
👛 WalletConnect Raises $12.5m. The decentralised web3 startup has raised some cash to further develop its tech to help users connect their non-custodial wallets to Dapps (e.g. OpenSea, Uniswap). Check out the story here.
🎨 Instagrams & NFTs! Meta has announced a brand new feature to make it easy for creators to mint and sell NFTs straight on Instagram. So, who loses here? Nobody! This is a great thing for boosting adoption in the space. Read the full story here.
🐦 Elon’s Twitter Musk has been in control of Twitter for just a few weeks now.. in that time he’s sacked thousands of employees, removed remote work, went to war on parody accounts, and is saying the company could go public. Never boring with him. Watch this summary video of his time at Twitter here.
🤯 Ready Player Die The founder of Oculus, the Facebook-owned VR company, is designing a headset that could kill you if you die in its game. This is truly dystopian. Take a read here.
🎉 Grapevine’s Rec: The Fintech Update 🎉
The only way to keep up with Fintech
Nowadays, every company is (or will be) a Fintech. The space is moving so quickly. We do our best to keep you in the loop but every week we have to decide to omit things. But, there’s an alternative.
Our friends at The Fintech Update was founded in 2016 by a small team of experienced financial services professionals with the mission of delivering the top Fintech news and trend analyses directly to readers’ inboxes.
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Over & Out,
Nick & Louis