💌 The Modern Price of Love
FTX's comeback, Future of Trash & Twitter Fire Sale
So, what happened this week in the Tech & Startup world? 🌍
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The Grapevine Newsflash 🔥
7 tech & startup stories in 111 super short seconds.
🥊 FTX Comeback? The new CEO of the disgraced exchange has said he’s considering reviving the company as part of the process to return money to its customers and creditors. In contrasting news Genesis, one of the largest crypto lenders, is expected to file for bankruptcy this week. This could signal another domino falling.
🔨 TweetSale In an effort to better balance the books, Twitter has been auctioning off items from their San Francisco office. If this isn’t a sign of the times, we don’t know what is. The sale included everything from espresso machines to statues of the logo (which sold for $100k). Observers clocked that most things were above retail price… The Musk effect!
🙌 It Pays To Be Nice Discord, the instant messaging platform, has acquired ‘Gas’ - a fast emerging social app that allowed teenagers to send compliments to one another. Nikita Bier, Gas’ founder, is becoming a prevalent serial entrepreneur having sold his last company ‘Tbh’ to Facebook. Tbh was pretty much the same as Gas. Who said it can’t be done twice?!
✂️ No One is Immune One week you’re gold, the next you’re laying off 10,000 people. Microsoft announced a cut of <5% of their workforce this week. It’s not surprising but comes at a time where the narrative of the tech giant has switched to one of positivity - led by their engagement with OpenAI.
💌 Pricing Love Match Group is testing new subscription tiers across its dating app portfolio. Hinge is testing a new tier around $50-60 whilst Tinder is testing a $500 per month version. Your guess is as good as ours as to what you can get for that much. Outrageous.
🚧 Destructive Elon At this point we could do a weekly newsletter on Elon Musk’s goings on. It wasn’t a great week for him - not only is he going to trial for his famous Tweet in 2018 saying he’d take Tesla public, but reports say that Twitter has been hit by a 40% revenue drop year-over-year. Tough luck.
🗑️ Absolute Trash The founder of Nest, the smart thermostat, has a new startup - Mill Industries. Their first product? A smart bin that transforms food scraps into chicken feed. More of this kind of stuff please.
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Nick & Louis
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