Musk's Twitter purchase plan calls for new CEO, monetization strategies, job cuts

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall and Haje Jan Kamps Friday, April 29, 2022

Friday, more like Fri-yay! It's April 29, 2022, we're here with the latest headlines, but honestly our brains are mostly focused on all the hardcore fun we're going to have this weekend. Like doing laundry, napping, playing with our pets, reading a book for a while and sleeping in. I know, we're old and boring, deal with it. — Christine and Haje Image Credits: NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3 Selling Tesla, getting a pretty tweet deal: Everyone's favorite social media-acquiring billionaire is selling $4 billion worth of Tesla stock and supposedly has a new Twitter CEO lined up. He also shared that he has the beginnings of a plan for how to monetize tweets. Wait, companies have to make money? Robinhood's stock price is going off a cliff as competition gets stiff and its business model is more and more skew-whiff. Home is where the benefits are: Airbnb employees received a fun surprise this week when the company told employees it was instituting a "live anywhere, work anywhere" philosophy. Want to work in the office? You got it. Want to keep working from home? No problem. Want to move to a foreign country and work from there? Yes, but only up to 90 days every year. We guess even they had to draw a line somewhere.

Startups and VC Civilian drone manufacturer DJI and the Ukrainian and Russian governments continue their spat. Most recently, DJI suspends sales in Ukraine and Russia in an apparent attempt to appear more neutral. We were particularly enthralled this morning by Jim Motavalli's feature article about bidirectional charging. In other words: If the power goes out, what does it take to power your house from your car's batteries? Johnny’s in the basement, mixin’ up the medicine, I'm on the pavement, reading news with wonderment: They grow up so fast: That feeling when you really want to plow some cash into a startup, but they're just a little bit too young? Yeah, Techstars hates that too, and it debuts a new fund aimed at investing in earlier-stage companies. Do I look like I know what a JPEG is: Revise raises $3.5 million to give NFTs powers beyond just being a pretty picture. The Game of Phones: Vercom, who wants to be a competitor to the likes of Twilio and Sinch, acquires marketing automation MailerLite for $90 million.

Charged with billions in capital, meet the 9 startups developing tomorrow's batteries today In his first TechCrunch+ article, Senior Climate Writer Tim De Chant examined nine startups optimizing EV battery technology that have collectively raised just over $4 billion in the last 18 months. Improving tech like solid-state batteries, replacing specific chemical components and using hybrid chemistries are just a few of the techniques startups are deploying to unlock benefits like reducing weight while increasing range and safety. “But cars and trucks won't be the only thing touched by the battery revolution that'll occur over the next few years,” he writes. “Like many advances, better, lighter and longer-lasting batteries will drive changes in our lives that are both unexpected and welcome.” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: PlargueDoctor / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. We're going on a bit of a roller coaster ride in terms of good news versus not, so keep your hands and legs inside the newsletter, and you'll be good. Amazon's crown is slipping: In the kingdom of the public cloud, we note that Amazon is an "undisputed king," but Microsoft is poised to storm the castle. Amazon continues to hold court, controlling a third of the public cloud for years, but Microsoft has been quietly amassing a public cloud army that now accounts for 22%, up from 20% last year. And Amazon's earnings, not so good: Shares of the company were down to a two-year low on the news that the company reported a first-quarter loss attributed to "inflationary and supply chain pressures." Apple has a different earnings take: In today's fruit news, Apple reported some record-breaking services revenue figures that increased 17% from last year to reach $19.8 billion. There are a lot of reasons for the good quarter, including selling a lot of iPhones, computers and watches. Netflix made some layoffs: Some of Tudum's editorial staff found themselves laid off yesterday. Tudum, you might remember, is Netflix's in-house publication that only started five months ago. While Netflix said Tudum was not shutting down, it is moving forward without an editorial manager and at least seven others.

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Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Associate Director of Web and Digital Strategy at Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire, USA) Software Developer at GOVERNMENT BRANDS HOLDCO INC (Marblehead, MA, USA) Product Support Engineer at Veeva (Dublin, OH, USA) Azure Cloud Engineer at Medtelligent (Chicago, IL, USA) Programmer Analyst at Midway University (Midway, KY, USA) See more jobs on CrunchBoard Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

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In latest earnings release, Twitter admits to miscounting users for the second time

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall and Haje Jan Kamps Thursday, April 28, 2022

It's Thursday, April 28, 2022, and Haje's blood pressure is slowly returning to what passes for normal after raging about Social Security numbers for a few minutes. Look, it's hard to get used to the quirks and foibles of a new country, OK? Nobody tell him about how healthcare works in this country, please; we'd never hear the end of it. In other news, TechCrunch has a shiny new fintech newsletter launching on Sunday. Sign up today so you don't miss it this weekend! The third ep of our crypto and blockchain podcast, "Chain Reaction," is out today, so fill your ears with the dulcet tones of Lucas and Anita's calming voices. Friday tomorrow, woohoo! – Christine and Haje Image Credits: Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3 Twitter admits it overcounted accounts: Hey guess what? Twitter announced its first-quarter earnings today. And it didn't count right, revealing that it was reporting more users than it really had — by nearly 2 million — something Sarah points out is "a predicament that may have encouraged the company to more seriously consider its acceptance of Elon Musk's proposal to take the company private in a $44 billion deal." Meanwhile, Alex looked into what the acquisition could mean for Twitter’s advertising revenue. Death and taxes are indeed certain: It's not every day that we get to quote Ben Franklin in a story, but in this case, it's tied to technology making it easier for us to do things like pay our taxes. To that point, mobile tax-filing app Taxfix brought in a $220 million round to become a unicorn. Taxes are not always easy, so it's good to have someone who knows what to do. We like how CEO Martin Ott put it, "We've hacked the brain of a tax accountant into codes." There's a Google of Russia: Its name is Yandex, and it's selling its media division to, get this, a company called VKontakte, which is considered "the local Facebook equivalent." Not sure it gets better than that. This is news Natasha was following for a month now, and she reports the sale was fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in many companies reassessing their media assets.

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Startups and VC One of our favorite things about putting the Daily Crunch together is that we get to cheer on our colleagues and read their fantastic work. Today, it's a Kyle-o-rama. He wrote about how Synthesis AI raised $17 million to create synthetic data to improve computer vision and how payroll provider Symmetrical.ai raised $18.5 million to make employee payouts smoother. CommandBar landed $19 million to continue creating a search-and-browse plugin for web apps, and Deepset raised $14 million to help companies build natural-language processing apps. Kyle, your fingers must be exhausted — go treat yourself to a cup of coffee and a round of baseball or something. We love Christine's story of Lemon Perfect's investor journey with the queen bee: Two years after Lemon Perfect was spotted in Beyoncé’s limo, the superstar is now a backer. Also! We kicked off a series of pitch deck teardowns, and we are looking for startups that want to have their pitch decks reviewed. Get involved! More news than you can shake a cap table at: Shuffle off your mortal oil: BlocPower wants to evict fossil fuels one building at a time, replacing them with greener alternatives. Wuthering Writes: Just when you thought you had learned to ignore marketing copy, Movable Ink comes along with customized marketing content and a $55 million sack of cash to build a content-generating AI. If you want it done properly, you gotta do it your shelf: Oware is streamlining Pakistan’s supply chain, powered by a $3.3 million seed round. Without a car in the world: Post-pandemic, used car platforms are booming, and Spotawheel just raised €100 million. It is active in Poland and Greece and about to launch in Romania. More vrooms, less fumes: Dat Bike is the creator of Vietnam’s first domestic electric motorbike, and we are a little bit in love with the cafe-racer styling.

GV's Frederique Dame on product-market fit: 'You have one chance at a good experience' In a fireside chat at TechCrunch Early Stage, Frederique Dame, an investing partner at GV who previously led product and engineering teams at Uber, Yahoo and Smugmug, shared her thoughts about product-market fit. Dame addressed several issues, including the need to collect customer data as early as possible, strategies for iterating and testing without tapping engineering resources, and, notably, why founders should make themselves vulnerable when pitching investors: “Trust me with what you don't know or what's not working” she said, “because once we invest, we're going to have to work on this stuff anyway.” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: John Lamb / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Get your popcorn ready: We already talked about Google and Facebook in the Top 3, so let's start off this section with a little bit of Amazon. The company launched its movie rental service in India, with over 40 original and co-produced shows and movies that will enable customers to get early access to both Indian and foreign movies. Rounding up some earnings: Today's earnings are brought to you by the letter "T," which rhymes with "P," and that spells Peacock, which added 4 million paid subscribers. Meta’s metaverse is not doing so hot, but Facebook gained users. Ac(quisi)tion news: It looks like Microsoft will be adding another company to its family. Activision Blizzard shareholders voted to approve the sale. Meanwhile, Hackerone acquired PullRequest, a YC-backed company that will give the bug bounty company some code-review skills. Judge sides with Elon Musk: He is probably going to win with the Twitter deal, but he can definitely put a checkmark in the "win" category here. A Delaware judge ruled in his favor following a lawsuit brought by Tesla shareholders that accused Musk of coercing Tesla's board into buying SolarCity back in 2016. Oh Snap!: Our reporters were busy covering Snap today in assorted stories we will bullet below. We would like to highlight that it created a new gadget that will have you forgetting what a selfie stick is. Pixy, Snap's mini drone, is your camera when you don't have anyone else to hold your phone. Also: Snap offers Lens Cloud for developers New in-app AR shopping tools for retailers Snapchat adds new assistive devices for bitmoji avatars Snap and Live Nation come together on AR experiences at concerts, festivals Snapchat's new 'Director Mode' will have you becoming a video creator in no time

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Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Product Support Engineer at Veeva (Dublin, OH, USA) Azure Cloud Engineer at Medtelligent (Chicago, IL, USA) Programmer Analyst at Midway University (Midway, KY, USA) Tech Infrastructure Architect / DevOps at Opolis (Denver, CO, USA) Senior Web Developer, Department of Advancement (R0004541) at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC, USA) See more jobs on CrunchBoard Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

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US dangles reward up to $10M for info on 6 elite Russian military hackers

TechCrunch Newsletter

By Christine Hall and Haje Jan Kamps Wednesday, April 27, 2022

It's April 27, 2022, and here's a thing we didn't see coming: May. What the hell happened to this month, this year? As the summer equinox draws closer, the weather warms up and the days get longer, we long drinks with tiny rainbow umbrellas in them. If you're reading this in the Southern Hemisphere: Sorry for our summery optimism. Please enjoy some hot chocolate and fuzzy socks as we take a dip in the pool. – Christine and Haje Image Credits: Lukas Kabon/Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

The TechCrunch Top 3 Gov wants to make the worm squirm: In what reads like a plot Jack Bauer would be proud of, the U.S. government has stepped up its hunt for six Russian intelligence officers, best known as the state-backed hacking group dubbed "Sandworm." It's offering a $10 million bounty for information that identifies or locates its members. If you've got 1337 doxxing skillz, here's your chance to actually do some good. Go on. Удачи. Nervous as a service: After a lengthy period of experimentation, investors have decided that consumer fintech trading businesses are not SaaS companies. Alex explains why that matters: In a nutshell, those fintech revenues should not be valued as if they were annual recurring revenue (ARR), the main product of software-as-a-service concerns. OK, fine, we'll let you open the phone you bought and own: Apple, which historically has taken a "keep your filthy mitts off our precious products" approach, is starting self-service repair for the most common iPhone fixes: battery replacements, screen restorations, and the like. The right-to-repair hackers that live somewhere deep within us are mighty pleased.

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Startups and VC It's fundraising season for venture funds, apparently! MassMutual Ventures closed a $300 million fund to back Asian and European startups. Lightspeed India Partners announced a half-billion-dollar fund. Crypto-focused Dragonfly Capital officially announced its third fund, weighing in at $650 million. A little less aspiration, a little more traction, please: Show me the money: In a world where $90 million can go missing for a few weeks because of a bug, Streamlined raised $4 million to take on B2B payments. Muéstrame el dinero: Minka raised $24 million to facilitate faster payment services across Latin America. A shine is a terrible thing to waste: One of the largest solar companies in Africa and Asia, Sun King, raised $260 million in Series D funding to deliver off-grid energy technologies to more people across the two continents. Dig deeper with oligochaeta for your data: Mozart data just orchestrated a $15 million round to help startups build a sensible data stack. He's a real straight scooter: Singapore’s Neuron raised a $43.5 million Series B round, bringing its total capital investment to $77.7 million, to deepen its micromobility presence in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, the U.K. and Canada. All around the watch-power: Home energy monitoring firm Sense just raised $105 million to fuel a spark of further growth. Cut my life into pieces, this is my last transport: Two of China’s biggest robotaxi rivals, Pony and WeRide, are joining forces to plow $135 million into Chinese ride-hailing service OnTime.

How to get into Y Combinator, according to YC's Dalton Caldwell In a conversation with Editor Greg Kumparak at TechCrunch Early Stage, YC managing director and group partner Dalton Caldwell spoke about the application process founders must navigate before they’re accepted to one of the world’s top accelerators. "The first thing I look at when I read an application is the team. What I'm looking for is technical excellence on the team," said Caldwell. “Our teams that rely on trying to hire outsourced engineers or consultants or whatever to build their product tend to move much slower than folks with a technical founder,” he added. “They tend to get ripped off.” (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Read More Image Credits: Third Eye Images / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc. Robinhood announced plans to lay off 9% of its staff just before the investing and trading service was poised to come out with its earnings. We'll have to see what happens Thursday — and whether that sheds light on the situation. In earnings talk, Spotify's stats told us what we already assumed: that the controversy around having a Joe Rogan podcast did little to sway subscriber numbers, which grew 15%. Yesterday, we prepared you for the General Motors earnings, and today, we are able to share that GM has some big ambitions and some serious cash to put behind it. Stay tuned for Ford. Meanwhile, Alphabet's earnings showed some mixed results — Google doing well, YouTube not so much, though the number of channels making $10,000 in revenue grew 40%. Not bad. Salesforce updated its low-code workflow tool, Salesforce Flow, which Ron described as "a bold attempt to pull together all of the pieces in the Salesforce arsenal in a more coherent fashion, using a popular tool that has been around since 2019 to do the job." Twitter news continues, from what happened at the company's all-hands meeting to Devin's opinion piece to how much Elon Musk and Twitter will have to pay each other should the deal fizzle. Follower counts on high-profile accounts fluctuated all over the place, with Twitter saying the undulations were mostly organic. Alex and Amanda came together to chat about all things Elon Musk and Twitter for the latest Equity podcast. We also have the skinny on Musk's attempt to end an SEC settlement regarding Tesla tweets. Here are some others we think you might like: PayPal is shuttering its San Francisco office: Was it to save on costs or save on taxes? We can't say at this time. Who's enforcing this thing anyway?: A leaked document shows that Facebook's ads document is not complying with European privacy laws. Speaking of Facebook, we have an update on what's going on with its parent company and some allegations of poor working conditions in Kenya. UiPath brings on new co-CEO: Former Google Cloud president of sales Rob Enslin will share CEO duties with Daniel Dines in an effort to steer the public company's future. Put an Oura ring on it: We've got the 411 on new CEO Tom Hale's vision for the future of the smart ring.

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Newest Jobs from Crunchboard Programmer Analyst at Midway University (Midway, KY, USA) Tech Infrastructure Architect / DevOps at Opolis (Denver, CO, USA) Senior Web Developer, Department of Advancement (R0004541) at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC, USA) Developer Advocate at DeepSource (San Francisco, CA, USA) Engineering Manager at Airplane (United States) See more jobs on CrunchBoard Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.

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