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Greetings, there’s a lot of news to get into today, and my head is spinning a little bit from that January 6th testimony today, so let’s get right into it. Oh, and londonbusinessblog.com+ is having an Independence Day sale! Save 50% on an annual subscription here. (More about londonbusinessblog.com+ here if you need it!) Now that you’ve said you have a subscription, skip to hi‘s story about your pitch deck in need of a surgery plan. † Christine
The londonbusinessblog.com Top 3
- Kid ‘n Play wouldn’t be amused: Airbnb has spoken and ends party houses with permanent bans, Ivan reports. This is something the company first started doing 2 years ago, and it seems to have worked – the company reports 44% fewer party complaints year over year.
- On target: Although the CEO of crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, denied that he was interested in buying Robinhood, Alex goes into why FTX would be interested at all.
- The headline speaks for itself† Mike hit a headline home run for a story about four European founders turned angel investors giving some of their venture capital competitors — many say they’ve never run a business before — a run for their money.
Startups and VC
We enjoyed Ingrid‘s story about Speechmatics, a company that raised $62 million for its speech-to-text artificial intelligence approach. One of the interesting things it does is remove some of the bias so that if you have an accent or speak a certain way, it will still be picked up and accurately translated.
Ecommerce is hot, hot, hot, but it can be daunting to browse through the 7,500 apps Shopify has to find the one that works best for your business. I wrote about Shop Circle, which came out of stealth mode today with $65 million. The company has searched and acquired all those apps so you don’t have to.
We know that electric vehicles are expensive, so wouldn’t it be great to defer some of the monthly payment? Meet Tenet, which raised $18 million for its loan offer that could save an average of $200 off the bill, Harris writes.
Here’s the short, short version of other stories:
- Managing job boards: As the tech sector sees layoffs, Kylea reports that Gloat is raising $90 million to build better internal job boards.
- Rising tide and stuff: Sustainable Ocean Alliance, an early-stage ocean-focused startup incubator, received $18 million in new funding from sources, most notably Marc and Lynne Benioff, writes Devin.
- you have a friend in me: Finding friends is hard, and if Catherine points out that it gets even harder as you get older. That’s why it’s heartwarming to read about apps like Hank, who raised $7 million in seed money and connected older adults with something fun they love to do.
- Vice no more?: It wasn’t that long ago that venture capital firms were wary of the idea of investing in one of the “vices”, you know, like alcohol and cannabis. hi reports that JourneyOne has a new $10 million fund ready to be put to work in cannabis technology.
Use chronological scenario planning to help your startup through a potential recession
Image Credits: Andriy Onufriyenko (Opens in a new window) / Getty Images
People who burn wood to keep warm through the winter know how to calculate how many cords to chop and stack. However, creating a winter strategy for a startup is a less straightforward process.
In this environment, entrepreneurs need to build decision trees that can help them manage 36 months of runway, recommends Gaetano Crupi, partner at venture capital firm Prime Movers Lab.
A three-year outlook “is a more appropriate time horizon for gathering more information, so you can slow down even further (with cash turning over) if things are worse in 12 months, or speed up if things are better in 18 months.” be,” he advises.
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Big Tech Inc.
The start of our Big Tech news today is a handover of one of India’s largest telecom companies and the start of a new generation. manish reports that Akash Ambani took over the reins of Reliance Jio from his father, Mukesh Ambani, in what analysts saw as “a clear illustration of a leadership transition in one of Asia’s wealthiest families.”
carly writes that cybercrime operation RansomHouse (why do they sound like book publishers?) is probably behind the extortion of some data from the American chipmaker AMD. The company is investigating the incident.
Ron attended some of Google’s Sustainability Summit this week and shared a story about Google Cloud’s new sustainability platform to empower businesses with data to help them achieve their climate goals.
More for your viewing pleasure:
- Oh, yeah, we got problems, problems, problems: When you buy an electric vehicle, you want it to drive with the same reliability as your old combustion engine car, but if Jaclyn reports, a JD Power survey found that this was not the case.
- Bring the band back together: Spotify’s new Supergrouper in-app feature will create a kind of mixed tape for up to five of your favorite artists, Aisha writes.
- Convoy† Rebecca reported an open letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom from a group of autonomous truck developers urging the state to reconsider a previous ruling banning these types of vehicles in the state.
- Listen up: If you are looking for new earbuds, Brian gives an overview of the prototype of Nura.
- Developer’s delight† Frederic writes about Hasura’s new GraphQL data connector that allows “developers to bring virtually any data source into Hasura to present it as a GraphQL API.”
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