Oct 23, 2021

Mobile News - Week of October 18, 2021

Issue #156 — View online — Suggest a link

Mobile

The latest news and information about startups and innovations from the mobile world.

Happy Saturday!

2021 is becoming a blockbuster year for venture and startup investing with over $158.2B in funding in just this quarter. I enjoyed reading this CBInsights State of Venture report. Sequoia Capital China is the new #1 investor by the number and completed 96 deals in 90 days. That’s 1.5 deals per business day! With a total of 848 unicorns now on the planet, the industry is on fire!

Kari McMahon from Business Insider wrote a nice profile piece on Race Capital. =) Reflecting on what I have learned as an investor over these past 7 years:

As an investor, we are only as good as the next investment we make.
Our past glory can get us access, but does not mean you deserve to invest.
Investing in seed stage is about getting comfortable with feeling very uncomfortable and investing in things that you don’t understand. If you want to understand 100%, then better to focus on later stage investment
The future will be created by founders who are literally half your age. =) You better get used to it.
Investing is only a small part of the venture business. Portfolio management, portfolio support, taking care of partners, LPs and founders take discipline, love and care.
FOMO is our worst enemy.
Don’t take yourself too seriously. Otherwise you may either get a heart attack or become an asshole.

I still consider myself as a baby VC. What are your thoughts?

P.S. Race Capital portfolio companies are hiring! Check out our job board.

P.P.S. Catherine Shu from Techcrunch was able to join FoundersHK Demo day last week and wrote up a great summary on all of the companies.

Here are the top mobile news this week >

TikTok - Go after eCommerce
Facebook - Unfollow Everything Ban
Moya - South Africa’s WhatsApp competitor
Instacart - Workers urge customers to delete app
Brazil - Pix - New Mobile Payment App
OPPO - 440M MAU for ColorOS
LinkedIn - Bye bye China

TikTok owner ByteDance is building an international shopping platform, taking on Alibaba and Amazon

Apparently Tiktok is now building an ecommerce engine. The only surprise is how long it’s taken - though your Tiktok stream might not map as well to your buying preferences as your Instagram feed?

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South Africa’s WhatsApp competitor that doesn’t use data

South Africa has a new WhatsApp competitor whose data is subsidised by the mobile operators (this sounds like a headline from 2010),

Messaging app Moya has 3.5 million daily active users and 6.5 million monthly active users in South Africa.

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Facebook permanently banned a developer after he made an app to let users delete their news feed

The developer Louis Barclay, who created Unfollow Everything, told Insider he was scared and anxious after receiving a cease-and-desist letter.

Louis Barclay, a developer in the UK, is the creator of a browser extension called Unfollow Everything. The extension lets users automatically unfollow all their friends and pages on Facebook, leaving their news feed blank. Barclay told Insider people could still connect to their friends and family on Facebook when using the extension.

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The death of the newsfeed

What do we do now that there’s more in the newsfeed than we can possibly read? Can the algorithmic sample ever actually work, or do we swing back to 1:1 messaging? How do Stories rebundle that? And what happens to all the traffic that the newsfeed provides?

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‘Tired of being stepped on’: Instacart workers urge customers to delete app

‘Shoppers’ across the US cite falling pay rates and unsafe working conditions ahead of company’s rumored IPO.

The group’s demands are mostly requests for a restoration of features the app had previously: a reinstatement of Instacart’s commission pay model, paying its shoppers per order versus bundling them, a 10% default tip on the app, transparency about how orders are assigned, and a rating system that doesn’t hurt shoppers for issues outside their control. Shoppers have also asked for occupational death benefits, citing the increasing dangers shoppers face on the job.

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Pix Mobile Payment: How Brazil’s Central Bank Launched Platform

One year ago the Pix platform didn’t exist. Now half the population uses it with over 110M users, showing just how quickly adoption of digital payments can spread.

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OPPO says it has 440M MAU for ColorOS

Chinese Android OEM Oppo claims 440m MAUs

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Sunset of Localized Version of LinkedIn

Microsoft tried to make the LinkedIn ccontent proposition work in China, reasoning that the censorship was marginal to the professional use case, but the censorship has become much stronger, and it had started to have to block journalists profiles. Now it’s stepping back, and will produce a limited version of the service focused only on CVs and jobs, with no publishing or sharing functions.

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Techstars Startup Digest Mobile is curated by:

Edith Yeung - General Partner at Race Capital
edith.yeung@startupdigestmail.com

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