Startups & Tech
By Chris McCann
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Startup Digest Reading List - Web3, Dark Patterns, ML Architecture
Netflix is now releasing games on both Android and iOS (coming soon).An overview on why there is a silicon chip shortage.There’s a common scam going around on Zelle (the banking payment network).A DAO setup to purchase a copy of the constitution lost the bid.…
Startup Digest Reading List - Coinbase Earnings, How Credit Cards Make Money
Amazon AWS is planning to move up the stack and offer enterprise applications, not just infrastructure.Discord will not be integrating with crypto wallets (yet) despite its heavy usage from the crypto community.Apple is launching a new product to get into the…
Startup Digest Reading List - Skeptical Take on the Metaverse, Open Source GTM, DAOs
Facebook changed its name to Meta, to capture the nebulous metaverse.Sam Altman wants to scan your eyeballs and give you crypto for it.Hertz placed one of the largest car orders to Tesla, for 100K model 3’s.Mastercard wants to enable all of their merchants to…
Startup Digest Reading List - Chief Product Officer, Asking Dumb Questions, U.S. Super Apps
Paypal is looking to acquire Pinterest, would be an odd couple.Linkedin is retreating from China.The first ETF focused on Bitcoin traded on the NYSE.Apple announced the newest laptops, M1 Pro/Max series.
Startup Digest Reading List - Open Source Fintech, AI Report, News Feeds
High speed internet could be coming to airlines while traveling in the air, via Starlink. Amazon is allowing most of its tech and corporate staff to work remotely forever. Mark Zuckerberg personally responds to the controversies it is facing, notably the rese…
Startup Digest Reading List - Facebook’s Bad Week, Concentration Risk in Fintech, State of VC
Facebook had a tough week - with an internal whistleblower, all of their services going offline, and a Senate committee hearing. TikTok hit 1 billion monthly active users.Netflix acquired its first game studio.Twitch had a major hack of both source code and u…
Startup Digest Reading List - Collision of DeFi and FinTech, Working in VR, ML Company Landscape
Facebook did internal research and found out its own products are harmful to teenagers. Compound accidentally sent $90M to their users, and asked for it back.Imgur was acquired by MediaLab, the startup incubator. Odd choice for the one high flying startup.Fiv…
Startup Digest Reading List - Understanding Startup Compensation, BNPL Growth, Asymmetric Upside
Amazon is finally cracking down on Chinese vendors who were selling goods & buying fake reviews. If you use Gmail, be careful about Google keeping records of all of your purchases via receipts. Twitter is working to enable crypto tipping in app & auth…
Startup Digest Reading List - B2B Payments, New Interfaces, and Play to Earn
Gitlab filed to go public via their S-1. The company is doing $233M in revenue, growing 69% with over 3,600 customers. Their overall revenue is low (compared to benchmarks) but their net revenue retention is best in class.Mailchimp was acquired by Intuit for …
Startup Digest Reading List - What PMs Do, History of TSMC, Facebook Glasses
Facebook is building and launching smart glasses (remember Google Glasses?) in partnership with Ray-Ban.Apple is losing its grip on its payment ecosystem now through the latest in the lawsuit with Epic Games, and with Korea Japan & India forcing Apple to …
Startup Digest Reading List - Saber, China Internet Report, Solana Ignition
Amazon will be using Affirm for their buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) checkout option, in a move following Square's acquisition of AfterPay for $29B.Databricks raised a massive $1.6B on a $38B valuation with a (small) participation from us at Race Capital & my p…
Startup Digest Reading List - Solana, Punks, and Valuing DAOs
There is still a big shortage of silicon chips and now TSMC is raising chip prices 20%.Apple (after a lawsuit) is finally allowing for alternative payment methods outside of the AppStore. Visa bought an NFT Crypto Punk which is now holding on their corporate …
Startup Digest Reading List - DeFi Eats CeFi, Evaluating Job Offerings, and FTX by the Numbers
OnlyFans banned explicit content on their site (the overwhelming majority of their content?) due to pressures from their payment processor (Mastercard). Coinbase is purchasing $500M of digital assets on their corporate balance sheet and investing 10% of their…
Startup Digest Reading List - Psychology of collecting NFT's, Partner Banks, and Coinbase Earnings
Reddit raised a $410M Series F with a valuation of $10B by Fidelity.A hacker exploited PolyNetwork (a cross-chain bridge connecting Polygon, Binance Chain, Neo, etc.) and stole $600M in assets, and then returned it all back.Coinbase reported earnings of $2B i…
Startup Digest Reading List - FTX Speedrun, Stablecoins, and Why Investors Say No
Square acquired AfterPay (a buy now pay later BNPL company) for $29B in an all stock deal, which was about 25% of the total value of Square. It’s a huge deal and Afterpay has 98K merchants in its network doing ~$21B in GMV.Robinhood, the king of meme stock tr…
Startup Digest Reading List: FTX, Cloud Provider Market Share, and Hype in Consumer Social
Incredible stat: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee.Duolingo went public with a valuation of $6.5BRobinhood went public at the low end of its range, and fell a further 10%, with a market cap of ~$30BThe semiconductor chip shortage could…
Startup Digest Reading List - Metaverse, Creator Fund, M&A, Product Document Templates
Facebook wants to become a "metaverse" company despite its multiple attempts at trying to do this before (Facebook Spaces, Facebook Horizon, etc.).Restaurant workers are quitting their jobs at a record pace due to low pay, exhausting work, unreliable hours, n…
Startup Digest Reading List - How the Financial System Works and VC’s pitching DAOs
iOS users now have the ability to opt-out of cross-site tracking which impairs the ability to track how advertisements are performing. Privacy will have major implications in the world of advertising. The fight for privacy isn’t limited to just the big tech c…
Startup Digest Reading List: Public Filings: Robinhood, Blend, Circle & Data Infrastructure Landscape
Uber, Lyft, and a multitude of other gig worker platforms are having a harder time attracting workers on the platform.Blend recently filed their S-1 to go public and Alex Johnson wrote a great teardown of the filing including the two big bets Blend is making …
Startup Digest Reading List - Selling to Large Enterprises, Silicon Valley, and Algorithmic Stablecoins
Brave Browser launched a search engine focused on privacy.The Supreme Court ruled universities cannot punish students for conduct on social media apps. This ruling will most likely have wide ranging consequences outside of this one case.Blend Labs, the mortga…