The Information Media Bias

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Briefing: Blockchain.com Lays Off 28% of Staff - The Information

business

Cryptocurrency exchange Blockchain.com is laying off 28% of its staff, or roughly 110 employees, in its second major round of job cuts over the past seven months, CoinDesk reported Thursday. The London-based company laid off 25% of its staff, or roughly 150 employees, in July. Blockchain.com was valued at $14 billion when it raised a Series D funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

Stripe and Instacart Fare Poorly in Fidelity Value Markdowns

tech

Of all the private tech firms waiting to hit the public markets, Reddit and Discord look to stand the best chance of scoring the healthiest valuations. That’s based on where asset management firm Fidelity has been valuing its stakes in the companies. After an initial big markdown in the second quarter of 2022, when the stock market plunged sharply, Fidelity kept its appraisal of Reddit and Discord relatively steady all year. In contrast, it continued to cut the valuation it put on its holdings in Stripe, Instacart and Databricks at least until November. That month it raised its valuation on both Instacart and Stripe, possibly reflecting a stock market rally (see the above chart).
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

Why Musk's User-Pays Twitter Policy Makes Sense; Hell Freezes ... - The Information

Give Elon Musk some credit. While his tornadolike upheaval of Twitter has apparently devastated its ad business (see an update with our latest story on that subject), there is upside in what he’s doing for the tech industry. Musk has indicated he wants to make Twitter users pay up for some features—so much so that, as The New York Times reported today, he’s even considering auctioning off usernames. It might not work for his business. But for investors, advertisers and the tech industry generally, there’s a benefit to learning just how many people value social media enough to pay anything for it.
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

The Looming Debt Crunch Facing Tech Companies Like The RealReal

tech

In 2020, a wave of public tech companies—including The RealReal, Vroom and Redfin—began selling record amounts of ultra-low-interest bonds that would convert into shares if the companies’ stocks kept soaring. Instead, stocks have been crushed, and a wall of potentially crippling or course-altering debt now looms over some firms. Several companies that sold convertible debt likely will struggle to refinance it or find the cash to pay it off unless their fortunes turn around soon, according to interviews with investment bankers and an analysis of companies’ financial statements. If they do refinance, it will likely be much pricier. For some companies, the crunch could lead to efforts to sell themselves.
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

Okta Chief Revenue Officer Departs Amid Sales Shakeup

Okta’s chief revenue officer, Steve Rowland, is leaving the identity and access management software provider at the end of the month, according to a current Okta employee. Rowland’s departure, less than two years after the enterprise software veteran joined Okta, comes as Okta is grappling with an industrywide slowdown in the enterprise software market. Rowland’s departure means Okta is losing two senior sales executives in the same month. Okta announced in November that Susan St. Ledger would retire this month as president of worldwide field operations. Both St. Ledger and Rowland were hired in early 2021 from Splunk as part of a move by Okta to bring in more-experienced sales executives to improve its sales growth.
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

The Writer Who Serialized Her Novels on Substack

tech

Elle Griffin's Substack career over the last two years is a testament to how tech platforms have transformed what it means to be an aspiring novelist.The former content marketing writer found success on Substack by taking a page from Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens: starting in 2021, she serialized her gothic and utopian novels to her newsletter subscribers, who are both paid and non-paid. Griffin had hypothesized that serial fiction, where readers pay a monthly or yearly subscription, would be a better way for writers to earn money compared to traditional publishing, where writers pitch their book draft in the hopes of securing a publisher, or self-publish on sites like Amazon.
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

Coinbase May Have the Best Shot of Weathering the Crypto Winter

By crypto standards, today was like any other day—both newsy and noisy. Let’s see, Coinbase laid off 20% of its staff, and the Winklevoss twins escalated their public battle with crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group with an open letter demanding the removal of its chief, Barry Silbert. Meanwhile, a former Coinbase manager's brother was sentenced to prison for violating insider trading laws through cryptocurrency transactions.If you step back, though, you can see some big-picture developments. One is that the crypto winter will "weed out bad companies," as Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong noted today. We can see what he means in the travails of the Winklevoss twins’ crypto exchange, Gemini, and their battle with DCG.
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

How Congress Can Get Crypto Legislation Right

The near-overnight collapse of FTX International sent shockwaves through the crypto industry that are now reverberating in Washington. As the dust settles and details of what went on behind closed doors emerge, it’s clear that FTX’s leadership displayed a complete disregard for corporate governance, risk management and, most importantly, business ethics. Sam Bankman-Fried’s indictment is a step toward vindication for the good and honest builders and creators in the crypto ecosystem. While he and any others responsible for the mismanagement, misdeeds and misinformation at FTX must be held accountable, we must be careful not to paint the entire crypto ecosystem in broad strokes based on one company’s misconduct.
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

Alphabet Job Cuts Widen to Robotics Subsidiary

science

Less than a month ago, Alphabet’s industrial robotics subsidiary Intrinsic said it acquired a team of people from a software development firm called Open Robotics. On Wednesday, Intrinsic went in the other direction by laying off 40 employees, a spokespersonconfirmed to The Information. A person close to the company said the layoffs represented nearly 20% of employees. The U-turn at Intrinsic, which spun out of Alphabet’s X incubator a year and a half ago, happened the same day that a bigger Alphabet subsidiary, life-sciences firm Verily, cut 15% of its roughly 1,700 employees, The Information earlier reported. They suggest that Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat has embarked on a cost-cutting effort across the conglomerate, which has ...
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

Stripe Cuts Internal Valuation by 11%, Implying $63 Billion Valuation

Stripe has cut the internal value of its shares by about 11%, implying a valuation of $63 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. It’s at least the third time since June that the payments startup has cut its internal valuation, following a smaller cut in October, and brings the total reduction to about 40% in the past six months. The lower internal price—known as a 409a valuation—cuts the price of new stock-based compensation issued to employees and could also help Stripe reset investor expectations ahead of any public listing. The new valuation is also 33% lower than the $95 billion level where investors including Sequoia Capital, Baillie Gifford and Fidelity valued Stripe when it ...
The Information     Jan 13, 2023

Our Creator Economy Summit Kicks Off April 20

We are kicking off today’s newsletter with an exciting announcement: Our annual Creator Economy Summit is happening for the first time in person on April 20 in Los Angeles at The London West Hollywood.We’ll have a jam-packed day of fireside chats, masterclasses and panel discussions, with lots of time to ask questions and network with attendees.
The Information     Jan 11, 2023

Six OpenAI Rivals Google and Microsoft Are Watching

tech

Microsoft’s big bet on OpenAI, whose ChatGPT software can understand and generate conversational text, is starting to look like a stroke of genius. Microsoft plans to use OpenAI’s tech to improve results in Bing searches and help Word and Outlook customers automatically generate documents and emails using simple prompts, as The Information has reported. But OpenAI is far from the only startup developing software that can understand language and that larger tech companies such as Google, Amazon, or Meta Platforms may want to license, partner with or acquire. In the last few years, top researchers from OpenAI, Alphabet’s DeepMind and Google, which pioneered the machine-learning techniques used in ChatGPT, have left those companies to launch or join ...
The Information     Jan 10, 2023