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Happy Friday everyone! If you’re sitting down this weekend, check out your Root Devices podcasts to see what’s been happening on Root Devices+ this week. Just a reminder that there will be no Fourth of July newsletter on Monday. I hope you have a safe weekend. See you on Tuesday! — Christine
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Root Devices Top 3
- Some developers are not happy: If you haven’t had the chance to meet our new European reporter, Paul Sawers, you’re in for a treat because he knocked it out of the park today. He wrote about the Software Freedom Conservancy urging open source developers to abandon GitHub after the company commercially launched Copilot. Their beef is that there is now a fee to use Copilot.
- It’s going down: Buy now, pay later Fintech company Klarna is said to have raised a new round of funding at a valuation well below some of its previous rounds. Mary Ann has more.
- Valuation does not wait for the market: Alex delves into OpenSea’s $13 billion valuation and why it’s out of line with what he’s seeing in NFT trading volume.
Startups and VCs
Bit of a slow day for startup news, but let’s dive in:
- Another wave: Natasha and Amanda are back with the saddest list we’ve ever compiled — all tech layoffs.
- No head in the clouds here: Snowflake has made a name for itself in the field of cloud data storage and Ron today it says that Hydra is here to take an open source approach. The company, which raised $3.1 million after graduating from the Y Combinator class in winter 2022, is building its cloud data warehouse on top of the popular open source database Postgres.
- Additional efficiency: I highlighted Promoted.ai’s new $6M seed expansion, which will be geared toward the company’s long-term vision of helping e-commerce marketplaces achieve profitability. Their technology combines all these beautiful marketing assets, search, resources, ads and promotions on one platform.
- Shot in the arm: Medical examinations have never been so important and Come on has learned that Visby Medical has raised an additional $35 million, an extension of the $100 million Series E round raised earlier this year. The company is working on “the world’s first instrument-free hand-held PCR platform for accurate and rapid testing of a variety of serious infections for anyone who needs it.”
Pitch Deck Teardown: $7M Wilco
Image Credits: Wilco
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Tech-savvy founders would do well to heed one of the biggest takeaways from Wilco’s $7 million startup package: Avoid the trap of focusing too much on a product’s features instead of its benefits. Come on it says
“The ‘how’ will be important, but it risks the temptation to go into more detail than is relevant to the presentation.” ‘What’ is too tactful; for this part of the story it doesn’t really matter what users have to do to get those benefits. Focusing on the ‘why’ is what makes this slide so powerful; it opens the door for more in-depth conversations if needed, but the basics are there. I wish more startups would get this right!”
(Root Devices+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can apply here.)
Big Tech Inc.
Yes, the Apple Store was down for 2 hours yesterday, but all is well with the world now. Come on reported that it has returned by removing Enjoy – the company that was in charge of delivering and setting up Apple devices – following Enjoy’s bankruptcy announcement, and that a $50 gift card will be sent with the purchase of Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD.
Annie delves into the story of US commodity regulator the Commodity Futures Trading Commission bringing civil charges against Mirror Trading International Proprietary Limited, a South African bitcoin pool operator, and its CEO Cornelius Johannes Steynberg for allegedly running a fraudulent commodity pool worth more than 1.7 billions of dollars in bitcoins.
across the pond Natasha today presented a couple of stories related to the European Union. One was that Amazon agreed to make it easier for people to cancel their Prime memberships while lawmakers approved some new cryptocurrency regulations.
- Google settles: Ivan reports that the search giant has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit by US developers who accused Google of abusing its app distribution power and charging an unfair 30% commission for app purchases and in-app purchases through Play Stores.
- Crypto Chaos: One company whose application for a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund was rejected by the US Securities and Exchange Commission is now suing the federal unit. Jacquie reports on why one expert says this approach is unlikely to work.
- FTX is at it again: FTX was first rumored to be looking to acquire Robinhood, which was debunked, but now another deal for BlockFi appears to be in the works. Lucas has more.
- No EPA, no crying: The team delves into why the Supreme Court’s recent Environmental Protection Agency ruling “all but ensures that the U.S. will not compete with China or Europe.”