Stephanie Kwok, 62, a Cambodian refugee who built a prosperous livelihood in the Los Angeles area with her husband and three sons, died unexpectedly on January 5.
She soon would have been my mother-in-law.
I have been learning more about her story:
Bird, a company whose ex-CEO used the term "fake news" to describe an unflattering but accurate news article about it, now tells the SEC it inflated revenue for >2 years.
Major SF-based tech layoffs discussed/announced in recent weeks total about 11,000 just between 8 firms.
- Uber (5,000)
- Airbnb (1,900)
- Yelp (1,000)
- Lyft (982)
- Juul (900)
- Opendoor (600)
- Eventbrite (500)
What's the impact on the SF economy, housing, etc?
🚨🛴 Scooter news 🛴🚨
The first detailed financial picture of Lime, the startup with the most scooters on the roads.
- It will lose more than $300M on ~$420M of revenue
- Depreciation, local ops are 💰💰
- Burned through ~$200M of cash through July
Email to current & former Stripe employees from John and Patrick Collison, on the firm's 47% down round from 2021:
"You might wonder how you should feel about the price...We shouldn't fall victim to anchoring bias."
"The San Francisco-based startup aims to upgrade the American trailer park, making it a network of intentional communities for the remote-working, previously urban professionals."
NEWS:
We got Stripe's pitch deck.
The payments giant needs $4B by end of '24, more than previously known.
It tries to paint itself favorably to other big names, like Airbnb and Amazon.
And, of course, there's an AI pitch.
w/
@KateClarkTweets
A shift is underway at Airbnb.
New listings that are full-time/professionally run are growing much faster than its more traditional mom-and-pop/part-time offerings.
The company never talks publicly about these categories. We got some data.
NEWS:
Katerra has told employees it plans to shut down.
It had raised more than $2 billion from investors including SoftBank.
It now says it doesn't have enough money to pay employee severance or PTO.
Man, there’s gotta be some kind of metaphor here about 2018-2021 venture capital market that Tiger Global considered investing in WeWork but instead, Tiger’s main investor got so drunk he threw up on a WeWork exec’s fluffy dog.
Wow.
Oakland is banning cars from 10% of its roadways during the shelter-in-place “so that bicyclists and pedestrians can spread out and exercise and take in fresh air safely.”
Today is my first day back reporting
@theinformation
in ~400 days.
I’ll be in our NY office, chasing interesting stories on tech, finance and corporate governance, while finishing my MBA.
What’d I miss?
News: First major cost-cutting moves at Airbnb for Covid-19.
- Stopped all marketing (estimated $800M savings)
- Halted most hiring
- Exec salaries cut by 50%
- Layoffs could be in play, but nothing firm yet
The scooter war no one is talking about: The leader—far and away—for the category of snappy one-word names for scooter startups is "action verb."
Inanimate objects is playing catch up. Bird deserves more credit for bucking industry trends.
A very closely guarded secret in private tech land has been: How much money does Databricks lose?
We are giving you the answer: ~$380M in operating losses last year, ~$900M combined the last 2 years.
Oh, and they're in talks to raise a lot more money:
Tired: Big announced funding from SoftBank into restaurant delivery startup.
Wired: Big ~secret~ funding from SoftBank into convenience store delivery startup
We have all the GoPuff news you didn’t know you wanted.
✍️Beat update✍️ I'm covering IPOs, M&A and other goings-on of late-stage private tech firms
@theinformation
.
📉As they say, "pencils are down" in the IPO world right now. 📉
But I think there will be lots of fun stuff to cover.
Let me introduce you to goPuff, a very under-the-radar unicorn that has quietly raised more than $150M.
Selling beer and Juul pods to college students appears to be a good business.
Today is my last day in the
@Bagehots
fellowship 😭 It's been an incredible year with smart, empathetic journalists.
Next: Returning full-time to
@theinformation
in NY in Sept, as a ~senior reporter~ covering tech & Wall Street.
Also: completing my
@Columbia_Biz
MBA this year.
Today is my 4-year anniversary at
@theinformation
!
Going to work with very smart, fair and ambitious people has been a great career and life decision.
<shouts into the abyss> the tech industry has generally shied away from meaningful investments in new government, civic and physical infrastructure to invest in ad- or subscription-driven business models that can achieve enormous financial returns within a decade
The next weapon in the scooter wars? A seat.
200 of these "Wheels" vehicles landed in San Diego last wknd. It's the next act for the Viner brothers, who cofounded Wag. They're planning 3,500 of them in San Diego & LA.
Some takeaways from a close-ish reading of the scooter applications from the dozen companies vying to operate in SF.
Preface: It's striking how rare it is for high-powered tech cos to have to answer regulators' questions ~before~ operating. Will be good for accountability.
I started as an infant reporter
@theinformation
5 years ago today
On my 1st day, I was assigned a story on arcane investment terms, & then was sent to Barcelona alone a month later for MWC.
They expect a lot here. It works. Grateful to
@Jessicalessin
,
@mvpeers
,
@WendyJPollack
.
I hear you like stocks...
Airbnb passed $200 a share for the first time today. It's up 39% since that crazy day 1 IPO pop.
Its market cap is $121B. It issued warrants at a $20B valuation last April.
Adam D'Angelo gets described in a lot of ways: brilliant, principled, but most importantly...stubborn.
At Quora, he fired popular execs w/ little explanation. Once it incited a mini-employee walkout.
He's an enigmatic figure in the OpenAI Sama Stalemate:
this
@parismartineau
story on problems at Patreon has it all — on-the-record quotes from employees, documentation on execs cashing out, details on settlement $$, and, my favorite: the revelation that execs didn't include PP&E in cash burn calculation.
A Vanity Fair ode to
@theinformation
&
@Jessicalessin
on our 10-year anniversary.
Come for the fun quotes by
@semaforben
, Reed Hastings & Jeff Bezos.
Stay for the real juice:
- 30% revenue growth in 23, profitable
- we "compete on the finance beat"
Welcome to SF
@rossmatican
, the first Gen Z reporter at
@theinformation
.
He murmured “ok millennial” under his breath at me several times but that’s ok I’m not sad about it.
NEWS:
We got financial results, forecasts & other details from one of the buzziest and most controversial companies in Silicon Valley: Palmer Luckey-founded Anduril
There's both sales momentum & heavy cash burn as it develops drones, missiles & subs.
Amazon's 10,000-person Alexa division is transitioning from the "let's just grow" to "let's figure out a business model" part of the story.
Under discussion? Taking a cut from WSJ, NYT subscriptions + Spotify ads.
Read
@Priyasideas
for more deets.
IT’S ARM DAY**
** softbank-owned chip designer Arm expected to release its F-1 prospectus after market close, a big step for what will likely be one of biggest tech IPOs ever
Venture capitalists have given up on the idea that they’ll make their career finding the next hit consumer marketplace, retail brand or media company.
Dealmaker by
@KateClarkTweets
Come w/ me to sprawling Irish estates, Singapore 5-star hotels, Sea Ranch techno-optimist conferences, NY conference rooms & Stripe all-hands.
A profile on one of the most interesting people in tech + finance—John Collison. Lots of scoops + deets inside:
I see you fools saying you're "working from home" meanwhile the 12:30 class at the Castro Barry's is waitlisted the next two days, which never happens.
The first ever "Micromobility Conference is tmrrw. A true sign of scooter fervor, although this will also look at ebikes, future vehicles, etc.
I'm interviewing Scoot, Skip, Spin & Grow CEOs.
What should I ask?
Katerra's six-year rise and fall is a story of:
- Overconfidence and overcapitalization.
- Lack of expertise in a complicated industry.
- Severe distrust between executives, investors and everyone in between.
The scene at Bird:
- 9:30 am invite to Covid-19 update
- 10:30 am video call, everyonne muted, no video. Bird branded logo. People are told they were laid off, given severannce.
- People on call thought it was prerecorded. Bird says it was a live speaker delivering the news
Amazon is opening small, post office-like locations faster than any other facilities. That's where Amazon Flex drivers often pick up packages.
Logistics researchers have "never seen this type of industrial growth before."
read
@parismartineau
:
Say what you will about
@rabois
' Twitter persona, but it's looking like an even bigger year for his portfolio with this Opendoor news.
He was also early in DoorDash and Airbnb, which are slated to go public this year.
Just talked to 4th graders about journalism.
Their questions shook me to my core:
How do you know if a source is lying to you?
Do people get mad at you for your stories?
And do you get jet lag if you travel for work?
Google, Airbnb, Zendesk halted negotiations for big new offices.
Will the pandemic shift companies' real estate needs for the long term?
"We’re starting to settle into the idea that people won’t come back [to offices] in the same numbers."
1 overlooked factor contributing to the lack of Black and Latinx tech execs:
The executive search firms that startups hire are even less diverse.
My piece on the headhunting world that plays an influential role in who gets picked for tech leadership:
🛴 LIME V. BIRD QUEST FOR TWO-WHEELED WORLD DOMINATION UPDATE 🛴
Things have taken a turn:
• Lime overtakes Bird in global market share
• Bird reduces scooter fleets, says focus is profits
• Lime exploring expansion to Tokyo
perhaps the most 2020 data point
"The big tech giants have far more cash, on a combined basis, than the Small Business Administration has to lend startups under the stimulus program."
NEWS: The numbers behind Stripe's no-good, forgettable 2022.
The payments giant burned through > $500M as its revenue growth rate slowed from ~85% to ~18%.
The questions for investors as Stripe raises cash: Was it an anomaly?
Motivate, US bike share leader, shops itself.
- It’s had talks with Lyft
- Hired ex Credit Suisse M&A boss
- made $100M last year, mostly from NY Citibike
- tried to merge with Jump, get Google to sponsor SF system
Some Airbnb news:
- Nights stayed in recent months dropped 40-50% in big cities, internal data shows.
- The slow urban recovery has raised concerns hosts will flee.
- S-1 coming LATE next week, per 2 sources.
In 2011, Twitter's leasing of SF's Depression-era furniture showroom at 10th St. and Market St. was the first major sign of a tech-driven real estate boom.
Now, what does this mean?
Airbnb doesn't want to pay the Google tax man.
Instead, "we will become a brand that generates direct traffic," Brian Chesky told employees
That will help profitability. But there's a warning sign: Vrbo, which is buying search ads, is rebounding faster
.
@eringriffith
gets underneath the anxiety of employee illiquidity at 11-year-old Airbnb.
One fact shouldn't get lost in the run-up to Airbnb's IPO: Some employee stock will worthless if the company doesn't go public by the end of next year.
Scooter startup Lime confirmed our report this morning that they are taking on $170 million investment from Uber & others.
Uber is also selling its Jump Bike division to Lime.
Dara's former chief of staff Wayne Ting is Lime's 3rd CEO in as many years.
Stripe employees, I'm sure, will mostly feel good. Tender offer begins in April and settles in May.
"You will be permitted to sell shares you have vested up to this point, in most cases with no restrictions."
Bird is, ummm, not pleased that Santa Monica might pick Lyft and Uber to operate scooter services there.
“Giving complete control of sustainable transportation alternatives to two rideshare corporations is like giving Exxon and BP Oil a monopoly on solar power.”
Rode a Lyft Bike to/from our downtown SF office a couple times this week.
1) Micromobility feels more fun and safe than ever (better bike infra from Mission to downtown, fewer cars/bikes on the road)
2) It also feels more expensive than ever. (Spent $30 for 4 trips)
Stripe plans to shed its San Francisco headquarters for a bigger spot just south of the city.
The move would be a stark break from the trend of the last decade.
M&A SCOOP: Cyber startup Lacework, once valued at $8.3B, in talks to sell itself to privately held Wiz for as little as $150M.
Kind of a wild example of M&A to come in the cybersecurity startup world, an area that VCs poured money into in recent years
I want to write a lot more deep dives this year.
What’s one company currently worth less than $1B that you think has the best shot of being worth $100B+?
SUNDAY SCOOTER SCOOP
Lyft plans to apply for permits in San Francisco, vying with several other firms for 5 slots. Ofo will also apply. Product work on scooters is early for Lyft, it recently hired a dedicated policy leader focused on scooters, bikes.
Airbnb is projecting that its revenue will tumble by some 54% this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
It's also forecasting a fast snap-back with revenue in 2021 higher than 2019
Airbnb has historically been an optimistic company. Will it pay off?
OAK says it didn't reject scooters or enforce strict caps so that you would see "lots of black and brown people on scooters."
SF regulators took more control, and ridership was mostly downtown & white.
Elephant in the room: Will prices keep going up?
Important dog related disclosures in Lyft's office lease attached to its s1:
Lyft employees only -- ONLY -- allowed to bring 45 dogs in total into their offices.
NEWS: Getaround plans to lay off about a quarter of its 600 employees in a bid to rein in rising costs.
It's the latest in a series of series of layoffs in SoftBank's Vision Fund portfolio.