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Friday, cha cha cha! Friday! Cha-cha-cha! We’re doing a little happy two-person conga line around our virtual Daily Crunch editorial Zoom gathering to celebrate the arrival of the first weekend in February. Yes, it looks ridiculous. No, we wouldn’t care, even if we took every ounce we had and poured it into less care.
A few quick ones for startups: If you’re going to MWC, we want to hear from you, and we want your votes for the businessupdates.org Early Stage fireside chats, breakout sessions and round tables!
And for today’s Black History Month recommendation, we recommend Michelle Alexander’s The new Jim Crow. It is an extraordinary read that, when published ten years ago, rekindled the desire for criminal justice reform and remains as poignant and relevant today. — Christine and Hey
Table of Contents
The businessupdates.org Top 3
- The Big Apple of the subscriber base: Apple may have fallen short of its revenue target (see the Big Tech section) for its fiscal first quarter, but the consumer tech giant is banging bottles and bells after announcing that it now has 935 million paid subscriptions across all of its offers. Ivan has more.
- Who’s at the door?: Christine got the scoop on Jokr’s new funding round. The grocery delivery company raised about $50 million to boost its value, to $1.3 billion today. Jokr plans to use that funding to double its service in Brazil.
- Quite a task for a pair of shorts: YouTube’s insistence on letting everyone watch short films has paid off: Google says YouTube Shorts has more than 50 billion views daily, Ivan reports.
Startups and VC
businessupdates.org Live is back, and Mat is pleased to lead this conversation with Sameer Shariff, CEO and Co-Founder of Cambly, and Sarah Tavel, Partner at Benchmark. In this hour-long event, hear how Cambly used a failed Series A fundraiser to force the company into a cash-positive position. Of course, one time the company didn’t need outside of capital, it was suddenly available and the company raised the next two rounds of funding.
And we have five more for you:
Pitch Deck Teardown: Laoshi’s $570,000 Angel Deck
Image Credits: laoshi (Opens in a new window)
The founders of Laoshi have raised a $570,000 angel round to scale up their app, which helps users learn how to read and write in Chinese.
To help other early stage founders, they shared 15 slides from their deck:
- Cover slide
- Problem slide
- Market slide
- Solution slide
- Competition slide
- Road map slide
- Team slide
- Teacher growth slide
- Retention slide for teachers
- Summary slide
- “Contact Us” slide
- Appendices cover slide
- Appendix I: Viral effect slide
- Appendix II: Business Model Slide
- Appendix III: “The Question” slide
Three more from the TC+ team:
businessupdates.org+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams lead the way. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
For all the “Seinfeld” fans out there, Amanda came across this gem on Twitch, the “Nothing, Forever” AI ‘Seinfeld’ parody, of which she remarks, “We’ve all seen way too many AI-generated gimmicks, but the AI isn’t the most interesting thing about” Nothing, For always.” It’s the community that has gathered around the stream that makes the project feel like this generation’s “Twitch Plays Pokémon.” Enjoy!
Our team had a revenue overload and now we have a nice collection of insights from Ford, Apple and Amazon:
Here are some non-earning items for your Friday fun:
