True Fact: Funding rounds are not actually "revenue"
“We’re just, a sign of the times We’re just, a sign of the times We’re just, a sign of the times We’re just, a sign of the times” — Quiet Riot, Sign of the Times It can’t get much more 2020 than this: Los Vegas based fraud prevention start-up, NS8, who just raised $123 million from the VC firm Lightspeed, just fired nearly everybody via an all hands Zoom meeting, and disclosed that they…
Read More
CNBC reported Friday that Tesla will be laying off up to half of it’s sales and delivery staff, this comes on the heels of other layoffs reported earlier in the week. Salaried employees are looking at pay cuts of 10% to 30%. In other news, Elon’s brother Kimball appears to have pulled a switcheroo on his employees “emergency fund” for his Nextdoor Restaurant chain, pulling the plug on the fund right before he laid off…
Read More
As per Bloomberg: WeWork desperately scrambles to salvage an IPO being spurned by the investing public by floating a “governance shakeup” although any reforms would still leave Neumann with total control over what happens because of the share structure. Also, the article opines that nobody is sure what governance changes remain to be made, given that “The company already has taken some steps, such as adding a woman to its board and having Neumann return…
Read More
I had all but mothballed this project because, frankly, I was neglecting it. But lately I’ve been feeling like some kind of inflection point has been reached. When multiple unicorns are underwater or in danger of going underwater on their IPOs ($TLRY, $SNAP, $UBER, that other one…. ) or at least looking like they should be under water ($BYND) and then WeWork looking like it may not even make it to the gate…. combined with yield curve…
Read More
“Social Capital arrived in Silicon Valley seven years ago with a charismatic co-founder, former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya who also owns a piece of the Golden State Warriors. It raised more than $1 billion and made early bets on companies like Slack.” …and then it all went to shit. This Axios article tracks the implosion. (Sometimes I think by building a real company that actually has a real service and a customer base for 20…
Read More
Answer Corp, parent company to Answers.com has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a maneuver to jettison close to half-a-billion in debt. Top creditors are: Yahoo, Inc. with an unsecured claim of $545,209.34. Taboola, Inc. with an unsecured claim of $411,754.97. Facebook with an unsecured claim of $295,000. Don Morrison, former vice president of Foresee, with a severance claim of $217,000. Amazon Web Services, Inc. with an unsecured claim of $200,000. This on the heels…
Read More
Oregon data center Peak Hosting has retreated from a “massive growth trajectory” and has laid off three quarters of its workforce (peaked at 200 f/t employees, now down to 50) and filed for bankruptcy after losing it’s biggest customer: mobile gaming company Machine Zone. The lost client was worth a reported $4 million/month in lost revenues.
Read More
The major distribution channel for Theranos, Walgreens has ended the speculation that they may drop the disgraced biomed start-up by… dropping them. Not much left for this former unicorn. Forbes recently marked-to-market founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes net worth from $4.5 billion …to zero.
Read More
Publicly traded memory maker Violin Memory (VMEM) has posted another quarterly loss in excess of $20M (this is the third or fourth in a row), begging TheRegister to wonder aloud “can they avoid a trainwreck?” Keep in mind, the market cap of the entire company is $36M, which means they are successively putting up quarterly losses worth roughly 2/3 the company’s market cap. This, after 7 funding rounds totalling $187M, their Series D valued them at…
Read More
Theranos scratches 2 years worth of lab tests. (Turns out 94% of their “in-house” lab tests were outsourced to external companies. The 6% remaining have all just been discarded as invalid.) BREAKING: Elizabeth Holmes’ exec assistant quits. Funding raised: $637 M Valuation: $9B Revenues: undisclosed
Read More