venture capital

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Beep boop, here we go again with another exciting week in tech. Next week is Disrupt, so the ZebethMedia Slack watercooler is full of sartorial advice, much to our surprise and confusion. Oh, and Haje has written more than 20 Pitch Deck Teardowns over on TC+ — and he’s running low on decks to review. Surely he hasn’t scared everyone away quite yet? Here’s a bit more info about what he’s looking for, and instructions for how you can submit your pitch deck for review! See you tomorrow, dear friends! — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Following suit: Today we have another installment of The OG App news. This time Ivan reports that Google also removed it from the Play Store. You might recall that The OG was promising an ad-free Instagram experience. After Meta said an app like that violated its policies, Apple made the first move and removed it a few weeks ago. The day has finally come: Hulu raised its subscription prices today, reports Lauren. It’s a trap!: “If risks to the software supply chain aren’t a boardroom priority yet, they soon will be,” Endor Labs’ co-founder Varun Badhwar told Kyle. The software supply chain startup emerged from stealth today with $25 million to continue developing its graph analysis tech for learning how dependencies are being used within an organization and creating the appropriate risk indicators. Startups and VC “The crude analogy I’ve been using internally is last year was the party and this year is the hangover. That’s really how it feels to me — that we’re starting to understand the excesses of last year,” says Mark Goldberg of Index Ventures in an interview, featured in Mary Ann’s The Interchange newsletter. “We’ve seen now the retrenchment period after the fact. At Index, we’re probably more aggressively investing in what we think the next generation of fintech companies is going to be right now.” Cloud kitchens became popular during the global pandemic as a way for restaurants to reach their communities when people were not going out as much. One of those was Foodology, a Colombia-based cloud kitchen and virtual restaurant company, which just raised $50 million, Christine reports. And we have five more for you: Growth hacking is really just growth testing Image Credits: Guido Mieth (opens in a new window) / Getty Images “Growth hacking” may not be the best phrase to describe the work required to fine-tune marketing campaigns and systems. In truth, successful marketers iterate constantly, measuring and testing efforts to minimize waste and maximize ROI. “If each test can result in a 1% improvement, you’re well on your way to 100% improvement after running 100 tests,” writes Jonathan Martinez, a self-described “marketing nerd” who has driven growth at Uber, Postmates and Chime. The best way to uncover marketing hacks is by using “stringent experimentation frameworks to run countless A/B tests,” advises Martinez, who shares a RICE (reach, impact, confidence and effort) scoring spreadsheet, along with his thoughts on acquisition and activation growth hacking. “It’s important to remember there’s no such thing as hacking growth. Instead, you should be thinking about how you can run 100 tests to move the needle forward.” Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. When one Florida company demanded its employee turn on a webcam during the workday so said company could monitor their work, it learned the hard way that hiring someone from overseas and performing video surveillance was in violation of European human rights policies. Haje has more on what happened. ICYMI over the weekend, Twitter locked Kanye West’s account following an antisemitic tweet, Taylor reported. And this was apparently after Elon Musk tweeted a welcome to Ye, who tweeted that he had been removed from Instagram. And we have five more for you:

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Friday! How’s that for brevity in newsletter introductions? Let’s get to it so we can crack open a Liquid Death and let the week sag off into the murky distance of memory sooner rather than later. — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Uh-oh: Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, confirmed that it found a blockchain bridge breach where hackers made off with $100 million. Carly has more. Evolving elephants to unicorns: Annie reports that Kenya’s tourism-focused startup studio Purple Elephant Ventures raises $1 million pre-seed funding to bring some modernization to the industry. What until you see the picture: Amazon’s Scout makes you just want to go up to it and give it a pat. Unfortunately, you might not get a chance to. After three years unveiling the robot, the delivery giant said that it is cutting back the program, Brian reports. Startups and VC Wildfires have become an ever-increasing threat as houses are built closer together and the growing impacts of climate change wreak havoc on natural landscapes. Entrepreneurs, in response, have started to develop tech meant to minimize the scale and damage of these natural disasters. Convective Capital is a new VC firm looking to back them, and it raised $35 million to do so, Becca reports. Haje got really bored of startups taking liberties with its market sizing, complaining that if you are a car dealership, your total serviceable market isn’t the value of the cars you sell (that’s the SOM for the car manufacturer). Your SOM is the total value of the sales commissions, service plans, aftermarket goods and services and everything else you can actually make money on. And we have five more for you: 7 investors discuss how agtech can solve agriculture’s biggest problems Image Credits: The Creative Drone (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Of all global industries, perhaps none is more susceptible to the dangers of climate change than agriculture. There’s a consensus among reputable scientists that the amount of CO2 we’re putting in the atmosphere is aggravating extreme weather events. How is that impacting the way agtech VCs operate during a downturn? To learn more, we surveyed: Brett Brohl, managing director of Techstars Farm to Fork, and managing partner at Bread and Butter Ventures Monica Varman, partner at G2 Venture Partners Jinesh Shah, managing partner at Omnivore Adam Anders, managing partner at Anterra Capital Ting Ting Liu, investor, and Ashutosh Sharma, India head at Prosus Ventures Camila Petignat, partner at The Yield Lab Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. Google plans to open its first data center in Japan by 2023, Ivan writes. The center is part of a $730 million infrastructure fund and will be the search engine giant’s third one in the region. Meanwhile, Kyle and Amanda looked at artificial intelligence–powered music generators and its place in an industry where it generally pays to be able to use your natural, human abilities. And another five more for you: Sharing is caring: A new Twitter feature encourages users to share the tweet versus taking a screenshot of it and then posting to other social media, Ivan writes. Press pause: A judge ruled that the Musk vs. Twitter trial can be put on hold temporarily while the two parties work out a deal, Amanda reports. It’s Marioooooo: Amanda gives you an inside look at the new “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” where she writes, “So far, Chris Pratt’s Mario seems more like Andy Dwyer than Star-Lord, and we love that for him.” Making tweaks: Shopify has agreed to add some consumer safety features to its app in Europe that includes a faster and easier way for national consumer authorities to report problems, Natasha L reports. Crack open a cold one: Pepsi is at the front of the line to get some of the first Tesla Semi deliveries, Kirsten writes.