Updates and Bans
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Updates and Bans
Startup Seeks To Help Creators Network And Hire
Creators need to mingle to market themselves and their work, but traditional networking and recruiting sites such as LinkedIn and Fiverr can come up short. Brian Freeman, the founder, and CEO of Creatorland, is launching a professional networking app for the creator economy in the next few weeks. Creatorland allows creators to showcase their projects and past work with the ability to tag collaborators, view profile analytics and build relationships with brands or other creators. Over 3,000 creators have joined the waitlist for Creatorland, including 200 brands and industry professionals. Creatorland will feature direct integration with a creator's YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram accounts, allowing creators to showcase recent posts, projects, and videos in a way that's catered toward landing business opportunities.
However, new professional networking startups face the challenge of luring users away from the incumbent LinkedIn. Kinigra Deon, a YouTuber with 2.56 million subscribers, met her video editor at VidSummit, a conference for brands and creators, which she hopes will lead to future partnerships. LinkedIn lacks tools for artists like herself to visually display their work, so apps can only go so far.
Good Eggs Cuts Valuation 94% in Lifeline Financing as Startups Seek Funding
Good Eggs investors have been through a cram-down or pay-to-play deal, known in the industry as a recapitalization, which gives preferential terms over those received by prior investors. Five years ago, Benchmark partner Bill Gurley led a $50 million cram-down investment in Good Eggs to help the company avoid bankruptcy. This is becoming more common as cash-burning startups run out of options. In Good Eggs' case, investors have a 2 times liquidation preference, which means in the event of a sale of the company's assets, the newest investors will receive twice the amount of their investment before other shareholders divide up what is left. In 18 months, Glade Brook and any other investors in the new round will gain the right to receive 3 times their original investment if the company is eventually sold.
Good Eggs, a food-delivery service founded in 2011 in San Francisco, has raised $200 million in equity financing and is now selling meal kits and alcohol. It has hundreds of employees and historically has employed and given benefits to delivery drivers and warehouse workers, similar to GoPuff and Instacart. Revenue peaked at $106 million in 2021 before falling 18% to $86 million in 2022. The company's negative profit margins and cash burn worsened, suggesting that it didn't move quickly to cut costs as its business declined. Good Eggs hired investment bank Evercore last year and sought to sell itself, but no deal emerged other than a special purpose acquisition company offer to take it public.
Glade Brook stepped in and invested $25 million in Good Eggs in 2020. The company has $28 million in debt from Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital. Still, it has struck an arrangement that allows it to not make principal payments for the next 18 months and lowers its interest payments by more than 40%. It aims to become profitable before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization by the end of this year. It has already lowered its variable cost per order to around $50 from $63 in the third quarter of last year. More startups will likely seek aid or require a recapitalization, so venture capitalists should plan ahead and figure out which startups they might want to help.
Shivon Zilis Leaves OpenAI Board
Shivon Zilis, director of operations at Elon Musk's Neuralink, has stepped down from the board of OpenAI, according to a person familiar with the move and Zilis' LinkedIn profile. Musk, who is widely cited as a co-founder of OpenAI but cut ties several years ago, has criticized the content controls OpenAI has applied to its ChatGPT technology. Zilis joined the board in 2020 as an independent director and stepped down recently, citing a potential conflict of interest with her ongoing investments in artificial intelligence. Elon Musk is working on an alternative to ChatGPT and has reached out to AI researchers about forming a new research lab.
Coinbase Has Been Placed On Notice For Allegedly Violating Securities Laws
Coinbase has received a "Wells Notice" from the Securities and Exchange Commission, indicating that the agency's staff plan to recommend some enforcement action after an investigation. The issue is "an undefined portion of our listed digital assets, our staking service Coinbase Earn, Coinbase Prime, and Coinbase Wallet." Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal shared a copy of the letter (PDF) and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted that the company is prepared to defend its stance in court. The company's blog post tells customers and investors that the news does not require any changes to their current products or services.
Canva Has Released An Update That Should Have Adobe Worried
Canva is introducing new brand management products and AI-powered design tools to help workplaces streamline their content creation process. A new Brand Hub is being added to Canva's Visual Worksuite, allowing users to create a Brand Kit with company-specific assets. Brand Folders are set up to group assets together for specific events, campaigns, and projects, and Brand Templates allow designers to create pre-branded reusable templates for more repetitive tasks. Administrators can set permissions to ensure the content is created in Canva remains on-brand and can approve workflows directly within Canva prior to publishing. Magic Replace is a new AI-powered tool that can replace an asset across all of your designs with one click if you need to update an outdated logo or branded graphic.
Canva recently announced a major update to its design platform, which includes a "Magic Design" tool, an AI-powered copywriting assistant, a translation feature, 953 new fonts, and a host of non-workspace-specific tools, new editing features for layouts, layers, styles, and gradients, and alt text can now be generated for images directly within Canva. Canva touts itself as an "all-in-one" creation tool, and it currently claims to have over 110 million monthly users. Adobe's solution to Canva's increasing popularity is to beat it at its own accessibility game, but it might need to do more.
Snap Launches AR Business To Help Retailers With AR Shopping
Snap just announced AR Enterprise Services (ARES), a new business unit that aims to help retailers increase conversions and reduce return rates with augmented reality shopping tools. ARES includes virtual try-on features, fit and sizing recommendations, 3D Viewer tools, and the Enterprise Manager Backend system. Snap says over 300 customers have used various Shopping Suite features, and the move comes a few months after Snap suggested making AR features monetizable was crucial for its success.
Lenovo's Legion Slim Gaming Laptops Get AI Chips To Optimize Cooling
Lenovo has announced some of the top laptops that its Legion gaming arm will release in 2023, including refreshes to the 16-inch Slim 7, Slim 7i, Slim 5, and Slim 5i as a new Slim 5 in a 14-inch size. These laptops include physical AI chips that power what Lenovo calls its "AI Engine+." This feature will dynamically adjust a system's thermals to optimize cooling on the fly and maintain maximum output with minimal noise. The Slim 7 models include a 16:10 display with WQXGA / 240Hz and 3.2K / 165Hz options, and the keyboards have per-key RGB lighting, a full numpad, and 1.5mm of travel. The two Intel models will launch in April, while the two AMD models are expected in May. The 14-inch Slim 5 is coming in October, with pricing still to be announced.