Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Jack Dorsey leaves Bluesky’s board | Equity Podcast”.
Hello and welcome back to equity, The Tech runch podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the Nuance behind the headlines. This is Alex good morning. It is May 6th 2024, and this is our Monday show where we take a look back at the weekend. We just had and a quick peek at the week that is in front of us so on today’s podcast. Just for you, I have stocks in crypto, big changes at Blue Sky and IPO to get excited about more investment in chips in the US and then the rise of alt clouds for computing work and why? I think that particular Tech Trend really matters all right. Let’S go and let’s start with my favorite thing in the entire world: it’s the stock market shares today are mixed in Asia.
They are higher in the EU and set to rise here in the US. Why all the positivity? Well, last Friday, the US Labor report was pretty lackluster and that led to optimism that the FED will cut rates. I don’t know how you want to rate that, but that’s what investors are saying now on the earnings front.
There are too many names this week to even begin to tell you all of them, so instead, I’m going to give you a couple of highlights for each day on Monday, paler hyns rocket lab Tuesday Arista Network coupon data dog, toast, twio Reddit, lift then Wednesday is Super busy Uber Airbnb Shopify HubSpot, Robin Hood, instacart affirm the list just goes on, then Thursday is Roblox Unity, Dropbox and jfrog, which I really need to look back into oh and amplitude, and then, oddly enough, we also have a Friday report this week from digital ocean. So something for everybody, no matter what part of tech you care about. There is data coming for you, but if the stock market is going to have a busy week this week, crypto had a more relaxed week in our rear view. Mirror prices for the two major tokens didn’t move too much.
Bitcoin is up 3 % in the last 7 days and ethereum is flat over the last week. Some stuff did move, however, salana bounced back 14 % in the last 7 days and something called ton coin has broken into the top 10 on coin market cap. I don’t know what ton coin is I’ve never even heard of it.
So I guess we all need to go figure out what the hell. That is, because suddenly it matters moving on to big news that matters. The biggest news this morning that I am chewing on is that Jack is out at Blue Sky. Yes, blue Sky’s, most prominent backer has left its board Blue Sky. If you don’t know, is a Twitter alternative made in the wake of its sale to X.
It’S pretty fun. I’Ve used it quite a lot, but we learned over over the weekend that Jack is no longer on its board. Someone asked him that, and he responded with a very tur, no and then did not answer any of the questions asking him to explain that departure. However, in the wake of dorsey’s announcement, Blue Sky did drop a statement saying, and I quote, we sincerely thank Jack for his help, funding and initiating the Blue Sky project.
Today, blue sky is thriving as an open source social network running on prototo, the decentralized protocol that we have built now the are looking for a board member to replace Jack so make sure to raise your hand, but it is a loss because dorsy, of course, a Co-Founder over at Twitter and square now X and block respectively gave it a lot of credibility, but he has also been spending a lot of time on noer. Lately, that’s NR, which self-describes as a quote decentralized social network with a chance of working. I appreciate that level of self-awareness and Noster, which is an open protocol. Social network does compete with Blue Sky. You probably can’t have a hand in both pots. Next up a Slowdown in Chinese Tech hiring now the South China Morning Post has fascinating data on the current state of tech in China that I read yesterday, while trying to navigate a stay in the Baltimore Airport long enough to establish squatter’s rights.
So I decided to bring it to you because I think it really does matter so. The scmp reports – and I quote, China’s internet Giants – have slashed jobs in recent years, affecting tens of thousands of people as of the end of 2023, China’s soall bat or ba Alibaba and tensent had 364,000 employees a drop of nearly 25,000 from a year before. Okay, so a couple of thoughts here, one those companies don’t have as many employees as I thought they did, and also the drop wasn’t as big as it might have been, and the trend is not a surprise because we have seen similar movements here in the US. As well and to make that point, I went ahead and I went back to alphabet’s latest earnings and pulled some numbers for you.
So alphabet had 19,7 employees at the end of the first quarter of 2023. Now, one year later, at the end of q1 2024, that figure had fallen to 18,893, so a drop of about 10,000. So a very similar kind of decline that we saw in China also echoed here at Google, but the tricky bit, of course, with all of these numbers, is that Google to stick with the example. Of course, it’s part of alphabet drives a lot more jobs in the economy than it, employees directly, ad agencies, consultancies, etc, etc, etc. So, of course, the impact of these companies is quite a lot larger than just their employee footprint, but it is notable that all around the world Tech Giants really are doing more with less next up an IPO, an upcoming IPO, an upcoming IPO that is filed privately To go public in the US, an IPO, that’s coming up that is filed privately to go public in the US and it’s a Chinese company working on self-driving. You know I’m so excited, because that is what Bloomberg reports that quote: Chinese self-driving firm Beijing momenta technology has filed confidentially for an initial public offering in the US.
Yes, this deal could raise up to $ 300 million, which is honestly a pretty tasty offering size, and I think either indicates that self-driving has come so far that it is ready to list more companies that are Revenue, driving and worthy, or that self-driving work needs new Financial backers to keep the cash flowing in the case of momenta GM is a back, including investing $ 300 million into the firm back in 2021, but no matter whenever momenta does drop a real filing. We will be all over it because, oh my gosh, I cannot wait to see the numbers putting our money where our mouth is, and by money I mean the collective wealth of the United States and by mouth I mean our domestic chips industry. Yes, I have news about the US and chips, and it is that President Joe Biden Administration is looking to fund efforts that improve semiconductor manufacturing through the use of called digital twins. Now digital twins are virtual models that are used to test and optimize physical objects and systems, so, for example, in the world of auto manufacturing, those companies are looking to use digital twins of their factories to experiment with new processes without actually disrupting production.
So how does this matter for chips? Well, the Biden Administration has announced that it will accept applications for what it anticipates to be about $ 285 million in funding for work that includes Research into semiconductor digital, twin development. I think this is super cool. The US needs to be more chip, independent versus chip Reliant and the chips act, which this is part of is doing. Yan’S work to try to help that, and if digital twins can help us go faster and do better. Well then, make me one and to close out something that I had missed. Kyle wiggers writes for techwrench that the appetite for alternative clouds has never been bigger.
Now. What does that mean? Well, to pick an example: cor weave the GPU infr provider that actually began Life as a crypto mining operation raised $ 1.1 billion last week, but it’s not just cor weave. If you look at landal Labs, it also offers an array of cloud-hosted gpus and in April it raised 500 mill million in a special purpose financing vehicle, and that was just months after closing a $ 320 million series C round. Then there is the nonprofit voltage Park, which last October announced that it will invest $ 500 million in GPU, backed data centers and finally, together AI a cloud GPU host that also works in the world of generative AI, unsurprisingly, raised $ 106 million in March now. Why does this matter? Well, these alternative clouds can be a little bit cheaper than the bigs when it comes to certain compute tasks.
The problem here is there are some analysts that worry that these companies growth could be stymied In Time by the major Cloud providers. But what I love here is that they appear to have found a wedge into a market owned and dominated by just a handful of The Usual Suspects, and I think that we need more competition in Cloud to keep prices low and Innovation high. But how can you start by taking on, I don’t know bare metal, compute and storage against Amazon and Microsoft? They have more money, more data, centers, better Enterprise sales, but you need an angle. A we in, and perhaps this is it and ALT clouds that do GPU work today can expand in time to do more and really give those Tech platforms a run for their Cloud money and keep them on their toes all right. That is all the time we have on this delightful Monday morning morning, but don’t forget to follow Equity, where we are Equity pod over on X and threads.
My name is Alex. I am Alex over on X. We also have a sister show called found talking about all things Founders. I hardly recommend it we’ll talk to you soon.
Equity is back on Wednesday, we’re back on Friday, I’ll see you, then bye Equity is hosted by myself, Alex Wilhelm and Tech rench senior reporter Mary, an aeto. We are produced by Teresa loans, solo with editing by Kell Bryce. Durban is our illustrator and a big. Thank you to the audience development team and Henry pette who manages Tech, runch audio products. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll talk to you next time.
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