Bell Curve founder Julian Shapiro describes his team as talented growth marketers who have a long tail expertise of various channels and who aren’t afraid to play part-time therapists. As an agency, they’re comfortable grounding founder expectations by explaining “No, virality isn’t a dependable growth strategy,” but “Hey, we can come up with a better…
Jumia held its first post-IPO earnings call and weathered a short-sell assault in May, with Wall Street showing confidence in Pan-African e-commerce company. On the numbers, key takeaways were that Jumia’s Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) — the total amount of goods sold over the period — grew by 58 percent to €240 million. Marketplace revenue…
Mercedes-Benz is expanding a pilot subscription service that lets users switch between different luxury models to a third U.S. city a year after launching in Nashville and Philadelphia. The pilot is another example of how automakers are experimenting — with mixed levels of success — with different ways to make money beyond producing and selling…
Flash, the micro-mobility startup from Delivery Hero and Team Europe founder Lukasz Gadowski, is re-branding today and disclosing that the e-scooter rental service has clocked up 1 million rides in just 4.5 months since launch. This, the company claims, is a milestone passed quicker than any of its competitors, although Voi recently announced that it…
If Uber gets its way, flying taxis will be coming our way in the next couple of years. The company plans to launch trials as early as 2020. Mark Moore, Uber’s engineering director for Elevate, is one of the people tasked with making sure that happens. Moore joined the company back in 2017 from a…
As anyone who has ever tried to buy or sell a home knows, the entire process can be the most stressful of one’s life. Traditional real estate agents rarely make the process any less stressful, leaving the industry ripe for disruption by tech companies which can automate many of the existing processes. Startups like Offerpad…
Five hours after Google publicly announced that it was working to resolve an outage in its Cloud computing network that had taken out a large chunk of Google services as well as Shopify, Snap, Discord and other popular apps, the problem seems to be resolved. The outage hit everything from the ability to control the…
YouTube star Kanghua Ren was just handed a 15 month prison sentence and 20,000 euro ($22,300) fine for a January 2017 video. The video, which generated widespread outrage online, found Ren giving a homeless man in Barcelona repackaged Oreo cookies filled with toothpaste. “Maybe I’ve gone a bit far, but look at the positive side:…
On Sunday, China released a comprehensive white paper to formalize its positions on trade negotiations with the U.S. The set of statements come as the trade war escalates and Beijing threatens to hit back with a retaliatory blacklist of U.S. firms. Here are some key takeaways from the press conference announcing the white paper: U.S.…
Welcome back the latest transcribed edition of Equity, the TechCrunch podcast that takes a closer look at the startup headlines from the week. Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm kick this week off by discussing comments on Twitter made by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham about the tech press. They then took a look at Uber’s…
