Bumble is about to go public with a stack of women in the top jobs
- Bumble, the dating app where women make the first move, has priced its IPO at $43 per share - The company will begin to trade tomorrow morning/by the time you hear this podcast with a market cap of $7 billion.
- 31 year old CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd will be the youngest woman to ever take a company public
- The chair of the board is also female and women occupy 8 of the 11 board seats, that’s 70% … that’s incredibly rare most big companies in Australia have just been pressured by shareholders to have 30% female representation on their boards.
- Bumble is free to use but sells features to users. The company had 42 million monthly active users as of the end of September, out of which 2.5 million were paying users, up 22% from the prior year.
- The company will rival Match Group which owns Tinder, OkCupid and Hinge
- I think the valentine’s day timing is deliberate - proving IPOs are a major branding event.
Twitter news
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey wants to build an app store for social media algorithms
Twitter kept gaining new users after it banned Trump
- Twitter has announced its quarterly results and they’ve had a great quarter, but there were some interesting tidbits from Jack Dorsey on the call
- Firstly, Dorsey talked about wanting to turn Twitter into a kind of federated platform for chat, that could power other chat services.
- He believes Twitter could be the “app store” of social media - which is basically what Twitter was back in 2008, before it decided to keep all the conversation to itself, and disable all the weird and wonderful apps people were building on top of twitter, and limiting 3rd party access to the API
- Another interesting data point: Twitter saw user growth AFTER it banned trump and Qanon
- Dorsey didn’t give exact numbers, but indicated the trend proved Twitter “Was bigger than one account”
- It seems that 13 years into Twitter, it’s creator is finally understanding the appeal of the service.
Can smart speakers survive without Google Search?
- Alex Kidman has a story on Gizmodo about how your smart speaker will cope if Google Search leaves Australia.
- Google has threatened to pull search from the market as a response to Australia’s new media code - however it has walked back some of those comments and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has had a “constructive” call with Scott Morrison.
- But the withdrawal could have consequences beyond your web browser. For example just about every service Google offers relies on search, such as its smart speakers or displays
- Google has a 64% share of the smart speaker market here in Australia.
- While Google didn’t comment, Kidman writes that most of the smart home IoT device functions of a Google powered smart speaker should continue to operate
- Cops
Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ to Avoid Being Live-streamed?