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The gotechbusiness.com Top 3
- “Side quests are always distracting”: That’s what Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, said today when he talked about why Shopify needed to reduce its headcount by 20%. He also talked about “head quests,” which is another video game analogy in case you were wondering. Oh, and Shopify also sold its logistics business to Flexport. Paul has more of the deets. In the meantime, Darrell also has some concerns.
- AI knew this was coming: Microsoft is planning the next set of features for Bing, and it’s no surprise that AI is involved. However, Kyle writes that “they’re not so much reinventing the wheel as building on what Microsoft has injected into the Bing experience over the past three months.”
- Written in the stars: Kyle also wrote about Hugging Face and ServiceNow releasing StarCoder, a free alternative to DeepMind’s AlphaCode, Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, and OpenAI’s Codex code-generating models.
Startups and VC
Showing that investments in the supply chain sector remain robust, Pando, a startup developing fulfillment management technologies, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series B round, bringing the total to $45 million. Kyle reports.
Tellus, a fintech backed by Andreessen Horowitz that claims it can offer people higher returns on their savings by using that money to fund certain US single-family home loans, is under the supervision of the US government. Senate banking president urges FDIC to investigate company, Mary Ann reports.
And we have five more for you:
Acquisition, retention, expansion: why SaaS founders need to understand DDR and NDR
Image Credits: Constantinos Z (Opens in a new window) /Getty Images
Investors have raised their expectations about SaaS profitability and growth since the downturn began. As a result, it’s even more important for founders to have a firm grasp of the key metrics VCs consider before saying yes or no.
In his latest TC+ article, Paris Heymann (partner, Index Ventures) shares formulas for calculating gross dollar retention and net dollar retention, KPIs that provide in-depth insights into the health of your business.
“Predictable companies are more sustainable, easier to manage and typically rewarded with higher valuations than unpredictable companies,” Heymann writes.
Three more from the TC+ team:
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Big Tech Inc.
Ron covered this week’s Salesforce World Tour event and found out more details about Slack’s plan to put AI at the heart of the user experience. He writes that examples include helping someone understand the gist of a long thread without having to read every message and generate messages. We can’t wait for telepathy technology to get better so we can just think and Slack will type a message.
Dallas, Texas found itself in a tough spot, confirming that a ransomware attack forced the city to close courts and disrupt some 911 services while the mess was sorted out. Carly has more.
And we have five more for you:
