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Bonjour, crispy people!
It was a bit of a tense morning at businessroundups.org headquarters this morning: news came that the company that owns businessroundups.org, Yahoo, has announced that it will be laying off 20% of its staff as Amanda reported. It looks like the layoffs are mostly on the advertising tech side of the business, so hopefully the businessroundups.org team’s jobs are safe — but these are tech layoffs that hit very close to home, with 1,600 colleagues shuffling to new pastures. May you all find a new job soon, colleagues!
Our featured Black History Month read today is ‘bell hooks’ Desire: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, a collection of her early pieces on cultural criticism from the 1980s. It’s a great collection of essays on the oppressive structures of domination. It’s also really damn depressing to realize how much of this is still relevant today, 30 to 40 years after the essays were first written.
Table of Contents
The businessroundups.org Top 3
- Safe and sound: DoorDash unveiled a number of new safety features for its delivery drivers, including fewer notifications and a way to let customers know the driver is in the middle of a trip. Ivan has more.
- See what’s in the open beta: Atlassian’s Jira Product Discovery, a tool to help technical and business teams prioritize and collaborate on new product ideas, is expected to open to a general audience in the next three months, Frederick writes.
- Flying high: Hey explains the features of the new DJI Mini 2 SE ultraportable drone and why he is confused about the naming of this particular product.
Startups and VC
More than 90% of cybercrime leading to financial fraud or identity theft begins with an email impersonation, known as phishing and spoofing. Tage reports. Sendmarc just raised $7 million in Series A funding to provide email protection to individuals and businesses against such attacks and common email impersonation.
Remember the piece we published about how a position doesn’t make a business? Twitter said the basic API tier will cost $100 a month, negating the hopes of hobbyist Twitter bots and a number of small business use cases. Ivan reports.
Today was a great day of news on the site, so instead of our usual five, we’ve got seven stories for you, ranging from fintech to NFTs to mushroom flesh (or meaty mushrooms).
4 video content tips for your startup’s growth marketing
Image Credits: shit (Opens in a new window) /Getty Images
If your marketing plan doesn’t include TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels, can you really call it a marketing plan?
Video content is essential for driving early engagement. That’s why growth expert Jonathan Martinez (formerly of Postmates, Uber and Chime) shares four tactics for getting started:
- Leverage marketplaces for creators
- Make short videos
- Build lasting relationships with makers
- Cross-fertilize your videos
“If you go into 2023 without a video content plan for your startup, you are missing an important resource for building brand awareness and reaching more consumers,” Martinez writes.
Three more from the TC+ team:
businessroundups.org+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams lead the way. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
Well, as you read in our introduction, we’re reeling from Yahoo’s announcement that it’s going to lay off 20% of its staff. Amanda has more on that. But that wasn’t the only bad news hitting the tech scene today: Frederick reports that Microsoft-owned GitHub is laying off 10% of its employees through the end of the fiscal year and going completely remote. In the meantime, Paul writes that developer giant GitLab is cutting its headcount by 7%.
And we have four more for you:
