Hello from NYC. Tech companies get a baby bear hug 🧸 from investors. Playing Lana's Summer Time Sadness as layoffs szn arrives in tandem with poolside martinis 🥹 New Cheres SMS feature so you're always in the know 📲

In other news…Peloton’s big L and hopeful strategy shift ➡️, Web3 pourovers ☕️ at a Seattle popup, and Cheres wants to make you a movie star 🎥

We're ending the week on not such a fun note BUT we did prepare and expect for the bearish news. From public to private markets, we're seeing more teddies than we'd want 🧸 Before we get into it, while things are looking grim, bear markets present opportunities and it's never as bad as we think ❤️ So if you're losing hope or feeling anxious, take a deep breath. It's why investing is community driven - we're in this together, and no one is alone here 🙏.

The stock market hasn’t been kind to tech stocks in recent months: both long-standing tech companies and newly-public companies are feeling the heat. Startups are feeling it too; as a result of the tech stock flop, VCs are second-guessing their portfolios, and funding rounds aren’t nearly as lucrative as they were pre-pandy 🍳. Less capital, for many companies, means less employees. Here’s the dl on high-profile layoffs from the past week alone. 👇

Robinhood laid of 9% of its employees, about 300 people, early last week. After the brokerage reported slowing user growth and decreased trading volume, HOOD tanked from a high of $85 to a low of $10. CEO Vlad Tenev said, “After carefully considering all these factors, we determined that making these reductions to Robinhood’s staff is the right decision to improve efficiency, increase our velocity, and ensure that we are responsive to the changing needs of our customers.”

Netflix reported its first loss in subs in 10 years (which we covered in the last newsletter 👀). As revenue dropped, the streaming company laid off marketing staff, as well as staff from Tudum, their new editorial branch 📰. Notably, Tudum had focused heavily on DEI, hiring many PoC journalists — and they’re now losing their jobs a mere 5 months later.

Cameo, a startup that lets you buy personalized vids from celebs, laid off 87 people — which is almost a quarter of its staff — due to “changing market conditions” (read: less Very Online ppl post-pandy). Supposedly multiple orgs were affected, and even execs faced the chopping block 🔪.

MainStreet, a startup that helps other startups find tax credits, let go of ~30% of its staff. The startup seemed to be doing well; it previously raised $64.7MM and earned $15MM in revenue in 2021. Doug Ludlow, CEO, has a grim outlook for the market, tweeting “We believe that there is a very strong chance that today’s incredibly rough market is only going to get worse, and potentially remain so for months, if not years.” 🪦

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Quick News Bites

Peloton is taking notes on Twitter's sale ✍️

The fitness company is reportedly looking for investors — either other companies or PE (private equity) firms — to take a 15-20% stake in the company as stocks continue to tumble, kinda like the recent Twitter buy-out but lower stakes and Elon-less. If you haven’t been keeping up, the company’s value dropped 10x, from $50B to just $5B. As gyms continue to open 🏋️‍♀️, revenue has substantially declined for the NY-based company.

The new CEO, Barry McCarthy, was formerly CFO of Spotify and Netflix, hasn’t been able to turn the company around… yet. But we think he’s making the right moves. McCarthy is bullish 🐂 on fitness subscriptions and is moving the company towards software-first model, even canceling plans to build a new factory.

Why? Software sales are often more cost-effective than physical good sales. This is especially true at scale, since the unit price (how much it costs to manufacture 1 unit of a good) decreases substantially as more software is sold 💰. Subscription models are particularly effective; the recurring revenue source is particularly loved by the folks on Wall St. Fair warning, though: as tech stocks continue their baby bear moment, PTON is going to keep falling. But it might be worth it to hang on for the ride. 🎢

👉 Read more about Peloton

IRL Web3 coffee popup in Seattle ☕️

Want some crypto with your coffee? Head to TheCafeDAO. The cafe, spawned from a Reddit thread, is structured as a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) — kinda like a Web3-backed co-op situation. Every time a customer buys a $5 pourover, which is currently the only menu item, a new token is minted 🪙. From there, ~$3.50 is burned in operating costs, and the remaining token is split between customers, staff, and the DAO treasury.Customers can exchange their tokens for regular cash, with each token’s value pegged to a cup of coffee 💵. Alternatively, customers can use their tokens for governance rights 🗳 — though votes don’t mean much until the community grows. The six founders hope that decisions regarding TheCafeDAO can eventually be made by the community, though Dustin Tong, one of the founders, notes that they’d set up standards on what types of things would be up for votes. “We don’t want for someone to spill coffee and have all the DAO members vote for who cleans it up, that’s just not efficient.”TheCafeDAO is eyeing brick and mortar locations, but for now, you can find the stand outside of the Seattle NFT Museum.

👉 Read more about TheCafeDAO