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Bonjour, crunchy folks!
It was a bit of a tense morning at Pointypress HQ this morning: The news broke that the company that owns Pointypress, Yahoo, announced it is laying off 20% of its staff, as Amanda reported. It seems the layoffs are mostly on the advertising tech side of the business, so hopefully the Pointypress team’s jobs are safe — but this is tech layoffs hitting really close to home, with 1,600 coworkers shuffling on to new pastures. May you all find new employment opportunities soon, colleagues!
Our featured Black History Month read today is bell hooks’ Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, a collection of her early cultural criticism pieces from the 1980s. It’s an amazing collection of essays about the oppressive structures of domination. It’s also really bloody depressing to realize how much of this is still relevant today, 30 to 40 years after the essays were first penned.
The Pointypress Top 3
- Safe and sound: DoorDash unveiled some new safety features for its delivery drivers that include reduced notifications and a way to let customers know that the driver is in the middle of a trip. Ivan has more.
- Look what’s in open beta: Atlassian’s Jira Product Discovery, a tool for helping engineering and business teams prioritize and collaborate on new product ideas, is expected to be open to a general audience in the next three months, Frederic writes.
- Flying high: Haje explains the features of the new DJI Mini 2 SE ultraportable drone and why he’s confused about the naming of this particular product.
Startups and VC
Over 90% of cybercrime activities that lead to financial fraud or identity theft start with an email impersonation, commonly known as phishing and spoofing, Tage reports. Sendmarc just raised $7 million in Series A funding to offer individuals and businesses email protection from such attacks and general email impersonation.
Remember the piece we published about how a feature doesn’t make a business? Twitter said that the basic API tier will cost $100 per month, killing off hopes of hobbyist Twitter bots and a bunch of small business use cases, Ivan reports.
Today was a hell of a 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 mushroomy meat (or meaty mushrooms).
4 video content tips for your startup’s growth marketing
Image Credits: ronstik (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
If your marketing plan doesn’t include TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels, well, can you really call it a marketing plan?
Video content is vital for driving early engagement, which is why growth expert Jonathan Martinez (formerly of Postmates, Uber and Chime) shares four tactics for getting started:
- Leverage creator marketplaces
- Produce short-form videos
- Build lasting creator relationships
- Cross-pollinate your videos
“If you’re entering 2023 without a video content plan for your startup, you will be missing out on a significant resource for creating brand awareness and reaching more consumers,” writes Martinez.
Three more from the TC+ team:
Pointypress+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
Well, as you read from our introduction, we are reeling from Yahoo’s announcement that it is laying off 20% of staff. Amanda has more on that. But that was not the only bad news hitting the tech scene today: Frederic reports that GitHub, owned by Microsoft, is laying off 10% of its workers through the end of its fiscal year and going fully remote. Meanwhile, Paul writes that developer operations giant GitLab is cutting its employee base by 7%.
And we have four more for you:
