employee

Unauthorized SpaceX Files Reveal Stock Prohibition for Employees Found Guilty of Misconduct

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Leaked SpaceX documents show company forbids employees to sell stock if it deems they’ve misbehaved 'An act of dishonesty against the company' is among the violations citedSpaceX requires employees to agree to some unusual terms related to their stock awards, which have a chilling effect on staff, according to sources and internal documents viewed by TechCrunch. Employees pay taxes on their sharesLike most tech companies, SpaceX includes stock options and restricted stock units (RSUs) as part of its compensation package to attract top talent. Unlike stock in public companies, stock in private companies cannot be sold without the company’s permission. Yet no employee at startups and private companies are entitled to sell their stock. Like other private companies, its stock is split into preferred and common stock.

“Enhancing Employee Support: Journey’s Acquisition of Felt, a Mental Health Startup”

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Employee-focused mental health company Journey is acquiring Felt, a startup formerly known as Mine’d that specializes in matching individuals with therapists using artificial intelligence. Journey, which offers a mental health employee assistance program used by companies like Walgreens and Universal Music Group, says the acquisition aligns with its mission to revolutionize employee well-being and mental health support while leveraging the power of AI. While Felt’s technology was initially designed for a consumer-facing app, it will be integrated into Journey’s backend product. Journey CEO and founder Stephen Sokoler told TechCrunch that Felt’s technology will be integrated into the company’s Proactive EAP platform. The company plans to pair Felt’s AI-based technology with its existing human-enabled therapist pairings in order to better match employees with therapists.

“Stealthy Emergence: Ema, the Revolutionary ‘Universal AI Employee’, Secures $25M”

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A new startup called Ema out of San Francisco thinks it’s a lot more than just a passing fancy. “Our goal is to build a universal AI employee,” Surojit Chatterjee, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. Accel, Section 32 and Prosus Ventures are co-leading, and Wipro Ventures, Venture Highway, AME Cloud Ventures, Frontier Ventures, Maum Group and Firebolt Ventures also participating. He himself has some 40 patents to his name in areas like machine learning enterprise software and ad tech. Most recently, he was VP of engineering at Okta where he oversaw data, machine learning and devices; and prior to that he was also at Google, where he was engineering lead for data and machine learning where he focused on privacy and safety.

“Record-Breaking Employee Stock-Sale Deal Boosts Fintech Powerhouse Stripe’s Valuation to $65B”

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Payments infrastructure giant Stripe said today it has inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation. Notably, the valuation represents a 30% increase compared to what Stripe was valued at last March when it raised $6.5 billion in Series I funding at a $50 billion valuation. But it is also still lower than the $95 billion valuation achieved in March of 2021. A Stripe IPO has been long anticipated and was widely expected to happen in 2024. But with this deal, it appears that an initial public offering may not take place until next year.

“Employee Badges Now Gain Access to Amazon’s ‘Just Walk Out’ Technology”

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The retail giant announced today the launch of “badge pay,” a new option that will initially bring Just Walk Out technology to a hospital setting. With the launch, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff will be able to grab food and beverages from their hospital’s Just Walk Out store by scanning their employee badges. The employees will also be able to look up their receipts and see their account balance in their hospital’s badge pay web portal or mobile app, Amazon explains. At this location, Amazon worked with healthcare automation provider CBORD on the implementation of the tech at the hospital store. The Candler Hospital’s store, meanwhile, is operated by food and nutrition provider Morrison Healthcare, which serves over 950 hospitals and healthcare systems.

PerformYard Secures $95M Investment to Expand its Staff Performance Management Technology

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Employee performance reviews take time and effort — and aren’t always conducted very efficiently. Seeking to make the performance review process easier — or at least less of a headache than it has been historically — Ben Hastings and Jon Malpass founded PerformYard, a platform that provides a collection of software-based retention, staff management and upskilling tools. “PerformYard has been cash-flow positive with attractive unit economics for the majority of our existence as a business.”Prior to launching PerformYard, Hastings spent the majority of his career in tech as a go-to-market sales leader. “In early 2013, I decided to go all-in on building a software-as-a-service platform for employee performance management and personally funded the initial team. “Our mission is to simply enable and facilitate any performance process that our customers are looking to automate and improve,” Hastings said.