Spill, a platform founded by ex-Twitter employees, is closing out its first year on the market by opening up its beta to all users, whether they’re on iOS or Android.
Spill is like the polar opposite of X, a platform that continues to alienate users with platform policies that make the app actively less inclusive.
Around his one-year anniversary of being laid off from Twitter, Spill CEO Alphonzo Terrell told TechCrunch that the app has amassed around 200,000 users.
Spill may not be growing as quickly as other Twitter competitors like Bluesky, Mastodon or Threads, but Terrell isn’t worried.
“People are looking for something new,” Terrell told TechCrunch last month.
Startup valuations — especially at the later stages — have come down drastically over the last year and a half of the ongoing market correction.
Companies that once boasted sky-high valuations like Klarna and Getir have seen their valuations slashed in their latest funding rounds.
Outside of Klarna and Getir, though, very few late-stage companies have raised new primary rounds since the booming 2021 market.
This is a noticeable haircut from the $25 billion valuation it garnered in 2021.
A recent survey of venture secondaries investors found that for those who focus on the industry, many think prices may still have room to drop.
IT budgets should increase in 2024, but it still could be tough going for startupsI think most people would agree that 2023 was a challenging time to be a startup.
Meanwhile, sales cycles were longer and many startups struggled to grow at a decent pace.
This means that startups that aren’t well capitalized right now could continue to struggle in 2024, and the flipping of the calendar isn’t going to change that.
It means they have to fight for their piece of enterprise budgets, and that, possibly, 2024 could look a lot like 2023.
The budget outlookA good starting point for budget discussions is what the proposed budget looks like.
Businesses are working hard to conform to traditional heuristics like Rule of 40 (i.e., the idea that the sum of revenue growth and profit margin should equal 40%+, a metric that Bessemer helped popularize).
The world has over-rotated into an FCF margin mindset over a growth mindset, which is backward for growing efficient businesses.
Long-term models show that even in tight markets, growth should be valued at least ~2x to 3x more than FCF margin.
While a margin increase has a linear impact on value, a growth rate increase can have a compounding impact on value.
We show the detailed math below, and it’s confirmed by public market valuation correlations when you backtest the relative importance of growth versus FCF margin.
“I think crypto has always been made by very technical people and for technical people,” Johann Kerbrat, the general manager of crypto at Robinhood, said on the Chain Reaction podcast.
“At the end of the day, I think customers, when they use crypto, they don’t really care what is the protocol under it?
Robinhood users can do more technical things like transfer to its crypto wallet and use “advanced charts and autotypes where you can put, for example, a stop loss,” Kerbrat said.
The platform might not be as highly technical as one that’s crypto-focused, Robinhood is doing research to understand what customers want and are missing.
With that said, the platform still has 14 cryptocurrencies and one stablecoin, USDC, available for users to buy and sell.
The fact is that they are rich ideologues announcing their intent to pay any politician who will advance their agenda, whatever that politician’s other views.
That tech is more important than people is fundamental to their approach.
For instance, supporting politicians who oppose basic civil rights just because they have a more hands-off tech regulation proposal.
In the first place, the idea that this one issue is non-partisan is risible.
They can’t expect us to believe that their understanding of lobbying and politics is this naive.
