INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Thank you for welcoming me into you inbox yet again.
Last week, I talked about Zuckerberg quest to tell us that Facebook has governing
principles when he really just building the stairs one step at a time.
If you&re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in
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The big story
Plenty of ink has been spilled on WeWork and SoftBank and WeWork Adam Neumann,
and yet it still feels like not nearly enough people are talking about it.
The startup post-S1 saga has just been just so messy that it
understandable one could only grab a sneaking glance of headlines before having to look way.
One reason everyone is talking about it because
Neumann maneuverings have created an anthology of sketchy founder dealings that nearly cartoon villain worthy
He got the eccentricities of Jack Dorsey, the frattiness of Evan Spiegel and the &change the world& delusions of Elizabeth Holmes
Critiques of WeWork weren&t all that sparse preceding its S-1, and yet many of venture capital talking heads had some kind of
founder-friendly admiration for someone that seemed to had bent the world heftiest venture capital fund to his will.
It far beyond the
pleasantries now, what happens to WeWork could deeply shape how late-stage venture capital operates
SoftBank was raising the second vision fund just as WeWork shit hit the fan and now it the fund deepest embarrassment and a financial
commitment they&ve poured $18.5 billion into
If WeWork craters, that second vision could fall far short of its aspirations
Plenty of Silicon Valley investors would be happy to see control shift to more even-handed institutional forces who did not have capital
commands that could set terms with a glance
Nevertheless, there are an awful lot of unicorns that have depended on SoftBank growth capital up to this point who would be in danger of
being left high and dry.
At this point, SoftBank sunk costs have led the desperate fund to go all-in on a sans-Neumann WeWork
They will have to shape the business on their own
They enabled Neumann and now they are left with the task of reverse engineering a disaster into a great turnaround story.
SoftBank says it
has now invested $18.5 billion in WeWork, ‘more than the GDP& of Bolivia, which has 11.5 million people
Send me feedbackon
Twitter@lucasmtnyor emaillucas@techcrunch.com
On to the rest of the week news.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Trends of the
week
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:
Extra! Extra!
Facebook is
getting into the news game once again, paying publishers and building an Apple News-like product called Facebook News that is determined to
give America access to trusted news
Facebook is doing great fresh out of the gate by giving Breitbart the distinction as a trusted news source
What could go wrong?
Netflix keeps racking up the billsHit TV shows don&t feel like they should be as expensive as building a quantum
computer and yet Netflix hefty original content spending is still chugging along
The streaming company announced this week they&re raising $2 billion in debt to fund its next efforts, which may or may not include another
14 seasons of Stranger Things.
Antitrust attorneys general
This week was another rough one for Facebook, a New York antitrust investigation
picked up the support of a whole lot of other states as the probe seeks out anticompetitive practices
There are now 47 attorneys general taking part.
GAFA Gaffes
How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own
section, in order of badness:
Facebook is still publisher enemy #1:[Why the Facebook News Tab shouldn&t be trusted]
Google emoji
puritanism:[Google Play Store is giving an age rating finger to Fleksy, a Gboard rival]
Disrupt Berlin
It hard to believe it already that
time of the year again, but we just announced the agenda for Disrupt Berlin and we&ve got some all-stars making their way to the stage
I&ll be there this year, get some tickets and come say hey!
Announcing the Disrupt Berlin 2019 agenda
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