Daily Crunch - Jeff Bezos will step down as Amazon CEO

The Bezos era is ending, Uber acquires Drizly and Tesla recalls 135,000 vehicles. This is your Daily Crunch for February 2, 2021.

The big story: Jeff Bezos will step down as Amazon CEO

Amazon announced today that founder Jeff Bezos will be transitioning from CEO to executive chair in the third quarter of this year. Andy Jassy, currently the CEO of Amazon Web Services, will be taking over as chief executive for the entire company.

In an email to employees, Bezos said that this will allow him to devote more time to “Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and [his] other passions.” Jassy, meanwhile, had previously been identified as a likely successor.

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The tech giants

Uber is buying alcohol delivery service Drizly for $1.1B — The plan is to build Drizly’s marketplace directly into the Uber Eats app, though Uber says it will maintain Drizly as a standalone app as well.

Tesla recalls 135,000 vehicles over touchscreen failures — According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the touchscreen in Model S and Model X vehicles can fail when a memory chip runs out of storage capacity.

Amazon to pay $61.7M to settle FTC complaint over stolen Amazon Flex driver tips — According to the complaint against Amazon and its subsidiary Amazon Logistics, the company had advertised that it paid 100% of tips to drivers, but in reality, Amazon used the customer tips to cover the difference after it lowered the hourly rate.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Divvy Homes secures $110M Series C to help renters become homeowners — Over the course of 2020, Divvy expanded operations from eight to 16 total markets and financed five times as many homes as it had in pre-pandemic times.

Kindred Ventures just closed its second fund with $100M in capital commitments — Kindred is a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed-stage venture fund founded by Steve Jang and Kanyi Maqubela.

Omnispace raises $60M to fuse satellites and 5G into one ubiquitous network — Omnispace wants to offer ubiquitous 5G-compliant connectivity for enterprise users using a hybrid of wireless ground technology and satellites.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Udemy’s new president discusses the reskilling company’s future — “We blew through $100M ARR.”

The future of SaaS is on-demand: Use experts to drive growth and engagement — For SaaS companies, not having a gig economy strategy as we start 2021 is like missing the internet trend in 1990.

Save 25% with Extra Crunch Group Membership — This new feature allows you to easily manage seats and payments for your team through a self-service interface.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Eight Miami-area investors assess America’s southernmost tech ecosystem — We’re seeing a “moment” in Miami, but many are hoping to turn it into a movement.

Welcome Tage Kene-Okafor, Mary Ann Azevedo, Sophie Burkholder and a guy named Drew — Hooray for new team members!

• Chief Operating Officer at Food-X Technologies/SPUD.ca (Vancouver, BC, Canada)
• Senior PYTHON Development at Confidential (Anywhere)
• AI Scientist, Small Molecule Pharmaceutical Sciences at Genentech (South San Francisco, CA, USA)
• Demand Generation Manager at Quorum (Washington, D.C., USA)
• Software Engineer at SG Cap Trading (Chicago, IL, USA)

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