Week in Review - Silicon Valley's exclusive club is getting copied again and again

Saturday, April 03, 2021 • By Lucas Matney

Hello friends, and welcome to Week in Review.

Last week, I talked about some of the happenings in Bessemer, Alabama, where Amazon warehouse workers are attempting to unionize. Well, after plenty of posturing the vote has happened and we should know the results soon as ballots continue to get tallied. This week, I’m going to do my best not to talk about NFTs even though that’s still all anyone is talking about. Instead, I will discuss the mounting challenges facing Clubhouse.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.

The big thing

Clubhouse’s growth is slowing

In a tweet this week, tech journo Casey Newton highlighted that SensorTower, a generally trustworthy app analytics firm, had reported a big drop in month-over-month Clubhouse downloads, 73% to be exact. Now, 2.6 million monthly installs isn’t bad for a consumer app, but it’s also not the hockey stick growth investors want when your previous month saw 9.6 million downloads. With a billion-dollar valuation under its belt, rocket ship growth is a must.

Clubhouse is just another app, but it has been a hot topic over the last year in Silicon Valley circles, largely because we’ve seemed to go several years without a social media startup getting quite this hot quite this fast. Part of that has been the frothiness of venture dollars as of late, but a bigger part has been the excitement around audio opportunities highlighting a clear gap in the social market.

Well, as quickly as it’s been highlighted, it has been studied and the copycats are about to start flying.

Twitter has long been publicly testing its Clubhouse competitor — Twitter Spaces — but who else is looking at this space? Turns out, pretty much everyone. Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Spotify and Slack all have initiative in the works. It’s a lesson that the tech industry et large seems to have learned from Instagram and Snap, it’s not the idea that matters, it’s the execution. Furthermore, it’s not who was first, it’s who kept the growth going.

Chances are that this mass hug of copycats won’t produce a clear product “winner” but will commoditize the tech to death, at least in terms of Clubhouse’s boundless future.

Image Credits: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Explore your competitive landscape in one click

Here are the TechCrunch news stories that especially caught my eye this week:

LinkedIn wants to become Clubhouse now
LinkedIn, bless its heart, doesn’t quite know what it wants to be when it grows up, but it does know it wants to be popular. After testing an Instagram Stories-like feature, the company has confirmed that it is now also working on a Clubhouse competitor.

Microsoft lands nearly $22 billion contract to build AR headsets for U.S. Army
Augmented reality has been a bit of a thud when it comes to consumer so far, but folks in the industry have high hopes for the near future. So, it seems, does the Pentagon which will be awarding Microsoft with billions to customize its HoloLens tech for the U.S. Army.

NBA Top Shot maker raises $305 million
NFTs feel like a bubble on their way to bursting, but Dapper Labs — which has pioneered the tech — has capitalized on the popularity. This week, the startup announced they’ve earned a $2.6 billion valuation after raising a monster round.

Siri is no longer a female voice by default
It was a tad eyebrow-raising when Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa and Cortana all came to market with the same female voice, but after several years with a female default, Apple announced this week that going forward, users will have to select a default voice for the assistant upon device activation.

Coinbase sets date for public debut
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is readying itself for a public debut, and watchers have high expectations for its launch on public markets which arrives amid all-time-highs for the stock markets and cryptocurrency markets. The company announced this week that its direct listing will take place March 14.

Tiger Global raises $6.7 billion fund
Venture capital is being invaded by hedge funds as asset managers search for new places to put capital. Tiger Global’s newly revealed venture capital fund is one of the largest ever and could spell trouble for funds already steeped in competition for high-priced deals.

Image Credits: Fernando Medina/NBAE via Getty Images / Getty Images

Extra things

Some of my favorite reads from our Extra Crunch subscription service this week:

The Tonal EC-1
“We have nearly 10 EC-1s in the works right now, and I am excited to introduce our first EC-1 profile of this new batch — a company that has truly skyrocketed amidst that dark pandemic year. Tonal is a unique entrant in the upscale fitness market, using a proprietary blend of hardware, software and content to bring comprehensive strength training to the home in as small and efficient of a package as possible. Sales have zoomed the past year as gyms shut down worldwide, and the company has been pelted by interest from both customers and investors.”

Private equity, a SPAC and an IPO walk into a bar
“Each path is still open for later-stage startups to pursue exits: The IPO market was welcoming until a few minutes ago and private equity firms are stacked with cash and willing to pay higher multiples than they might in more normal times. And there are sufficient SPACs to take the entire recent Y Combinator class public.“

The NFT craze will be a boon for lawyers
“NFT buyers don’t actually own the media files associated with their blockchain receipts, whether those files are JPEGs or GIFS or MP3s. The best way to know which aspects of the NFT craze will outlast this trendy boom is to look at the history of comparable assets. As it turns out, people have been making crypto collectibles for nearly seven years.”