Daily Crunch - Stripe buys Y Combinator alum Bouncer for undisclosed sum

Friday, May 14, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Wrapping the week here at Daily Crunch with a big thanks to Henry for taking over yesterday and a fist bump to everyone who has written in with notes on its format. We’re still tinkering, so your notes are read and (mostly) appreciated, even if we can’t respond to everyone.

Stick with us as we get this fully figured out. — Alex

Image Credits: Getty Images

TechCrunch Top 3

Coding school drama: The market for coding schools and bootcamps is not going to go away so long as there is an outsized market demand for developers that current educational methods can’t fulfill. But not every player in the market is doing well. Lambda School, for example, is in even more hot water this week.

VCs love edtech: While private investors are happily pouring capital into the edtech startup market, the share prices of many public edtech companies are under fire. That’s a sentiment gap that TechCrunch is keeping close tabs on. More here on the edtech venture market.

Apply to Startup Battlefield: There’s not a lot of time left to apply to the upcoming Disrupt Startup Battlefield. And we want to hear from you. Really. Many startups that have taken part in our free and fun and very public pitch-off have gone on to raise lots of capital or even go public. So hang out with us; we think you’re great!

Own the domain that is a perfect match to your brand name

Stripe buys Bouncer: The progress of the yet-private Stripe as an online finance behemoth continued today with its purchase of Bouncer, a startup based in Brooklyn that TechCrunch reports has “built a platform to automatically run card authentications and detect fraud in card-based online transactions.” Fraud detection is a point of product differentiation among online payment companies, so this is a deal to watch.

Why aren’t more African startups going public? The SPAC boom is taking a host of American startups public, but not upstart tech companies from Africa. The real issue could simply be one of scale, it turns out. TechCrunch investigates.

SoftBank makes piles of money: Some of the bets that SoftBank has made on its own, and via its Vision Fund 1 and 2, have been clunkers. WeWork remains a byword for embarrassment. But the teleco and investing powerhouse has been on a heater lately, as TechCrunch’s Equity Podcast explored. How good were its results? Very, very well. More on its investing performance here.

Don’t leak customer account data: An exercise startup that competes with Peloton didn’t have its cybersecurity house in order. Echelon, TechCrunch reports, “had a leaky API that let virtually anyone access riders’ account information.” That’s all kinds of not good. And the news item explains why cybersecurity has been so hot lately. More tech everywhere means more potential vulnerabilities everywhere, as well.

5 ways to raise your startup’s PR game

By now, it’s widely understood that storytelling is the foundation for successful startup PR.

Tech journalists receive more pitches than we can count each day from very early-stage companies seeking to make a name for themselves, and, to be honest, most of them sound like they were written with language-prediction technology.

What most companies fail to grasp is that storytelling is everyone’s job, like product managers who write blog posts that give users real insights into the latest release. The same holds true for founders who take part in Reddit AMAs and engineers who join product Slack chats.

To make a splash and stay relevant, here are five actionable suggestions that won’t cost a dime to implement.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Wrapping up news from the biggest tech companies this week, a short digest of earnings results from companies that you care about is in order.

Coinbase met its pre-released Q1 2020 earnings expectations, posting both huge revenue and profit gains. In short, the first quarter was a huge win for the crypto trading house. It had the same sort of quarter that likely led to Robinhood filing to go public.

DoorDash blew the, er, doors off its own quarter, leading to its shares spiking by around 25% in today’s trading. That’s one hell of a result. Sure, DoorDash is worth a lot less than it was at its peak, but the company had a great day all the same.

Airbnb managed a roughly 2.5% gain today after reporting its own earnings yesterday. It also got an analyst upgrade to boot. In short, the company managed year-over-year revenue growth, but also detailed larger-than-anticipated losses thanks to some one-time items. Worth around $85 billion, Airbnb remains richly valued.

And then there was Alibaba, which has lost around a quarter-trillion in value since it got into a scrap with its local administration and swung to a loss after it was served with a multibillion dollar fine by the Chinese government. But the e-commerce giant’s $28.6 billion in total revenue was up 64% compared to its year-ago result. Hot dang.

Now you are all caught up! Have a lovely weekend, and we’ll see you again Monday afternoon.