The Search for Money, Starting-up & Female CEO 🔍

Financial searches

While people with resources tried to start their own companies, some others went the "get rich faster" route by wanting to invest in digital assets, stocks and alternate currencies. Dogecoin was the top trending topic in both the “how to pronounce” and “where to buy” categories. The price of Ethereum and meme stocks like AMC and GameStop were also newly popular searches in 2021.At the same time, undergirding this newfound interest in the stock market is the persistent economic uncertainty in the US. Trending searches for Mega Millions lottery, stimulus checks and eligibility for student loan forgiveness suggest regular revenue streams weren’t quite panning out.

Mental Health searches
Unrelated to startups and finances, this year more than ever, people have also been searching about health and sanity issues. Some of the top questions on Google were; 

• How to heal
• How to improve my mental health
• How to be strong and resilient
• How to use my voice

Many gig economy companies such as Deliver, Glovo, and Uber manage their lakhs of employees through artificial intelligence, which handles everything from using facial recognition to check identities, to pairing drivers or delivery guys with customers, to spotting fraudulent practices.

But gig economy workers complain there is little redress when the AI makes a wrong decision. Companies do not tell them how algorithms will assess them. Workers feel like they’re living in a Kafkaesque system trying unsuccessfully to fight the ambiguity. People are getting suspended, unable to work, for reasons they don’t know about. In fact, the company’s employees themselves don’t know. 

Over the past eight months, more than 500 gig workers from companies such as Amazon Flex, Bolt, Deliveroo, and Uber, have asked the Workers Info Exchange Union for help understanding automated decisions, which is their right under the European data protection laws. But so far no company has clearly explained how their data was used to make decisions. 

In Europe, regulators are beginning to recognise the harms of algorithmic management practices. In January, an Italian court ruled that Deliveroo had discriminated against workers because AI did not differentiate between workers who were unproductive and those who were sick or exercising their right to strike.

In March, a Dutch court ruled that ride-hailing company Ola had to provide the data used to generate ‘fraud probability scores’ and ‘earnings profiles’ of drivers. 

Despite these scattered legal wins, enforcement remains weak. Gig companies treat the way their algorithms work as a “trade secret”.

Spain is looking to lower taxes for startups and their employees with a new bill sent to parliament on Friday.  

The bill, dubbed the Start-up Law, is meant to help Spain become one of the most sought-after countries for attracting startup investments and HNIs. 

The bill, which could be approved by parliament by mid-2022, would reduce corporate tax and income tax rates on start-ups and their investors from 25% to 15%. In addition, these startups will have the possibility to request for a deferral of the Corporate Income Tax amount to be paid for two years without accrual of interest for late payment.

Luvleen Sidhu was just 28 when she founded BankMobile in 2015 with a lofty mission: to reinvent banking for millions of Americans through the power of tech.

Six years later the Pennsylvania-based business merged with SPAC in a transaction worth $150 million. That made Sidhu the youngest female founder and CEO ever to take a company public at the time. 

Even though the digital banking market is pretty crowded these days her company is on pace for nearly $100 million in revenue in 2021. The company - that renamed to BM Technologies - allows non-banks and large brands to launch their own digital banks making it essentially a B2B2C company. They went from $960 million in deposits in 2020 to $1.6 billion in the first half of 2021 alone. Q1 and Q2 revenue was up 40% to 50% year over year.