Street's Hires, Timepieces & An Inside Story💰

Supporting the Military:

Many people with traditional desk jobs put down their laptops and picked up weapons to protect their land. And in support, IT startups have been developing apps for the military and solutions for civilians. Today, there are hundreds of such volunteer initiatives - a display of unity of startups for victory.

• Fintech startup, 42Flows.Tech, has made five social, humanitarian and medical chatbots, as well as an informational website that explains the war to international communities. It has united professionals and organisations from Ukraine and the U.S. to work together to provide information and training to the military. 
• Another company MacPaw came up Spybuster, an app to track if there were any Russian or Belarusian spy apps running in the background of its customers’ computers. 
• Another war-time tool - Together App - lets employees check in on another as they are dispersed across cities and time zones.

It’s been a particularly tough year for the finance sector that has been experiencing high employee turnover and dissatisfaction among bankers who notoriously grind through 100-hour workweeks.

As a result, top firms on Wall Street are shelling out millions to acquire the brightest talent amidst an unprecedented resignation trend. And even undergrads and interns are reaping the benefits of this. 

Global investment banks boosted intern pay by 37.2% for the current internship season from a year earlier, according to finance career site Wall Street Oasis. Interns at proprietary trading firm Jane Street are making an average salary of $16,356 a month — the equivalent of nearly $200,000 a year. 

Hedge funds, proprietary trading firms and investments banks topped the list for intern compensation, with the top eight paying a median intern stipend above $10,000 a month, according to Wall Street Oasis. 

Last year, it seemed like Amazon and its swarm of sellers were having a great time with surge in demand, increasing hourly wages, expansion of fulfilment network and an expectation of normalcy in 2022. 

But this year, inflation has depressed many a small sellers on the e-commerce giant after the company announced Wednesday that it will implement a 5% fuel and inflation surcharge on its fulfilment services beginning April 28.

Reasons for the surcharge are obvious. 

• Parcel carriers have upped their shipping rates amid the supply chain crisis. 
• Fuel costs are high due to Russian sanction.

The results of the surcharge are also obvious.

• Lower sellers' margins.
• Higher pressure on startups and local business running smaller operations. 

For startups, the volatility hits harder because Amazon hasn’t made it clear if this surcharge is temporary or permanent — and when is it going to go away. For some startups that have already stocked up inventory to meet rising demand, if the surcharge sticks around the entire year, it could cost over $100,000 in business.

News publishers have sold nearly $12 million (£9m) worth of NFTs since March 2021.

That overwhelming amount of money has got their chief executives either making career pivots to blockchain or ditching their long-run publishing careers to start an NFT initiative.

Here’s a graph of publishers’ NFT riches. 

Time has earned the most from web3 initiatives (>$10m). The company said in January that in the last nine months it had done “in excess of eight-figures of revenue” specifically from web3 ventures. The company’s first foray into NFTs - an auction of three front covers in March 2021 - netted the company the then-equivalent of $435,000 in Ethereum, according to AdWeek. The publisher has since established a storefront for their NFTs (or what thy call ‘Timepieces’) on Opensea. 

The New York Times’ columnist Kevin Roose auctioned an NFT of his own column - titled “Buy This Column on the Blockchain!” - in March 2021. Despite setting the minimum price at 0.5 Ethereum, the price ballooned to 350 Ethereum - approximately $560,000 - enough to buy two millennia’s worth of NYT digital subscriptions.

CNN’s NFT project, “Vault”, sells short video and image NFTs of broadcast coverage of historical events. The most expensive items to sell through Vault have been $500 video clips of the moment CNN forecast various presidents’ election wins.