Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told staff on Tuesday to expect a decision about layoffs in the next two weeks as the ride-hailing company struggles with depleted demand for its core business. “Hope is not a strategy,” he told employees. “We’re not going to avoid hard decisions.” Som … | Continue reading
Uber is in talks to lead a $170 million financing in scooter rental firm Lime, whose business has dropped sharply amid the coronavirus pandemic, executives at the startup told investors last week. The potential deal would value Lime on paper at $510 million, after the proposed ca … | Continue reading
A shift to remote work at companies was underway even before the Covid-19 outbreak. New startups were being born that were fully “remote from the start.” Larger companies were experimenting with remote work to access talent outside major hubs.But while the shift had started, few … | Continue reading
Apple can’t get enough of Mike Janicek. The firm needed him so much that he worked at the tech giant three times over four decades. First, in 1984, he worked as a contractor at an Apple keyboard and mouse factory. The second time, between 2002 and 2009, he supervised the manufact … | Continue reading
Executives at Uber are discussing plans to cut around 20% of the company’s employees, as it copes with a sharp decline in its ride-hailing business due to the coronavirus pandemic, The Information has learned.Layoffs of that magnitude, which haven’t been finalized but could be an … | Continue reading
Executives at Uber are discussing plans to cut around 20% of the company’s employees, as it copes with a sharp decline in its ride-hailing business due to the coronavirus pandemic, The Information has learned.Layoffs of that magnitude, which haven’t been finalized but could be an … | Continue reading
Google’s parent company, among the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest property owners, is starting to pull back from its decadelong land grab.Alphabet in recent weeks has broken off talks to buy or lease more than 2 million square feet of office space in the Bay Area, including wha … | Continue reading
Uber’s global gross bookings have fallen 80% below year-ago levels over the past few weeks, said two people who were briefed by senior company officials on the situation. The question now is to what extent the business will improve later this quarter as some areas of the U.S. an … | Continue reading
China’s ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has raised $150 million from SoftBank and Legend Capital for its bike-sharing unit, Qingju. This is the first time it has raised money from outside investors for the business, according to people with direct knowledge of the deal.Media repo … | Continue reading
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is known for his relentless optimism and outsize goals. The company for years has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into pursuing his vision of designing the “perfect trip” for travelers. Determined to think big, Chesky has explored taking the company … | Continue reading
Home-buying startup Opendoor laid off more than 600 employees Wednesday, one of the deepest cuts from a private tech firm since the coronavirus outbreak sent the economy into a tailspin.The layoffs amount to 35% of Opendoor’s staff, CEO Eric Wu said in a statement. The company ha … | Continue reading
Three years ago, Tencent’s top executives flew to Cupertino, California, for a meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook. Their mission: mollify Apple executives worried that a new feature in Tencent’s WeChat, China’s top social-networking app, could upend the multibillion-dollar app ecosy … | Continue reading
Airbnb, reeling from the coronavirus’ spread, has projected that its revenue will plunge some 54% this year, people familiar with the matter said.In a scenario the company has shown investors, Airbnb’s revenue would fall to about $2.2 billion this year, from $4.8 billion in 2019. … | Continue reading
Airbnb shut down its marketing efforts last week, saving an estimated $800 million annually. But it likely will need to make more-substantial cost reductions across the board as the spread of coronavirus ravages its business.An analysis of Airbnb’s profit statements shows that th … | Continue reading
Normally, Apple’s hardware teams meet in person at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters to review upcoming products, often bringing key components of their devices to show colleagues.But now that they are sidelined at home due to Covid-19, members of those teams are … | Continue reading
Normally, Apple’s hardware teams meet in person at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters to review upcoming products, often bringing key components of their devices to show colleagues.But now that they are sidelined at home due to Covid-19, members of those teams are … | Continue reading
No matter how the pandemic ends, one thing is certain: Zoom Video has become a household name as people flock to it to connect with work colleagues, family and friends. That has helped send Zoom stock into the stratosphere—it is up 46% in the past five weeks even as the overall m … | Continue reading
Airbnb plans to halt all of its marketing, pause most hiring, and likely withhold employee bonuses as it tries to conserve cash amid a slide in bookings, CEO Brian Chesky told employees in a video conference call Thursday, a person familiar with the matter said.The steps are the … | Continue reading
As the world braces for a recession triggered by the coronavirus outbreak, venture capital–backed startups across several industries are making significant cuts to their employee numbers.Four companies have cut roughly 20% of their workforce in an effort to reduce cash burn rates … | Continue reading
In June 2018, CEO Brian Chesky assured employees that Airbnb would go public by 2020. What nobody could have foreseen then was that a viral pandemic would threaten to pulverize the travel industry and hurt Airbnb’s business just as it planned to introduce itself to public investo … | Continue reading
The impact of COVID-19 on the economy and our lives has been the subject of a lot of discussions in the last several weeks. But there’s been less discussion of the potential long-term implications of how the virus—or something like it—may alter the longer-term trajectory of our s … | Continue reading
Huawei is projecting that its annual smartphone shipments will fall around 20% this year, in what would be its first year-on-year decline, as a result of U.S. sanctions on its business. The rapidly spreading coronavirus, which has hurt manufacturing and retail sectors in China, c … | Continue reading
After Alphabet’s Waymo said this week it took money—$2 billion—from outside investors for the first time, rumors swirled about a $30 billion valuation attached to that deal. The Financial Times confirmed that value, which will have implications for other companies attempting t … | Continue reading
Facebook is scaling back its ambitious plan to upend the global financial system with a new digital currency.Succumbing to pressure from regulators, Facebook has decided to offer its users digital versions of government-backed currencies, including the U.S. dollar and the euro, i … | Continue reading
Facebook is scaling back its ambitious plan to upend the global financial system with a new digital currency.Succumbing to pressure from regulators, Facebook has decided not to make the proposed Libra currency available on its own services for the time being, and will instead off … | Continue reading
When Lucy Guo pitched Andreessen Horowitz in 2016 on an early funding round for her company, an artificial intelligence startup called Scale, the high-powered venture capital firm passed on the deal.In 2019, Guo sent a cold email to Chris Dixon, a general partner at the firm, ask … | Continue reading
Alphabet’s Waymo still hasn’t perfected a self-driving car. So it is throwing more money at the problem.Waymo nearly doubled its headcount to 1,500 employees, known as “Waymonauts,” from 800 about a year ago, said a person with knowledge of the figure. Much of the expansion came … | Continue reading
Alphabet’s Waymo still hasn’t perfected a self-driving car. So it is throwing more money at the problem.Waymo nearly doubled its headcount to 1,500 employees, known as “Waymonauts,” from 800 about a year ago, said a person with knowledge of the figure. Much of the expansion came … | Continue reading
When Lucy Guo pitched Andreessen Horowitz in 2016 on an early funding round for her company, an artificial intelligence startup called Scale, the high-powered venture capital firm passed on the deal.In 2019, Guo sent a cold email to Chris Dixon, a general partner at the firm, ask … | Continue reading
We live in a world marching straight toward gridlock. In 2007, the share of people living in cities crossed 50% for the first time. By 2050, more than 66% of humanity will live in urban areas. At the same time, the number of cars sold keeps rising. In just the last decade, there … | Continue reading
The leaders of Apple and Facebook have each described augmented reality as the next big thing in tech. Google, though, still seems to be figuring out its AR plans.In 2017, after Apple’s release of a software kit for building primitive AR experiences for mobile phones caught Googl … | Continue reading
Sequoia Capital, already one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world, is putting more boots on the ground to make sure it doesn’t miss out on the next big early-stage startups.In an unusually large expansion of its investing team, Sequoia has hired four new par … | Continue reading
A group of 30 companies has spent at least $16 billion on developing fully self-driving cars over the past few years—and so far they have little, if any, revenue to show for it. But billions more will likely be needed before the technology is ready for primetime.Just three compan … | Continue reading
Last year, Papaya Global, a financial services business based in New York City and Tel Aviv, pitched investors on its hopes of raising $15 million to expand the business, according to a person familiar with the situation. But after talks with venture capital firm Insight Partners … | Continue reading
Google is working on a mobile application for businesses that brings together the functions of several standalone apps the company already offers, including Gmail and its online storage service Drive. The move could help it compete more effectively with application suites from Mi … | Continue reading
Last July, at a SoftBank conference in Tokyo, CEO Masayoshi Son brought on stage Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of Indian startup Paytm. Son described Paytm as the “uncontested No. 1” payment service in India. SoftBank had invested $1.4 billion in the startup, helping to fuel … | Continue reading
A wave of consolidation in the education technology market appears set to continue this year.K12 Inc., a publicly-traded education company, has agreed to acquire Galvanize, a provider of coding bootcamps and co-working spaces across eight locations in the U.S., for $165 million i … | Continue reading
Silicon Valley has no shortage of companies promising to disrupt higher education with technology. The buzziest of them all may be Lambda School, a company that provides free coding courses in exchange for a cut of its students’ future incomes.The online school has won a followin … | Continue reading
Apple CEO Tim Cook thinks augmented reality, or technology that overlays virtual objects onto the real world, is “the next big thing” that “will pervade our entire lives.” Cook made the comments recently in Dublin, Ireland, at a ceremony where he received an award for Apple’s c … | Continue reading
Microsoft on Thursday unveiled a sweeping, 30-year plan to remove from the atmosphere all the carbon it has ever emitted, effectively eliminating its global carbon footprint. The plan appears likely to raise the stakes for other big tech companies that haven’t set goals anywhere … | Continue reading
After Amazon paid nearly $1 billion to acquire the streaming video service Twitch more than five years ago, it looked like the company had a shot at turning it into the next YouTube. That view got a boost when Twitch began pushing beyond its main audience of gamers into cooking a … | Continue reading
This time last year, Slack Technologies, the popular workplace chat provider, was one of the most eagerly anticipated public tech debuts of 2019. That seems like a long time ago. Since Slack went public in June, its stock has dropped about 40%.The reason for the slump: Revenue gr … | Continue reading
Car-rental startup Getaround plans to lay off roughly 150 employees, or about a quarter of its staff, in a bid to reduce rising costs, people familiar with the matter said. Getaround’s chief executive told The Information that the cuts mostly will involve employees handling day-t … | Continue reading
As 2020 begins, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi faces what is shaping up to be a year of reckoning. Uber’s market capitalization has dropped $29 billion since it went public in May. It likely lost five to six times as much money in 2019 as it forecast in presentations to banks two yea … | Continue reading
Five to 10 years. That’s how long Michael Abrash, chief scientist at Facebook, predicts it will take before augmented reality glasses—which will display digital images and data on wearable devices that people view through—is ready for the masses.Abrash leads Facebook Reality Labs … | Continue reading
In Burlingame, California, a small city about 15 miles north of Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters, a monument to the social media giant’s future ambitions is taking shape. Construction is underway on a 770,000-square-foot new campus, with the capacity for about 4,000 employe … | Continue reading
In Burlingame, California, a small city about 15 miles north of Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters, a monument to the social media giant’s future ambitions is taking shape. Construction is underway on a 770,000-square-foot new campus, with the capacity for about 4,000 employe … | Continue reading
The clock is ticking for Google Cloud.The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Microsoft or Amazon—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding. While the company has … | Continue reading