Week in Review - Amazon buys Roomba's maker, Bolt vanishes, and YC slims down

août 06, 2022

Saturday, August 06, 2022

Hello again! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the top stories to cross TechCrunch dot-com over the past seven days.

The most read story this week is kind of a wild one: Bolt Mobility, an on-demand bike/scooter rental company co-founded by Usain Bolt, kinda just…vanished. “The departure has been abrupt,” writes Rebecca, “leaving cities with abandoned equipment, unanswered calls and emails, and lots of questions.”

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

other stuff

Amazon buys iRobot: Bezos wants all the things. Whole Foods! One Medical! And now…Roomba? In this latest in a series of seemingly sudden and somewhat surprising acquisitions, Amazon is dropping $1.7 billion for the company best known for its robo vacuums.

Facebook shuts down live shopping: If you use Facebook's "live shopping" feature to sell things via stream, it might be time to find a new platform. While live streaming isn't going away, the dedicated shopping-focused features will go dark come October.

Starbucks is getting into web3: I'd roll my eyes, but given how many people I know insist on buying a Starbucks mug from every major city they visit…

More Robinhood layoffs: Oof. Just a few months back, Robinhood cut 9% of its full-time staff; this week, the company confirmed it's letting go of another 23%. Citing overhiring over the last few wild years, CEO Vlad Tenev writes "I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory — this is on me."

YC gets smaller: It had to happen eventually. Y Combinator had been getting bigger and bigger with each accelerator class, peaking at an absurd 414 companies in the last batch. They're scaling things back a bit with the next cohort — but at approximately 250 companies, it's still relatively huge.

Accelerate Innovation with Cox Edge

audio stuff

Podcasts! Get your podcasts!

This week in the world of TechCrunch podcasts, the Equity crew talked about YC’s smaller (but still pretty huge) cohort, Darrell and Becca talked about “Instagram being MySpaced by TikTok” on The TC Podcast, and Burnsy talked with Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis about the freight company’s “secret growth hack” on TechCrunch Live.

additional stuff

Glambook’s $2.5 million seed deck: Glambook recently raised millions to build what it calls "Uber for the beauty industry." How'd they convince investors to get on board? In this latest edition of his Pitch Deck Teardown series, Haje buzzes through the deck and helps explain why certain things made the cut.

What really happens when your startup gets acquired?: There's more to getting acquired than waiting for a bag of cash to appear on your desk. Yair Snir, VP at Dell Technologies Capital, gives us the high-level overview of the whole process, "from NDA to LOI."

Dear Sophie: "How long am I required to stay at my current job after I get my green card?" It's a reasonable question! Immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn weighs in.