📰 Stories & Signals to Jump On

Joel Hansen

Dec 3, 2021 • 5 min read

Morning Builders,

Jack left Twitter, the Giphy deal got blocked and omicron headlines were on every smartphone this week. If you weren't happy w/ your Spotify Wrapped album, be grateful your brand name isn't the same as the new variant. This construction company can't say the same.

We're into the last month of the year, which means if you haven't hit your fitness goals by now, you should probably be building NFTs or joining Mr. Beast live squid games. How else are we gonna pay for gifts this year? 🎄

Today's Menu:

Jack Dorsey's Next Startup Idea
Top Stories and Signals
New Startup Goodies

Ready to rumble? 🥊

🐦 Jack Dorsey's Next Startup Idea

If you haven't been knee-deep in season 2 of Tiger King this week, you probably heard about Jack's move. He resigned from CEO with an on-brand Twitter announcement and handed the baton to Parag Agrawal. Here's some things you probably don't know about the news:

He ran Twitter and Square ($100B fintech co) during a life move to Africa
Twitter grew from 109m DAUs to 211m in 4 years under his reign
Elliott Management was the hedge fund leading the fight against having Dorsey removed as CEO. They owned 4% of the company.
Agrawal, the new boss, will be focused on 1) growing the user base, 2) monetizing those users more effectively and 3) making Twitter spotlight in as few "big tech is bad" headlines as possible.

Wanna know the bigger question we have about Jack leaving Twitter? What if he secretly just wants to go and build one of our top-ranked startup ideas that mention "Twitter"? We wouldn't hold it against him... 😎

We're 99% sure he'll run with this new startup idea called "Block", but you never know. Here are some of our favourites startup ideas Jack would've picked if he wasn't busy:

View more startup ideas that mention [Twitter] here or post one of your own.

📰 Stories & Signals to Scroll

A roundup of the top signals and stories that are worth a scroll this week:

🔎 Signal from Julia: "The number of active DAOs has increased by 132% since September 2020, and their combined assets under management have ballooned from $290M to over $14B today. [Read more here]
✨ Story from MFM: Whether you like Mickey Mouse or not, Disneyland is now a $3.8B/yr empire. Here's how Walt did it.
🔎 Signal from Jakob: Kernaler, Jakob Greenfeld, shipped VC Watcher - a tool that lets "keeps you in the loop on what top VCs are investing in."
✨ Story on Jack Dorsey: Zuck and Dorsey may not have the same amount of facial hair, but they definitely do the same name change dance. Read more about why Square changed its name to Block here.
🔎 Signal on VC Activity: "Nearly all of Sequoia Capital China’s deals (92%) in Q3 unsurprisingly went to China-based companies, and the majority (60%) were early-stage (seed or Series A) deals." - Anand Sanwal
✨ Story on Meta's M&A Ambitions: Wondering why the British antitrust regulator forced Meta to divest Giphy? Find the reason here.

🎁 Startup Gifts

10 New Tools: The NFX blog just shared their 10 best tools for founders.
Cold Email Guide: Sahil Bloom wrote a 10/10 guide on cold emailing.
Top Creators: Free on Dec 13? The speaker lineup for Creator Conference just dropped and it may be worth poking at.
Deck Templates: steal these pre-seed pitch deck templates from DocSend
Gift Guide for Tech Nerds: can't buy the perfect gift. Look here.