9

Daily Crunch: Better.com CEO Vishal Garg says he's on the hook for $750M SoftBan...

 2 years ago
source link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/daily-crunch-better-com-ceo-224036378.html
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
neoserver,ios ssh client

Daily Crunch: Better.com CEO Vishal Garg says he's on the hook for $750M SoftBank loan

Christine Hall
Sat, May 14, 2022, 7:40 AM·4 min read

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PT, subscribe here.

It’s Friday the 13th, and I hope nothing nefarious happened to you today. At least the weekend is here! At the very least, you can catch up on the latest Terraform Labs news — Binance halted Luna and UST trading — and some great podcasts from your favorite TechCrunchers. And make sure to secure your “seat” for our June 1 TechCrunch Live event in Columbus. See you Monday! – Christine

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • If Elon doesn’t buy Twitter, at least Snoop Dogg is ready to pounce: Early this morning, Elon Musk tweeted that his proposed purchase of Twitter was on hold while he figures out the percentage of fake accounts using the social media channel. Though he also tweeted he remains “committed to the acquisition,” I enjoyed seeing Snoop Dogg tweet his desire to maybe take a run at it if Musk does not. His plan for it is not bad, actually.

  • Dining out on Dineout: In some online food ordering M&A news, Swiggy said it was acquiring Dineout, the Indian equivalent of OpenTable. This puts Swiggy squarely into the dining-out sector, dominated for quite some time in the country by Zomato, whose market cap has dropped to about $5 billion. It also represents additional consolidation within a giant market trying to make sense of its pandemic boost.

  • More layoffs: Natasha and Amanda were already busy last week catching up on the myriad tech layoffs, and unfortunately have another list today that includes Section4, Carvana and Latch. Even Meta is not immune.

Startups and VC

  • On the hook: That’s what Better.com CEO Vishal Garg is saying about a $750 million SoftBank loan. By Garg assuming personal responsibility for the loan, he is liable for any losses. However, the company may also be affected because any losses could require him to sell a lot of his Better.com holdings, which could negatively impact shares. Still a mess no matter how you look at it.

  • Dress you up in indie brands: China-based Body404 is betting that the West will embrace the next generation of clothing designers who want to give them something that isn’t just a cheaper runway knockoff. It’s paid off in that the company is now valued at $50 million after raising $50 million in March. Also interesting to note is that customers are not returning the clothes — Body404’s return rate is around 2%, much less than the 10% fashion industry average.

  • Revel with a cause: Frank Reig, who sits at the helm of Revel, a company building fast-charging hubs for electric vehicles, caught up with Rebecca to discuss the company’s shift from moped sharing and the distance Revel has traveled to drive electric vehicle adoption.

  • Watch and get paid: Our attention is valuable and often being pulled in different directions. WeAre8 wants to reward you for doing what DVR has enabled us to skip for many years now — watch ads. The company is led by advertising guru Sue Fennessy, who aims to steer ad funding away from social media giants like Facebook and channel it into a good cause.


Recommend

About Joyk


Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK